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, UK publishers join forces against AI scraping their content, Gucci faces backlash over ‘AI Slop’ ads, and WPP announces a major restructuring.
Top Stories of the Week
Major UK Publications Join Forces Against AI
Some of the UK’s biggest news publishers have united to regulate the use of their journalistic content to train AI models. The coalition, formed by The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Telegraph, the BBC and Sky News, aims to develop industry-wide frameworks to govern the use of news by AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews and ChatGPT. A joint open letter was sent to media leaders from the group, warning of the risk of not addressing the impact of AI on the industry.
Why it matters: The group, named Standards for Publisher Usage Rights (SPUR), comes against the backdrop of growing discontent from news outlets about their content being used, often without permission or payment, to surface as information in AI models. Simultaneously, publisher traffic is impacted by AI tools, particularly Google’s AI Overviews and AI Mode, as users navigate less to publisher pages to get the information they need.
Gucci Faces Backlash Over ‘AI Slop’
The high-fashion brand Gucci is facing backlash over the use of AI-generated marketing content in the run-up to its Milan Fashion Week show. The images – which feature AI models instead of real people – were questioned by audiences on social media for not using real talent in models and photographers.
Why it matters: Even though Gucci’s images were labelled ‘Created With AI’, audiences still branded them as ‘AI Slop’ – a term used to describe low-quality AI-generated content. Some social media users also questioned why a luxury brand like Gucci needed to use a tool like AI to cut costs for their campaign. This backlash highlights continued skepticism of AI use, especially for visual content, from consumers.
WPP Announces Elevate28 Plan
Marketing holding giant WPP announced this week a major restructuring of the business, including organising the company into four global regions and four main pillars: Media, Creative, Production and Enterprise Solutions. A major element of the plans includes a goal to save £500 million by 2028, some of which is expected to be achieved through job cuts.
Why it matters: The goal of the new upheaval, titled ‘Elevate28’ to signal changes before 2028, is to streamline WPP and make it more integrated, the company said this week. WPP has experienced declining revenue in recent years. The company said it had a 3.5 percent decline in revenue compared to last year and a profit decline of 26 percent. The restructuring from the company’s new CEO Cindy Rose aims to get the firm back on track, in the face of AI disruption.
Quote of the Week
Brands & Agencies
Omnicom Reveals Plans to Cut 4000 Jobs
Holding giant Omnicom announced its plans to cut more than 4000 jobs following its $13 billion acquisition of Interpublic Group (IPG). The company said that following the cuts, 85 percent of roles will be client-facing while 15 percent will be administrative. Major players in the advertising industry are being pushed to streamline business amid pressures from AI reshaping workflows and creative processes.
DEPT Launches AI-Powered Operating System
Marketing company DEPT announced the launch of an AI-powered content operating system DEPT Studios. The system integrates Adobe products, including Adobe Firefly Services, Adobe Experience Manager Assets, Adobe Workfront, and Adobe Express.
One-in-Ten Marketers ‘Laggards’ at Adopting Tools
One-in-ten marketers self-identify as ‘laggards’ when it comes to adopting new tools, including AI. The report from GWI found that privacy concerns and data security (27 percent) are the biggest barriers to AI adoption. This is followed by fears of tech dependency (24 percent) and gaps in knowing how to use AI (21 percent).
Rightmove Credits AI Chatbots for Revenue Boost
The property buying and renting platform Rightmove credited AI for its recent 12 percent profit surge from the year before. Its integrations include a conversational tool developed with Google’s Gemini and a Rightmove app in ChatGPT.
WPP and Adobe Expand Partnership
WPP and Adobe announced an expansion of their partnership. The expansion will let brands access agentic workflows and orchestration from both companies to help clients produce more content across multiple channels whilst maintaining a consistent brand identity.
Media
Love TV Channels Dubs Shows with AI Tool
Love TV Channels announced it uses AI dubbing company Deepdub’s technology to dub its shows in different languages including Spanish, Italian and French. Deepdub claims to reduce the cost of localising TV in different languages by 80 percent.
