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, L’Oréal unveils a major OpenAI partnership, a new Reuters report charts a fragmenting and increasingly AI-influenced news landscape, and Warner Bros. Discovery rebuilds its ad stack around agentic AI.
Top Stories of the Week
L’Oréal Partners With OpenAI
L’Oréal has announced a broad new partnership with OpenAI that spans scientific research, marketing, content creation and consumer engagement. The beauty giant is adopting OpenAI’s GPT-Rosalind model to accelerate skin microbiome research for La Roche-Posay, integrating OpenAI’s image-generation technology into its CreAltech content platform, and launching a Maybelline New York virtual try-on experience within ChatGPT later this summer.
Why it matters:
L’Oréal said it will treat content transformation, not image generation, as the real AI opportunity, restructuring product data and brand content so it’s legible to both humans and machines. With AI search gaining momentum, L’Oréal’s bet is that whoever shapes the “answer layer” in LLMs first shapes discovery for the category.
Reuters 2026 Digital News Report: Social Overtakes TV for Top News Source
According to Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2026, social media and video network consumption is now ahead of all other news sources globally for the first time, used by 54 percent of audiences, while TV news and news organisations’ own websites and apps continue to decline — though only 1 percent of respondents said AI is their main news source, suggesting chatbots remain a supplemental tool rather than a replacement for other sources.
Why it matters:
The fifteenth edition of this benchmark report captures an industry in genuine structural transition — not collapsing under AI overnight, but steadily losing ground to platforms, video and now chatbots, while struggling to rebuild the trust that underpins the entire commercial case for journalism.
Warner Bros. Discovery Rebuilds Its Ad Stack on Agentic AI With AWS
Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) and AWS announced the development of an advertising platform powered by AWS’s agentic AI capabilities. The system is designed to unify planning, activation, optimisation and monetisation across WBD’s US linear and digital inventory, allowing AI agents to coordinate and automate decisions across the advertising lifecycle.
Why it matters:
This is one of the clearest commitments yet from a major media owner to rebuild advertising infrastructure from the ground up around autonomous agents rather than bolting AI onto legacy systems. As media companies and advertisers grapple with fragmented audiences and converging channels, agentic AI is emerging as a potential operating model for ad sales
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
WPP: AI Search Ads Set to Become Fast-Growing Channel
WPP Media’s This Year, Next Year midyear forecast projects that AI search will rocket from just 1.9 percent of search ad revenue this year to 39.2 percent by 2031, helping build what OpenAI itself has predicted could be a $100 billion ad business by 2030. “It might capture a larger share of incremental growth than other channels, because it’s new and it’s exciting,” WPP Media’s global president of business intelligence, Kate Scott-Dawkins told Digiday.
Stagwell Launches Full-Lifecycle Agentic Media OS
Stagwell has launched The Media Machine, an AI-native operating system for media developed by its GALE network in collaboration with agency Assembly, where more than 20 AI agents plan, buy, optimise and report across platforms. It integrates directly with Google’s GMP products, Meta, Microsoft & LinkedIn, TikTok and The Trade Desk.
Survey: 60% of US Consumers Say ‘AI’ in Brand Messaging Is a Turnoff
A new WordPress VIP report found that 60 percent of US consumers say brands using the word “AI” in their messaging are a turnoff, and 86 percent don’t fully trust AI-generated answers, still preferring to check original sources.
Horizon Media Builds the Plumbing for Agentic Ad Buying
Horizon Media has added agentic ad buying into its intelligence platform, Horizon OS Blu, building a software layer that lets its buying agents interact directly with agents from adtech partners including Innovid, Magnite, Vidmob and Smartly, as well as agents built by media companies such as Fox, Disney, TikTok and NBCUniversal.
Media
A German Publisher JV Turns LLM Visibility Into a Premium Brand Buy
German publisher BCN has launched GEO Brand Impact, bundling an AI visibility audit, content strategy, AI-optimised branded content and ongoing optimisation to help brands get properly surfaced inside ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI assistants. BCN Chief Digital Product Officer Stefan Betzold described it as currently a brand-awareness product priced at the premium end, since there are no reliable click-throughs from AI answers yet to build performance pricing around.
Fox Launches TV’s First End-to-End Agentic Advertising Platform
Fox Advertising has launched what it calls the industry’s first end-to-end agentic advertising platform, transforming its Fox AdStudio data and technology platform into a secure, AI-powered system embedding agents across audience planning, media transactions and activation for both linear and digital. Fox said it ran tests with WPP and Horizon Media on audience discovery and forecasting, completed digital transactions with Comcast’s Universal Ads, and demonstrated linear deals with Simulmedia.
Tech
Databricks Enters Marketing With CustomerLake, an ‘Agentic CDP’
Databricks has launched CustomerLake, an agentic Customer Data Platform built natively on Databricks that unifies customer data, AI models, agents, identity resolution, audience building and activation, aiming to replace one-off campaigns with continuous “infinity campaigns” that can personalise experiences numerous times a day.
Google Launches ‘Ask Ad Manager’ a Gemini-Powered Agent for Publishers
Google has launched Ask Ad Manager, a Gemini-powered conversational assistant built into Google Ad Manager that lets publishers troubleshoot delivery issues, generate custom reports and navigate the platform using natural language, currently in beta. Google says this is just the beginning of a broader “agentic” future for ad operations, with an MCP server, and specialised agents for inventory discovery and deal negotiation planned for later this year.
WPP Enterprise Solutions Signs Multi-Year Agentic AI Deal With AWS
WPP Enterprise Solutions has signed a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement with AWS to help enterprise brands close the gap between AI experimentation and scaled business impact across commerce, customer experience and marketing operations.
Snap Spins Off Its AI Video Team Into Gaming-Focused Startup Dotmo
Snap is spinning off its internal GenAI video team into a new company called Dotmo, which will focus on AI models for interactive gaming experiences, citing the high costs of developing the technology internally. Snap CTO Bobby Murphy will act as lead investor with a significant personal stake, while continuing his role leading Snap’s own GenAI research; Snap receives a large equity position in Dotmo in exchange for talent and a technology licence.
Nexxen Opens Its Platform to Claude and Google’s Agent Protocols
Nexxen now supports Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing agencies to access its platform through Claude, alongside Google’s agent-to-agent protocol, enabling agencies’ in-house agents to communicate directly with Nexxen’s own agents.
Startup of the Week
Seattle-based Gradial closed a $65 million Series C on June 17, led by Insight Partners, valuing the company at $675 million and bringing its total raised to more than $110 million in just 16 months.
Number of the Week
In its Mind the Marketing Gap report, BCG also found that around 80 percent of CMOs report making significant investments in AI-specific upskilling programmes, with a similar share now adding responsible AI and ethics training, up 10 percentage points from 2025.
