The news: A sweeping internet outage traced to Google Cloud paralyzed various content streaming, cloud productivity, gaming, and AI services Thursday. The outage exposed the dangerous reality of an increasingly hyper-connected digital infrastructure—when one provider fails, the entire ecosystem collapses like dominoes. Our take: AI adoption is straining overloaded cloud systems, making widespread outages inevitable as demand grows. While Cloudflare and Google Cloud may have fixed their issues within hours, its customers may have been deeply affected. The full financial impact may take weeks to emerge.
The news: Cannes Lions 2025 is highlighting how retail media is moving beyond performance marketing into broader applications across brand storytelling, in-store influence, and customer experience. Executives like Victoria Usher and Jim Kane are calling attention to how brands now activate retail data for segmentation, planning, and innovation across media touchpoints including CTV and search. Our take: This shift reflects growing demand for privacy-safe, first-party data solutions amid signal loss and rising complexity. Cannes will underscore retail media’s potential to support creativity and full-funnel integration. The future isn’t just attribution—it’s about making retail platforms vital to brand equity and long-term engagement.
The news: Tech giants like Meta, Google, and Amazon are building tools that let brands bypass ad agencies entirely—automating the creation, placement, and optimization of ads, per The Wall Street Journal. Yes, but: Strategy, storytelling, and brand stewardship can’t come from algorithms. Even with automation, brands need creative direction, long-term planning, and cross-channel cohesion—roles agencies are uniquely positioned to play. Our take: To stay relevant, agencies must move up the funnel. AI can optimize and target, but it can’t craft brand strategy or narrative. The edge belongs to firms that lead with insight, creativity, and cohesion.
he news: At WWDC 2025, Apple announced its upcoming macOS 26 Tahoe, marking the final operating system supporting Intel-based Macs and the end of a computing era. Apple’s transition will accelerate replacement cycles for millions of business users and marketing technology stacks. ur take: The shift will require a massive reset for Apple-reliant companies. They will need comprehensive technology audits across devices and software to weed out unsupported tools. Organizations delaying transitions, particularly for models that have already lost support, risk security vulnerabilities and performance limitations, affecting campaign execution and creative production timelines.
Perplexity Labs signals a pivot from AI search to full-stack enterprise tools, positioning the startup as a rising competitor to Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI in workplace automation.
Multicultural adtech is becoming essential: Mundial’s privacy-first model helps brands reach a $4 trillion Hispanic market with precision.
WPP, Publicis, and others are buying data-rich firms to outmaneuver Google and Amazon but risk creating the same closed systems they’re rebelling against.
The R1-0528 model nearly matches OpenAI and Google on reasoning, offering a tantalizing preview of what the cheaper, open-source future of AI could look like.
Choosing the right tech solutions can be like entering a long-term relationship with vendor partners. “There has to be a long-term gain more than just a nice-to-have quick incremental add,” said Ann Marie Ippoliti, vice president of ecommerce and marketing for Michael Kors at The Lead Summit in New York City earlier this week.
Adobe’s new Email Designer addresses content delays with cloning, GenStudio integration, and improved reuse—streamlining production for time-starved teams.
Inside Amazon’s partnerships with InfoSum and Magnite: The new integrations highlight Amazon’s goal to be an essential platform for advertisers.
Creative pros are building AI-powered workflows, not just experimenting: 80% use genAI, and 40% run full-stack with it, showing adoption is strategic—not trendy—across text, audio, image, and video
The $8 billion Informatica buy signals a pivot from flashy AI tools to reliable, compliant data—core to scaling enterprise automation without sacrificing transparency.
GPT-4o’s high sycophancy score underscores a deeper issue—when AI flatters instead of critiques, it risks spreading bias and eroding confidence in key decisions.
On this special edition podcast, we examine practical ways to track commerce media ROI—covering KPI selection, attribution, and cross channel measurement. EMARKETER Principal Analyst, Sky Canaves talks with Maev’s Michael Campi, PepsiCo’s Mike Glaser, and LiveRamp’s Christine Grammier in this panel from the May 9th EMARKETER virtual summit, Commerce Media Trends 2025. Listen everywhere you find podcasts, or watch on YouTube and Spotify.
MNTN debuts as a public company with a $1.6 billion valuation: Its performance-focused CTV adtech aims to bring small businesses into streaming.
From ad analytics to secure data crunching, Google’s AI shows promise—though wide adoption hinges on performance, not just benchmarks
As consumers become increasingly comfortable abandoning brands, marketers and retailers are betting on personalized experiences to keep them around. 81% of Gen Zers and Millennials, and 74% of all shoppers worldwide have switched brands in the past year, per a December 2024 Salesforce survey. Enhancing personalization efforts and building brand trust and loyalty are two of the top priorities among marketing leaders worldwide, according to a December 2024 survey from The Marketing Geeks.
Over half (53%) of US B2B marketers have a growing dedicated budget for influencer marketing, according to September 2024 data from TopRank Marketing and Ascend2.
A 30% YoY surge in US smartphone imports in March reveals how manufacturers—led by Apple—raced to beat looming Trump-era tariffs.