ChatGPT’s Big Bet On Advertising: Will AI Ads Deliver ROI?

A few days have passed since Sunday’s big game and its slew of celeb-heavy (and AI-assisted) ads, but large, lofty advertising campaigns had been on my mind for a while now ever since I read this MarTech headline:

“Are ChatGPT ads worth NFL-level money?” 

Yes, just as Claude hilariously referenced in its Super Bowl commercials, OpenAI is talking about putting ads in the middle of conversations. 

And the asking price is on a whole other playing field.

 

Faces Of Fakery: More Fake And AI Generated Experts Con Their Way Into Media

New research from Press Gazette has uncovered a fresh tranche of likely fake and AI-generated experts making their way into UK publications.Press Gazette looked at 50 pieces each from five UK newsbrands which quoted “experts”. The titles were selected because they have all come up in previous Press Gazette research as having published fake and likely AI-generated content shared by PRs.

 

The Future of Search & Discovery

Agentic systems are becoming the new gatekeepers of retail visibility. Discovery is no longer mediated primarily by humans or keyword search, but by AI agents that interpret intent, retrieve data and curate consideration sets before a retailer is ever visited.

 

Wall-To-Wall Email

Email marketers may wonder what types of emails other brands are sending. Here’s an answer: The top one is newsletters, judging by a roundup of usage statistics reported by ElectroIQ.

Content Matters: Are Publishers Driving More Conversions Than Attribution Shows?

The consumer journey (and all the ways marketers and their trusted marketing software can revolutionize it) is something I usually like to write about on the Marketing Manager blog.

However, recent research from Partnerize offered up some fascinating intel on that journey that is of particular interest to publishers, who were found to be driving twice as many conversions as their attribution was capturing.

 

Journalism and Technology Trends and Predictions 2026

Only slightly more than a third (38%) of our sample of editors, CEOs, and digital executives say they are confident about the prospects for journalism in the year ahead — that’s 22pp lower than four years ago. 

 

The State of AI: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation

A majority say that their organizations’ use of AI has improved innovation, and nearly half report improvement in customer satisfaction and competitive differentiation. … Revenue increases resulting from AI use are most commonly reported in use cases within marketing and sales, strategy and corporate finance, and product and service development.

 

Measurement Is Driving Martech-Adtech Convergence

47% of marketers worldwide say better attribution and measurement is the top benefit of integrating martech and adtech systems, according to an August survey from EMARKETER and Zeta Global.

Prime Real Estate: Why Advertisers (And Consumers) Love News Content And Environments

Ads do better next to news.

And while that might not feel like news at all to many publishers, it’s reassuring when the marketers responsible for buying those campaigns acknowledge the benefits from their side.

In a DoubleVerify survey of nearly 2,000 marketers, 60% said advertising in news environments “outperforms campaign baselines,” with a further 27% seeing an average performance from that inventory.

 

Rolling Slowdowns: Publishers Suffered Traffic Declines In Late 2025

The traffic declines suffered by publishers from mid-2024 into 2025 are continuing, but not all because of Google’s AI Overviews that were blamed for the earlier problems. One cause is the crawling of news sites by bots to feed large language models (LLMs), according to a study from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. 

 

Eight In Ten Of World’s Biggest News Websites Now Block AI Training Bots

Some 79% of almost 100 top news websites in the UK and US are blocking at least one crawler used for AI training out of OpenAI’s GPTBot, ClaudeBot, Anthropic-ai, CCBot, Applebot-Extended and Google-Extended. Meanwhile 71% are blocking AI bots from crawling their sites for retrieval or live searches. 

 

How Different AI Search Engines Choose Which Brands to Recommend

Each AI engine has a distinct “personality” that determines brand visibility. ChatGPT mentions brands in 99.3% of eCommerce responses while Google AI Overview includes them in just 6.2%. These aren’t random variations — they’re fundamental design differences that shape how customers discover products.

Rules Of AI Engagement: Does AI Helping With Headlines Actually Improve CTR?

The temptation to copy-and-paste entire AI passages is one that any reputable journalist, writer, and content creator should be able to resist. 

That’s not to dismiss what genAI is capable of generating, or discount the guidance that genAI can provide within its outputs.

In fact, recent research by Chartbeat looked at how AI-assisted headlines compared to original human-made headlines when it came to engagement, finding not much difference in head-to-head battles for which had higher click-through-rate, itself serving as a “meaningful signal that the presence of AI is moving content performance in the right direction.”

