Topic
Where the money goes, what it buys, and the growing distance between the two.
55 marks · first on 4 May 2026 · latest on 2 July 2026
Often filed alongside
US brands on track for 13.7 billion dollars of influencer spend by 2027, with creator partnerships spreading past social into retail media, CTV and display. Duolingo, Ulta and YouTube are profiled on how they wire creators across the full stack. The spend is not only growing, it is diversifying, which turns influence into infrastructure rather than a standalone social budget.
Brands are shifting spend into content and creators to earn visibility inside AI generated answers rather than betting on paid placements in AI search, where ROI is still unproven. To be cited by an AI engine you need credible, abundant earned content, not ads. Being cited is won, not bought.
Axios hit its first half 2026 revenue goals early and is resuming its local news expansion with OpenAI helping pay for it. The model: Axios produces original local reporting, OpenAI pays to train on it and surface it in AI search. Original content now has a new class of buyer, which changes the economics of content investment.
The week AI stopped being a marketing tool and became a marketing channel: OpenAI's self serve Ads Manager in beta with no minimum spend, alongside Google's Conversational Discovery ads from 20 May. Content that performs in AI indexed formats, structured, factual, authentic, is what gets surfaced in conversational search, which changes how creator scripts should be built.
Advertisers can now bid 3 to 5 dollars per click, ten weeks after the CPM model launched, where CPMs have already fallen from 60 to 25 dollars. OpenAI is recruiting its first Advertising Marketing Science Lead to build attribution from scratch, and is moving faster than Netflix or Uber did on ads. Intent here is built through conversational prompts rather than keywords, which is a different user mindset at comparable CPCs to premium Google Search.
Dentsu's Creator and Trends Studio (CATS), built on a Meta API deal, suggests creators by subject, profile and trend participation: for Elizabeth Arden it produced plus 14.3 percent unaided ad recall and plus 41 percent sales conversions. Later models predicted ROAS against historic engagement before a brief goes live, and Walmart now deploys creators in the hundreds of thousands, impossible to select by hand. Human judgement is being reserved for top tier talent while nano and micro campaigns go fully automated.
The consolidated view of the month, including OpenAI's move from February ad tests to a self serve Ads Manager. The number that reframes the stakes: ChatGPT reportedly handles around 50 million shopping queries a day, which puts an ad channel at the exact point where people research and buy, outside the search and social duopoly.
Across I/O and Marketing Live, Google positioned Gemini as the layer under all its ad products: Conversational Discovery ads, Highlighted Answers in US testing, a Business Agent for Leads chat agent inside search ads, and a conversational video editing model. Conversational, agent driven formats will need modular, prompt ready brand content rather than fixed assets.
A self serve Ads Manager launched 5 May, letting US businesses run CPC campaigns inside ChatGPT conversations with no minimum spend. 100 million dollars of revenue in the first six weeks, a 2.5 billion target this year and 100 billion annually by 2030, with the UK, Mexico, Brazil, Japan and South Korea next. Ads are contextually targeted without conversations being shared with advertisers, a different model from search or social.
Gemini embedded across the whole marketing stack, with Ask Advisor as a unified agent working across Ads, Analytics, Merchant Center and the Marketing Platform. The move is from AI assisted to AI executed: agents act rather than recommend. The number to keep: pages holding top three rankings see 18 to 34 percent CTR declines once an AI generated answer sits above the fold.
Two moves in one month. OpenAI formally enters advertising with an Ads Manager platform, which puts brand visibility inside conversational AI on the table and makes GEO a media question, not only an SEO one. Meta ships AI connectors letting advertisers manage Meta ads from external AI platforms and workflow tools: the walled garden is getting API doors.
All cash at 38.50 dollars a share, a 29.8 percent premium, enterprise value 2.167 billion. After Epsilon and Lotame, Publicis frames this explicitly as accelerating agentic AI and addressable targeting, with LiveRamp staying platform agnostic. The moat agencies are buying is not creative, it is the plumbing between brands, audiences and AI agents.
Advertisers generated close to 70 million creative assets inside Google Ads Asset Studio in Q4 2025 alone, three times year over year, with Veo 3 and Nano Banana now embedded for studio quality video in minutes. A Salesforce survey puts generative AI's saving at five hours a week per marketer. The bottleneck stops being production and becomes creative direction: knowing what story to tell and who should tell it.
The shift from AI as assistant to AI as autonomous actor, with Adobe's CX Enterprise "Coworker" executing tasks across defined business goals. McKinsey estimates agentic AI could support up to two thirds of current marketing activities, and organisations deploying these workflows report 10 to 30 percent revenue increases. The marketer's role moves from executor to orchestrator.
The IAB's annual revenue report puts creator marketing at 37 billion dollars in 2025 and on track for 44 billion in 2026, and reclassifies it as a foundational media channel. Search growth fell nearly five points year over year while social now takes 40 percent of all digital ad spend. Total digital ad revenue: a record 294.6 billion dollars.
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