It’s been a little over a year since OpenAI released ChatGPT. Since then, seemingly every chief marketing officer and advertising talking head has chimed in about how revolutionary and transformative the underlying technology, generative AI, will be.

They could be right. So far, the advertising industry has looked to Silicon Valley, from startups to tech giants, to understand and utilize AI, agency execs told Marketing Brew.

This year, it seemed like pretty much every major agency holding company, from Omnicom to Dentsu to IPG, announced it was working with Google on AI initiatives. It makes sense, seeing as “Google helped put the T in ChatGPT,” Graham Wilkinson, chief innovation officer, product strategy and innovation, at the IPG Mediabrands agency Kinesso, told Marketing Brew.

“I think it’s a fairly safe bet that Google is going to do well in this space,” he said.

IPG began experimenting with the tech at least six years ago, and this year the agency partnered with Google Cloud to create two yet-to-be-released platforms that use Google’s generative AI technology. The applications are called BrandVoice AI, which is designed to draft content and images to be on-brand for digital ads, and BrandPortrait AI, which is designed to help media planners and strategists distill audience survey data and research using generative AI.

“We obviously have a lot of clients that are leveraging Google’s platforms for advertising,” Wilkinson said. “Having that data natively available in the same environment was important.”

Keep reading here.—RB

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Ever since she defrosted and told us it was tiiiiiiime, it’s been Mariah Carey’s season. And brands know it.

To capitalize on the non-trademarked Queen of Christmas’s seasonal fame, brands have created everything ranging from dolls based on Carey to fast-food menus curated especially for her. Here are some of the most notable campaigns we’ve seen this year:

• Victoria’s Secret teamed up with Carey to promote its holiday collection and plastered the singer on its NYC flagship store with the tagline, “Victoria’s Secret celebrates Mariah season.”
• The Children’s Place featured Carey and her twins, Moroccan and Monroe, in its holiday campaign, with the singer wearing a gown she designed and the kids in matching PJs.
• Mattel created a holiday-themed Barbie based on Carey’s likeness.

Carey’s dominance of December has been evident in past years, too:

• Last year, Booking.com offered people the opportunity to win a trip to NYC and stage a Christmas card photo shoot in Carey’s apartment as part of “Mariah’s Ultimate Holiday Experience.”
• In 2022, Walmart and Unilever created an exclusive line of holiday-themed gift sets with Carey under Unilever’s Find Your Happy Place brand.
• Peloton also worked with Carey that year to create an Artist Series across 11 classes—and she even showed up to a Peloton class to promote it.
• In 2021, McDonald’s created The Mariah Menu, in which it gave away some of the singer’s favorite menu items for free over 12 days in December.
• That same year, Carey also released her first-ever official holiday collection in partnership with NECA that was sold at Target and Walmart. Products included ornaments, holiday cards, and wrapping paper.

Billboard estimates that Carey could make more than $2 million in royalties each year from “All I Want for Christmas Is You”—and that doesn’t even include her other songs, tour revenue, or merch (this year, she partnered with Amazon Music on merch for her Merry Christmas One and For All! Tour).

It’s probably safe to say that even without the brand deals, she would be doing just fine come December.—KH

The new year really brings out the optimism in people, huh?

New consumer survey data from Attest shows a 7% bump in the number of Americans who feel “very positive” about 2024: That figure is 33% compared to 26% who said the same heading into 2023.

• Overall, 71% of respondents are optimistic about the upcoming year, compared to 64% who felt the same way coming into 2023.
• That being said, the percentage of respondents who say their spending will be “cautious” (53%) has dropped by 5.6% compared to last year, while almost a quarter (24%) say they will spend “freely” in the new year.

But e-commerce retailers shouldn’t fret: Non-food shoppers who say they will spend “mostly” or “always” online jumped 5.5% to 39%, compared to 27% of those who said they are going to prefer going into the store. The rest plan on splitting it between the two.

According to this research, there is going to be a major caveat: marketplaces. Attest found an 11.1% percentage point slide in customers who say they’ll start their shopping journeys on marketplaces (now 40%), compared to 29% who will simply go to a search engine, which is up 4.9% year over year.

And to keep it light, more than half (56%) of consumers want their advertisements to be funny, which is a nearly 5% increase from last year. The number of shoppers who want messaging to be “reassuring” (35%) is down four percentage points from last year.—KM

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

Going viral: A founder broke down a TikTok video that racked up millions of views, increased visits to her site, and helped generate $25,000 in two weeks.

Unlikely pair: Love it or hate it, here’s how the Pringles x The Caviar Co. collab found social media success.

Link in bio: Examples of professional bios and how to write one yourself.

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