 

News Media and Magazine Audiences As Valuable As Ever

The story told about the news media and magazine industries is all too often one of doom and gloom, but the data within this report provides reasons to be optimistic. The audience for news and magazine content is large, diverse, and valuable, with hundreds of millions of Americans consuming their content each week.

 

Five U.S. Publishers Sue Google Over ‘Deceptive And Manipulative’ Adtech Practices

The actions come after the US Justice Department successfully sued Google for violating antitrust law by monopolizing digital advertising markets, harming “Google’s publishing customers” as well as consumers. … The publisher lawsuits allege that Google used its dominance over ad servers and ad exchanges to force publishers into its ecosystem, stifle competition and drive down online prices.

 

2026 State of the Customer Experience

Notifications, alerts and AI-generated chatter bombard them daily. Brands feel it too. Fragmented systems and AI fatigue leave teams overwhelmed and unable to act on insights. 70% of consumers say brands send so many messages, it’s causing them to tune out.

Built-In Power: The Rise of Passive AI Over Standalone AI Tools

As more and more professionals actively incorporate AI tools into their day-to-day processes, a recent Deloitte forecast is putting a spotlight on how readily people will be using AI passively, with more people using “gen AI when it’s within an existing application than those using a standalone gen AI tool.”

 

OpenAI’s New Report Says AI Saves You an Hour a Day

The average Enterprise worker saves 40-60 minutes daily using AI. Heavy users? They’re saving more than 10 hours per week. Basically an extra workday per week!

 

B2B Marketers Are Prioritizing AI Tools For 2026

45% of B2B marketers worldwide are prioritizing investment in AI-powered marketing tools for 2026, according to an August 2025 report from Content Marketing Institute. AI adoption is already widespread among B2B marketers. In fact, 95% are using AI-powered tools in some capacity … though most applications remain experimental, like generating marketing copy (used by 89%) and creative assets such as images and video (53%).

 

Data Deluge: Marketers Have Trouble Making Sense Of It All

The old direct-marketing masters had it right. Direct mail and direct-response advertising were the only two channels that could tell you how you were doing: People either responded, or they didn’t. What brings this to mind is Funnel’s 2026 Marketing Intelligence Report. It found that 86% of in-house marketers and 79% of agencies are struggling to measure the impact of each channel on overall performance.

AI In Tomorrow’s Newsroom: How Journalists Will Balance Critical Thinking With AI Applications

As we kick off 2026, it’s clear that AI is an accepted part of many newsroom and publishing processes. 

In fact, a new Trint survey shows nearly 1 in 5 (18%) newsroom professionals are using AI extensively across a variety of functions, with 2 in 5 (41%) using it moderately. Of the remaining respondents, 32% have limited use and 9% aren’t using it, but plan to within 6 months.

So whether AI evolves into becoming an essential part of publishing processes remains up to those who’ve adopted the tools and are continuously learning how to take advantage of the applications at their fingertips.

 

2026 Digital Advertising Trends Report

As adoption rises, AI’s role is expanding. Once focused on creative production, it now powers data analysis, validation, and personalization, driving smarter decisions, faster alignment, and new creative efficiency.

 

ANA Finds Minuscule ‘Risk’ In Programmatic Media Buys

The good news is that the ANA analysis found that 99.1% of programmatic inventory runs in “low risk” environments. The bad news is that less than half (45.5%) the advertising buys are associated with “positive” brand sentiment, although the majority were “neutral” and only 1.6% were “negative.”

 

Keeping Sensitive Data Out of the Wrong Inboxes

Our survey participants are experiencing significant numbers of accidents involving human error, sensitive data, and email. The vast majority (96%) reported that their organization had encountered data loss or exposure due to misdirected email within the past year. Over one-third of respondents (35%) had experienced data compromise due to misdirected email 10 or more times within that timeframe, and 13% had experienced it 20+ times.

Strike Up A Conversion: AI Search Traffic Converting Better Than Traditional Search

Last week, I wrote about how AI search, specifically being cited in an AI Overview, has led to both more organic and paid clicks than not being cited at all (to the tune of 35% and 91% more, respectively).

Microsoft’s Clarity blog recently took the research a step further within its own data, finding that not only are AI-driven traffic and clicks increasing, but so too are conversion rates.

