Advertising & Marketing

Here's an idea: let's announce that ChatGPT will begin testing sponsored content on Friday afternoon of MLK weekend. Nothing says "people are going to love this" like a holiday news dump. If you use the free tier or the new $8/month ChatGPT Go subscription, you'll start seeing sponsored content at the bottom of answers in the coming weeks. Continue Reading →

CES® 2026 opens in nine days, and for the thirteenth year, the Shelly Palmer Innovation Series Breakfast will bring together C-suite executives from the world's most influential media, marketing, and technology companies. Continue Reading →

Thanksgiving always kicks off the annual flood of promo emails, shipping alerts, loyalty offers, holiday coupons, and "exclusive VIP deals." This year, the volume feels higher and the quality feels sharper because AI tools now generate phishing emails that look exactly like what Amazon, Walmart, Wayfair, UPS, FedEx, or any major brand would send. The old visual tells are gone. The scams and their associated scam websites are practically indistinguishable from legitimate ones. Continue Reading →

Last week, I was facilitating an AI workshop for a group of senior executives at one of our F500 clients. As we explored ways to integrate generative AI into their workflows, the atmosphere was both energized and strangely hesitant. It wasn't explicit, no one raised their hand and confessed to being terrified of AI, but I could feel an underlying tension. I've encountered it before, a subtle yet palpable fear academic researchers call "Identity Threat." Continue Reading →

The controversy over Tilly Norwood, the AI-generated "actor," has exposed something deeper than union postures and moral panic. It forces us to reexamine what acting is, what AI does, and why the usual arguments miss the point entirely. While reading this I'm going to ask you to keep an open mind. I know this will not be a popular interpretation of this issue, but musicians lived this experience during the transition from acoustic to electronic musical instruments, the advent of the digital synthesizer and again at the advent of sampling keyboards. Evolution is an amoral process. We must adapt. Let's explore. Continue Reading →

According to multiple reports, SpamGPT is an underground tool being sold on dark-web forums as a turnkey “spam-as-a-service” platform. Think Mailchimp for criminals. Instead of helping brands send newsletters, it’s designed to help attackers launch large-scale phishing campaigns. Continue Reading →

The debate over AI and its role in creative industries often centers on one question: Can AI ever be as creative as humans? While it’s tempting to philosophize about inspiration and ingenuity, this line of inquiry misses a crucial point: If the audience can’t tell the difference between AI-generated and human-generated content, or if they don’t care, for all practical purposes, there is no difference. Continue Reading →

Singapore-based Sapient Intelligence just open-sourced their Hierarchical Reasoning Model (HRM), and the AI community is buzzing about a 27-million-parameter model that beats Claude, OpenAI's o3-mini, and DeepSeek R1 on certain reasoning benchmarks. The headlines scream breakthrough. The reality demands nuance. Continue Reading →

ChatGPT head Nick Turley just admitted what every tech executive already knows: even 700 million weekly active users can't make the math work without ads. In an interview on Decoder, Turley said he's "humble enough not to rule it out categorically," though he hedged that OpenAI would need to be "very thoughtful and tasteful" about how ads could be integrated into ChatGPT. Continue Reading →

The words we use to control generative AI have become competitive assets. In a recent cookbook entry, OpenAI detailed “meta‑prompting,” a method that uses a more powerful model to write or refine a prompt for another model. Equally important are “pre‑prompts,” system-level instructions that set the model’s identity, tone, and behavior before any user input is received. These may sound like technical nuances, but together, they will shape how enterprises deploy, govern, and scale AI across the organization. Let's explore. Continue Reading →