Anora Director Joins ‘No AI’ Film Festival
The director of Oscar winner Anora, Sean Baker, will speak at a film festival that has the mission of counteracting the use of AI in TV and film. The film festival titled the ‘No-AI Credo 23 Film Festival’ was created by Justine Bateman, an American filmmaker and actor known for starring in Desperate Housewives and Californication.
Logan Paul Makes Seedance Film
The Dor Brothers, an AI video production company, posted a 15 minute film to X, starring influencer Logan Paul, made entirely using the new realistic video generation tool Seedance 2.0. The pair claim the film took a week to make and is the equivalent of a production that would have cost $300,000. The entire video was made using Chinese-owned Seedance 2.0 and has already passed a million views.
Google Apologises Over BAFTA News Including Racial Slur
Google has apologised after an automated news notification about the BAFTA Film Awards included the N-word in its preview text. The AI-generated alert linked to a Hollywood Reporter article but surfaced the slur directly in the push notification.
Tech
OpenAI and Microsoft Back UK AI Alignment Fund
OpenAI and Microsoft have joined the UK’s AI Security Institute’s Alignment Project, pledging new funding for research into safe and controllable advanced AI systems. OpenAI committed £5.6 million, bringing total funding to over £27 million and supporting 60 projects globally.
Koah Raises $20.5M to Power AI-Native Advertising
San Francisco startup Koah has raised $20.5 million in Series A funding, bringing total funding to $26 million, to expand its AI-native advertising platform. The company’s SDK enables developers to integrate context-aware, transparent ads directly into AI chat and search tools, supporting monetisation without compromising user trust.
Wix Integrates Bookings with Google’s Agentic Commerce Tools
Wix has launched a new integration between Wix Bookings and Google Search, Maps and AI Mode, enabling service businesses to display pricing and near real-time availability directly in search results. Availability syncs automatically, allowing customers to book appointments seamlessly from high-intent queries.
Amazon Ads Launches Agentic Creative Tool in Europe
Amazon Ads has introduced Creative Agent, an AI-powered tool that helps advertisers across five European markets develop end-to-end ad campaigns. Embedded in Creative Studio, the conversational tool supports ideation, scriptwriting, video, display, voiceovers and music — powered by Amazon’s retail and audience insights.
Creators Push Back on Instagram’s AI Shopping Tags
Instagram is facing backlash from creators over its AI-powered “Shop the Look” feature, which automatically surfaces similar product matches within posts. Influencers say the tool can promote items they don’t endorse, potentially clashing with brand partnerships and undermining audience trust.
Canva Acquires MangoAI and Cavalry
Online design platform Canva is acquiring two companies – AI video advertising startup MangoAI and AI animation startup Cavalry. MangoAI is a US-based AI video company that converts text and images into professional videos featuring talking avatars. Cavalry’s animation tool is known for letting users take data from sources like Google Sheets and CSV files to create complex animations with AI.
LiveRamp Partners with Scowtt
San-Francisco headquartered data company LiveRamp has announced a partnership with Scowtt, an AI advertising optimisation platform. Scowtt’s models use customer first-party data to create predictive, real-time signals that can improve a brand’s advertising performance.
Startup of the Week
AI discovery monitoring platform Profound has raised $96 million at a $1 billion valuation to expand its enterprise AI visibility and automation tools. The New York headquartered platform helps brands track how they appear in AI-generated answers, analyse sentiment and positioning, and trigger automated marketing workflows via autonomous “Profound Agents.”
Number of the Week
Only 15 percent of CEOs believe their marketing leaders have the appropriate AI knowledge, according to a new Gartner study uncovering the CMO “AI Blind Spot”. The research also predicts that by 2027, a lack of AI literacy will be a top reason CMOs at large companies are replaced. This reflects a cognitive dissonance where CMOs both realise the importance of AI but are incapable of shifting their own ways of working.
