Dec 10, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🎯 Mark Cuban Replies to Honesty

Plus: AI Survival Test, New Marketing Funnel

Hi, Marketers!

As marketing funnels mutate into algorithm-driven machines and founders race to adapt, his response landed like a reminder from the old internet — that trust still compounds, and authenticity is still the only funnel that truly scales.

Mark Cuban Replies to Honesty

👀 What’s happening: In 2025, when inboxes drown in AI-generated spam, a real founder still broke through. Adam Joseph, founder of Clipbook, an AI-powered media intelligence platform, secured $3 million in seed funding from Mark Cuban, all from a single cold email. No intros. No PR firm. Just one shot, one beer, and one message that actually read human.Cuban read it himself, grilled Joseph with twenty brutal questions, and then told him to prove it by analyzing media data for CostPlus Drugs, his own company. Clipbook nailed it.

🔥 How this hits reality: Every marketer is busy automating empathy. Joseph went the opposite way, direct, relevant, human. That email wasn’t “personalized at scale”; it was personal, period. In a market stuffed with AI slop and over-optimized outreach, Cuban responded to what every founder forgets: truth still cuts through the noise.

🎯 Our take: No one denies automation wins in the AI era, but the real edge comes from remembering that sincerity still scales better than code.

CMOs Hit the AI Survival Test

Marketing leaders gathered for an AI strategy roundtable jointly hosted by The Drum and Globant Gut.

👀 What’s happening: At a private roundtable with leaders from Microsoft Advertising, Unilever, Samsung, Philips and Skoda, one truth cut through the polite industry optimism. AI has moved from tool to infrastructure. Marketing is no longer powered by people telling stories, it is powered by systems designing mechanisms. AI Brand brains, synthetic audiences and model-driven strategy are becoming the new default. And the CMO’s role is shifting from campaign builder to system architect.

🔥 How this hits reality: Unilever is encoding brand equity into Brand DNAi. Skoda uses ChatGPT-style layers to enforce global consistency. Microsoft Advertising lets AI surface strategic insights that once took months. Philips and Globant use synthetic personas to run instant market simulations inside the model. As creative, insight and distribution become machine-run, human judgment becomes calibration rather than engine. Any CMO still clinging to “gut feel” will soon find the model reading the market faster than they can brief their team.

🎯 Our take: AI will not replace CMOs, but it will expose the ones who refuse to evolve. In this era, your biggest competitor is the model you built yourself.

AGENTS

Recipes Are the New Marketing Funnel

👀 What’s happening: Walmart, Pinterest, Albertsons, and Williams-Sonoma all rolled out “shop-the-recipe” tools within days. Pinterest lets users add ingredients straight into Walmart carts. Albertsons’ AI reads any recipe and builds a grocery list. Williams-Sonoma turned its recipe archive into a personalized cooking assistant. What looks like meal-planning convenience is actually a strategic move to capture shopping intent before AI agents take over the buying process.

🔥 How this hits reality: Picture this — you open ChatGPT and ask it to plan three easy dinners for the week. The model suggests a lemon chicken recipe, builds a list, and compares prices across stores. You never visit Walmart.com, but if Walmart owns that recipe data, ChatGPT still pulls from its catalog, and Walmart keeps the clicks, exposure, and intent data. For marketers, this changes everything: the funnel collapses. There’s no awareness-to-purchase journey anymore, just one swipe from inspiration to checkout.

🎯 Our take: AI is rewriting commerce around intent, not impressions. For marketers, the new brief isn’t “sell the product”; it’s “own the moment that creates the craving.”

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