🎯 OpenAI Tests Negative Targeting

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We wanted AI to remove the tedious decisions. It has begun showing interest in the important ones too.

OpenAI Tests Negative Targeting

TL;DR: OpenAI is testing negative targeting guidance for ChatGPT ads with a small group of advertisers, giving brands a way to tell the system which contexts they do not want to appear beside. The test answers an early buyer complaint: ChatGPT ad controls still feel thin, especially around audience definition, placement visibility and brand-safety confidence for now. Read more →

Trade Desk Builds Agent Router

TL;DR: The Trade Desk is building Ask Koa, a central conversational interface that routes media buyers to specialized AI agents for audience building, campaign creation, insights, troubleshooting and search. A leaked roadmap obtained by Adweek says the product is moving from alpha to closed beta this week, turning programmatic workflow automation into a buyer-facing control layer. Read more →

United Streams Fantasy Midair

TL;DR: United put ESPN's Tyler Fulghum on a real 737 flight to join a Fantasy Football Marathon broadcast at 35,000 feet, turning Starlink-powered Wi-Fi into proof instead of a product claim. The stunt gave Disney Advertising a custom sports integration while United showed passengers that in-flight connectivity could support living-room-level live media behavior midair. Read more →

Coke Taps Fantasy Football

TL;DR: Coke is extending its "Fan Work Is Thirsty Work" platform into college football with creator content, a 74-stop campus tour and its first Yahoo Sports College Fantasy Football tie-up. The brand is using social-first college creators and fantasy participation to stay close to fans who track teams weekly, not just during marquee games this season. Read more →

Estee Enters Group Chats

TL;DR: Estee Lauder is pushing Advanced Night Repair into private recommendation culture with "Guilty as Skin," starring Bowen Yang and Ana Gasteyer. The campaign leans on group chats as a beauty discovery channel, citing GIPHY and Censuswide research showing people increasingly consult friends in chats before everyday decisions, not just major life choices online now too. Read more →

Uber Sells Teen Independence

TL;DR: Uber is using back-to-school season to market teen accounts with "Manifest Your Best Year Ever," a Mother New York campaign built around Gen Z manifestation culture. The service lets 13- to 17-year-olds book rides and order food under parental supervision, while the campaign pairs free rides and eats with a fresh-start school narrative. Read more →

State Farm Personalizes Football

TL;DR: State Farm is turning football season into a personalization pitch, pairing Jake from State Farm with Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Cam Skattebo and Fernando Mendoza. The campaign uses humor and player-specific storylines to make a plain insurance claim feel tangible: having coverage is not the same as having a service shaped around each customer personally. Read more →

Stella Enters Netflix's Universe

TL;DR: Stella Artois is bringing Theo James and David Beckham into "The Gentlemen's Serve," its first major campaign since Netflix and AB InBev signed a multi-year partnership. Rather than treating entertainment as borrowed fame, the beer brand is stepping inside a specific show universe, using recognizable characters and tone to make sponsorship feel like story extension. Read more →

Target Rebuilds Beauty Discovery

TL;DR: Target Beauty Studio will launch Sept. 10 across more than 600 stores and online, adding over 1,600 products from 90 brands after the Ulta partnership wound down. More than two-thirds of those brands are new to Target, turning the section into a curated discovery space where founders also train store associates on product education. Read more →

USA Today Courts AI Bots

TL;DR: USA Today Co. is testing machine-readable content formats to make its reporting easier for AI systems to access, understand and cite. Digiday reports the publisher is experimenting with infrastructure, metadata and even markdown-style formats while blocking most unapproved AI bots, aiming to strengthen both future licensing deals and its visibility in AI answer engines reliably. Read more →

Meta Controls Keep Shrinking

TL;DR: Some advertisers are reporting that Meta's placement controls are disappearing from Ads Manager, with value rules offered as the substitute. PPC Land notes the workaround only allows a 90% bid decrease, meaning a surface can be suppressed but not fully excluded, a meaningful gap for advertisers managing brand safety, compliance or Audience Network exposure today. Read more →

Adobe Measures Cross-Border Visits

TL;DR: Azira and Adobe are adding international footfall attribution to Adobe Advertising DSP, starting in APAC. The integration lets advertisers serve media in one country and measure store visits in another, with tourism as the first use case. For global buyers, cross-border attribution becomes less of a custom vendor project and more of a platform feature. Read more →

LG Expands Shoppable CTV

TL;DR: LG Ad Solutions and KERV.ai are expanding their interactive CTV partnership beyond the U.S. into Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand. The deal brings frame-level object detection, contextual targeting and shoppable ad formats to LG's premium streaming inventory, giving advertisers a clearer route from what viewers see on screen to commerce action globally. Read more →

Vendor Listicles Survive Google

TL;DR: Kevin Indig's 5.32 million-row study, covered by PPC Land, found vendor listicles still appearing across 55.1% of top-ten results, with commercially self-serving pages often gaining traffic despite Google's January demotion. The finding complicates the SEO story: AI search may punish thin list content, but machine-readable ranked formats still attract citations and organic clicks. Read more →

Brazil Tests TikTok Targeting

TL;DR: Brazil's ANPD recommended R$153.7 million in fines against ByteDance over TikTok children's data, including findings tied to unregistered feeds, age gates and advertising to minors. The case matters for marketers because the regulator treated device-level behavior and recommendation signals as enough to create profiling risk, even without a named logged-in user profile there. Read more →

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