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The Top Three

🏆 THE INDUSTRY’S MOST IMPORTANT STORIES TODAY

🥇 OPTIMIZING FOR MACHINES > HUMANS

🎯 Your new target demo: AI agents. As AI tools take on more consumer tasks, marketers may soon be pitching to bots before buyers. A new study looked at how AI agents — GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 3.7, and Gemini 2.0 Flash — interact with online ads, specifically within hotel and travel booking platforms. The researchers suggest a shift is coming: optimizing ads for AI requires aligning textual content with likely user queries, while visual elements take a back seat. more

• The study found that AI agents don't ignore ads, but instead favour clarity over creativity.

  • Banner ads drove the most clicks across all agents.

  • Keyword-rich, visible text influenced decisions more than visuals or emotional content.

  • Ads with embedded text in images were often ignored.

• The study found engagement varies by model: GPT-4o was the most decisive, consistently completing bookings. Claude followed closely, while Gemini was less consistent.

🥈 MOODY PACKAGING SELLS

A new study found that darker packaging can make products seem more effective. Consumers were up to 7% more likely to say they’d buy a product with dark packaging versus light, especially when the product is designed to solve a specific problem and strength is the main selling point (e.g. headache relief). more

• Why? According to the study's researchers, when shoppers make quick decisions, like during a grocery run, they rely on mental shortcuts, and colour is a big one.

• Dark = strong. Darker packaging is often associated with potency, thanks to everyday experiences with things like coffee or cleaning products.

• However, darker packaging also raises flags about potential side effects. For products targeting sensitive groups (e.g. children or skincare), light packaging may be the safer bet.

🥉 SCROLLS OVER POLLS

A Canadian law intended to support traditional news outlets may have handed the mic to creators instead. The Online News Act requires platforms to pay news outlets for sharing content, but Meta $META ( ▼ 3.68% ) responded by banning news on Facebook and Instagram in Canada. With Canada’s 2025 election just two weeks away, the Globe and Mail reports political influencers are now gaining millions of views via platforms like TikTok, while traditional news outlets lose visibility. more

• The Act may also benefit right-wing groups. In the 2024 U.S. election, conservatives used social media to drive results, a trend now appearing in Canada.

• Right-leaning outlets like Fox News $FOXA ( ▼ 3.6% ) and the Daily Mail are reportedly gaining traction on Canadian TikTok.

• In the U.S., Fox News' online success helped spark a wave of young conservative influencers.

• If conservative candidate Pierre Poilievre sees a similar boost, officials may have to acknowledge the impact of social media restrictions on politics.

Today’s Other News

📰 EVERYTHING ELSE THAT MATTERS

Advertising 📣

• Apple $AAPL ( ▼ 3.89% ) officially rebranded its Search Ads platform to ‘Apple Ads’ today. Launched in 2016 with a single ad placement at the top of App Store search results, the platform now offers multiple ad placements across the App Store. more

• Brands and creators are taking a page from the NewFronts playbook, hosting their own splashy pitch events to secure long-term ad dollars — and agencies are here for it. Digiday reports how these custom showcases could pave the way for deeper, more profitable brand partnerships, especially as the creator economy is projected to hit $32B by 2025.

Search 🔍

• A bug appears to be impacting the first image in Google’s $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.91% ) product snippet carousel, causing it to display as blank. more

• 🔁 Echo chamber search: A user recently discovered that Google’s AI Overviews are repeatedly looping back to the same query. When searching for "narcissist," clicking on a highlighted word in the AIO leads to a new search results page. This page then generates the same AI Overview, which, in turn, links back to the search results for the same query... creating a continuous cycle of self-referential links. more

• Google's John Mueller confirmed that structured data won't make a site rank better. While structured data can be useful for displaying certain search features, it won’t impact your site's ranking position. more

Social Media 📱

• 200+ million X user records were reportedly leaked earlier this month in a major data breach. A hacker claims to have posted the database on a popular forum, exposing names, email addresses, and other profile detail. X has not publicly acknowledged this latest breach. more

• A new report looks at the top-performing LinkedIn post types for 2025:

  • Carousel posts and document attachments generate the most engagement, followed by video posts.

  • Carousel posts get the most likes, while polls drive the most impressions.

• LinkedIn is expanding its top-of-feed news banner to more regions, but didn't specify which. Currently, it is available to members in the U.S., Canada, India, the U.K., and Australia. The banner features a rotating summary of trending news stories selected by LinkedIn’s editorial team. Tapping on any headline takes users to a list of related articles and posts. more

When Fail-Safes Fail 🙃 

• 🔌 “Have you tried turning it off and on again?”: Google Cloud says a recent six-hour outage in its Columbus, Ohio, data center came down to a fail of its uninterruptible power supplies (UPSes)… the very tech meant to keep things up and running during a blackout. A "critical battery failure" not only took them out, but also blocked power from reaching the servers. Most services recovered quickly, but some took longer to restore due to manual fixes. more

The Ticker

📈 HOW DIGITAL MARKETING STOCKS ARE DOING

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