So far, the data shows a tradeoff: Equity is down in most segments, but parts of the funnel are moving in the right direction.
A full 80% of consumers say they want more video from brands, yet only 13% say they actually get it regularly.
About three quarters of B2B buyers now use AI tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity during research on products and brands.
As AI follows digital advertising's playbook by optimizing for engagement, constant validation may also reinforce harmful beliefs.
The Comcast report demonstrates TV's role as a full-funnel driver of performance and impact on other ad channels. It finds brand recall increases when TV is part of the media mix compared with
stand-alone channel efforts, according to the data. Recall rises 8.7X when TV is paired with search, 1.8X with social media, and 1.6X with podcasts, according to data in its most recent report.
Brands still close the sale, but AI gets the first date and sometimes picks the outfit.
People who linger longer with chatbots reported higher loneliness, less interaction with actual humans and more signs of emotional dependence.
Perplexity seems to have abandoned its ad model in February to focus on optimizing results for search queries and AI agents and software for enterprises - despite the court ruling it must stop using
its web browser agent to make purchases on behalf of shoppers on Amazon's online marketplace. That's not the case.
Traditional web search still leads the pack with 44% of survey respondents relying on it most, but AI chatbots have already captured 34% of search activity.
AI is becoming part of the infrastructure for brand discovery and comparison, along with content creation.
AI literacy is becoming cultural literacy, making brand presence inside AI ecosystems matter as much as a presence in social feeds.
CMOs now expect media to drive growth, relevance and transformation all at once.
Consumers feel informed and optimistic, but they are also alert, cautious and paying close attention to how AI shows up in content and advertising.
New UC San Diego research finds LLMs frequently alter review sentiment - and the shifts measurably change human decisions.
Nearly two thirds of Americans say having ads in AI search results would make them trust those results less.
Research from Taboola and several universities suggests AI-generated ads perform comparably to human-made ads when humans in ads look real. Here's what the data reveals.
Discovery, consideration and even purchase are increasingly happening inside AI interfaces, often without a click, a visit or a polite thank you to the brand that supplied the data.
Roughly 40 percent of media buyers now view retail media as a full-funnel solution, according to survey data.
Eighty-two percent of ad executives believe Gen Z and millennials feel positive about AI-generated ads. Only 45% of those consumers agree.
An ecosystem of consumer apps and what seems like billions of interactions daily has given Google an advantage to make its Gemini app the smartest personal assistant. Here's how.
Much of the momentum in influencer marketing depends on a single assumption: that humans, not machines, remain the primary shoppers.
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration to build on the next generation of Apple Foundation Models based on Google's Gemini and cloud technology.
While 72% of consumers still shop in physical stores, AI-assisted behaviors are already mainstream.
In a tightening market, the most-read CPG Insider stories show brands experimenting under real pressure.
AI tools are quickly becoming embedded in how Americans research and discover products.
Some marketers said they expect AI to contribute to workforce reductions, while a majority anticipate maintaining current headcount but redeploying talent.
Blind evaluations by expert moderators consistently rated AI-moderated interviews poorly on core qualitative skills, including rapport-building, improvisation and the ability to ask insightful
follow-up questions.
Anthropic, Block, OpenAI and other AI-tech companies recently launched the Agentic AI Foundation to ensure that agentic AI tools for advertisers and marketers develop as an open, collaborative
ecosystem.
A BrightEdge analysis of informational, consideration and transactional queries revealed patterns showing where the biggest competitive battles are - and it's not where most marketers might expect.
The proposed framework from the IAB Tech Lab is expected to change real-time bidding performance and agentic interoperability across programmatic media buys.