Welcome to Week In Review
From new tools transforming creative work, to campaigns reshaped by automation, we track the biggest shifts at the intersection of AI, media, and marketing. This week, Google rewrites search advertising at Marketing Live, The Times launches synthetic audiences for media planning, and Publicis acquires LiveRamp.
Top Stories of the Week
Google Rewrites Search Ads for the AI Era at Marketing Live
Google used its Marketing Live summit to unveil a wide-ranging suite of advertising and commerce products designed to better align brand experiences with a more conversational era for search. A new unified entry point called Ask Advisor will allow marketers to draw on data from Google Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center, and Google Marketing Platform in a single workflow — launching later this year. New ad formats including Conversational Discovery and Highlighted Answers are designed specifically for AI Mode, which now has over 1 billion monthly users. Google also unveiled native checkout within AI Mode and expanded its Direct Offers format, already used by brands including Chewy, Gap and L’Oréal.
Why it matters: The Marketing Live announcements signal a fundamental restructuring of how search advertising works. Rather than the familiar auction for keyword-matched placements, Google is building an end-to-end system in which AI interprets context, generates creative, and completes transactions — with ads woven in at each step. For marketers, the implication is less manual control, not more, as campaign creation, placement and purchase become increasingly automated by the same platform.
The Times Launches AI-Generated Synthetic Audiences for Media Planning
News UK, publisher of The Times and Sunday Times, has launched a synthetic audiences product called Times ExplorAItion as part of its Nucleus data platform, The Current reported. Built in partnership with synthetic audiences company Electric Twin, the tool lets advertisers run simulations — surveys, focus groups, and experiments — against AI-generated audience models trained on real reader data, with results returned instantly. The product claims to deliver around a 10x saving compared with traditional audience research, in both time and resource.
Why it matters: This appears to be the first major UK publisher to bring a synthetic audience product to market from the supply side. As advertisers face growing pressure to validate campaign decisions faster and more cheaply, tools like Times ExplorAItion offer a route to qualitative insight without commissioning expensive human research.
Publicis Acquires LiveRamp for $2.2 Billion
Publicis Groupe has agreed to acquire data connectivity company LiveRamp in a $2.2 billion deal. The acquisition gives Publicis direct ownership of a platform that connects first-party data across publishers, advertisers and technology partners — consolidating a data infrastructure layer that most competitors access only through partnerships.
Why it matters: The deal reflects a broader bet that whoever controls identity and data infrastructure will control the AI era of advertising. By owning LiveRamp outright, Publicis can build AI-driven audience targeting directly on top of clean, connected data rather than relying on third parties. For the industry, it raises the stakes around data access, particularly for agencies and brands that depend on LiveRamp’s interoperability.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
LPP Cuts Fashion Design Cycle From Months to Weeks Using AI
Polish clothing retailer LPP, owner of the Reserved and Sinsay brands, revealed that using AI to analyse trends and design clothing collections has shortened its process to between six and twelve weeks, down from six to twelve months previously. The company now generates 80 percent of its marketing visuals using AI, up from 20 percent in 2025, and has cut content production costs by 60 percent as a result.
Stripe President Calls Keyword Search ‘Ridiculous’ as Agentic Commerce Rises
Stripe co-founder John Collison argued on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast that agentic commerce — AI buying something for you — will compress the entire online buying funnel, and declared keyword search “ridiculous,” calling it a structural anachronism that AI-mediated research naturally replaces. Collison also disclosed that new business creation on Stripe rose 71 percent year over year in the first quarter of 2026.
Publicis Sapient CEO: CMOs Must Move Beyond AI ‘Grief’
At IAB UK’s AI Growth Summit, Publicis Sapient CEO Nigel Vaz argued AI adoption demands company-wide transformation, not simply new tools. Vaz said many CMOs remain stuck in “grief” over losing traditional ways of working, which is holding them back.
Media
The Economist Prepares for a Two-Track Internet
The Economist is experimenting with agent-readable versions of content that already sits outside its paywall — chiefly marketing copy and B2B sales material — and restructuring those surfaces for AI answer engines, preparing for what its VP of generative AI described as “a world with two versions of the web.” The publisher has more than doubled its technology delivery velocity by reorganising around small cross-functional “pods” that use AI to ship products faster — a new CarPlay app, for example, launched five months ahead of schedule, Digiday reported.
Condé Nast CEO: Human Journalism Will Win the AI Slop Wars
Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch has told teams to plan as though search traffic is zero, citing three consecutive years in which search declined further than internal forecasts predicted. He argued that the proliferation of low-quality AI content across the web makes human-created editorial output more strategically valuable, not less — and cited 29 percent digital subscription revenue growth in 2025 as evidence the strategy is working.
News Publishers Unite to Negotiate with AI Companies
A new report from the Reuters Institute documents a growing third path for publishers dealing with AI companies: banding together to negotiate from a collective position, rather than signing individual deals or pursuing litigation alone. Initiatives ranging from UK coalition SPUR — founded by the BBC, Financial Times, and The Guardian — to Denmark’s national CMO, which has become the first united publishers group in Europe to sue OpenAI, reflect an industry increasingly willing to treat AI licensing as a structural rather than transactional challenge.
SK Broadband Expands AI in Regional News Production
South Korean telecoms operator SK Broadband has expanded its use of AI in regional news production, automating elements of content creation for local outlets as part of a broader push to reduce costs and speed up news delivery in underserved markets.
Tech
HubSpot Launches Free AI Search Volatility Tracker
HubSpot launched AEO Sensor, a free public dashboard that tracks how often brands appear in responses from ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, and whether those appearances are growing, shrinking, or changing in form. The tool produces a daily volatility score across four tiers — Calm, Moderate, Elevated, and Extreme — and is designed to help teams distinguish between brand-specific visibility problems and industry-wide shifts in AI citation behaviour.
Amazon Doubles Down on Agentic Shopping at Upfront
Amazon used its upfront presentation to position Alexa as a full agentic shopping assistant, consolidating its Rufus AI shopping tool with the Alexa+ personalisation layer into a single interface available across its app, website and Echo Show devices.
Skai Data Hub Launches as Standalone Product
Alongside its Studio announcement, Kenshoo Skai made its Data Hub — which unifies and normalises advertising and commerce data across sources — available as a standalone product, meaning brands can adopt the data infrastructure layer independently of the full Skai stack.
StackAdapt Expands Conversion Suite Globally
Programmatic advertising platform StackAdapt has expanded its Conversion 2026 suite globally, making its on-demand performance tools available to advertisers across additional markets as demand for outcome-based buying continues to grow.
Startup of the Week
Huella has launched HuellaNXT, an AI-powered programmatic advertising platform designed to make digital ads more interactive and creative across mobile, display, and connected TV. The platform combines AI-generated creatives, media, and premium ad inventory while integrating with major adtech partners like Google DV360 and The Trade Desk.
Number of the Week
Despite relentless headlines about AI reshaping product discovery, the data suggests consumer behaviour has not yet followed the narrative. Among those who have tried AI for shopping, ChatGPT leads at 48 percent — but the base of AI shoppers remains small enough that its overall share stays firmly in single digits. The gap between how people feel about AI search and how they actually use it may be the most important number in digital marketing right now.