 

AIO Impact on Google CTR

In January we hypothesized that AI Overviews will significantly affect CTRs for both organic and paid search and that the impact will vary based on (1) the query type and (2) AI Overview citations. This was absolutely confirmed. And that impact is even more severe than we predicted. AIOs dramatically impact CTRs, and citation matters. 

 

How Humans Decide

On average, channels containing OSE [owned, shared, and earned] touchpoints are nearly 3x more powerful than paid media alone in converting someone from bias to purchase. Communications planning must therefore include ‘influence’ as a planning metric, and quantify the impact of OSE touchpoints. The result should be integrated OSEP (owned, shared, earned, and paid) influence plans that involve the full range of influential touchpoints, not just paid-media reach plans. 

 

Politico Journalists Fight Back Over AI Tools That Published ‘Glaring Errors’

Journalists at Politico … have won a ruling over the rollout of AI tools as a nationwide News Not Slop campaign was launched. … The dispute centered around a “Live Summaries” feature used during the 2024 Democratic Convention and a Capitol AI Report-Builder tool available for Politico Pro subscribers.

Trust Issues: New Data Reveals Sharp Decline In Trust In National News

To say that most Americans trust national news for information should, in a perfect world, not be a matter of concern or something that needs to be quantified.

But here we are, not only aware that technically most (56%) U.S. adults trust news organizations, according to recent Pew Research Center numbers, but that that percentage is down from 11% earlier this year and from 20% when Pew first posed the question nearly a decade ago.

 

Study Claims 9% Of U.S. Newspaper Articles At Least Partly AI Generated

Researchers from the University of Maryland used AI detector Pangram to analyze 186,000 articles published online by 1,500 national and local newspaper brands between June and September 2025. They concluded that “approximately 9% of newly-published articles are either partially or fully AI-generated.”  … AI use was found to be “much higher” in smaller local outlets compared to large national newspapers. 

 

MIT Just Built A Digital Twin Of Every American Worker — And the Results Are Sobering

MIT and Oak Ridge National Laboratory just released Project Iceberg, a massive simulation that tracked 151 million US workers across 32,000 skills and 923 occupations to figure out which jobs AI can already automate today. The findings = AI can technically replace 11.7% of the American workforce right now… affecting $1.2 trillion in wages. That’s not a prediction for 2030. That’s what’s possible with current technology.

 

The ROI Meter: How Brands Measure Return On Investment

Despite challenges, marketers appear to be confident in their ability to measure return on investment (ROI). It varies by geography — but only slightly, judging by a new study from Nielsen titled The Marketing ROI Blueprint: Unlocking the full value of marketing investments. 

Consumer Concerns Growing Over AI Copying Local News Stories (New Report)

Perhaps it’s reassuring that the concerns about AI stealing the work of journalists is shared by those outside the journalism industry. 

More than three-quarters of consumers (76%) say they’re concerned about AI stealing or reproducing local news stories, with half (51%) telling OnMessage Inc. they’re “very concerned.”

 

Do We Need Humanlike AI? Experts Say It Depends

Given the growing concerns over anthropomorphic AI, we asked our panel to react to the following provocation: Responsible AI governance requires questioning the necessity of overly humanlike agentic AI systems. Nearly 80% of our panelists agree or strongly agree with the statement, arguing that responsible AI governance is not just about how a technology is designed or deployed but also about when it should be deployed. 

 

Holiday Shoppers Using AI Are Open To Buy Through It

Nearly four in 10 consumers participating in the 2025 Holiday Shopping Report from First Insight note they intend to use AI tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude to assist in their holiday shopping, and 68% of them plan to go from browsing to buying directly within the platform — compared with 42% of shoppers who plan to do the same on social media.

 

The Small Business Holiday Outlook 2025: Your Guide to Winning the Make-or-Break Season

When it comes to getting the word out and driving action, our report confirms where you need to focus your limited marketing budget. Nearly 40% of SMBs told us social media marketing is the most impactful channel for holiday marketing. This significantly outweighs email marketing (18%).

Navigating The News: Why Credibility Is Key In The Age Of Audience Skepticism

Be it from traditional media sources, social-media sources, or word-of-mouth sources, news finds a way. 

And as new research from Ipsos, Muck Rack, and VaynerX shows, audiences aren’t afraid to be skeptical.

“Today’s audiences are buried in click bait and sensationalized headlines, but when something feels off, they don’t hesitate to fact-check,” says the report which found a majority of consumers are taking in news multiple times a day and only a third trust it most or all of the time. “When confronted with a news story that feels questionable, 44% of consumers say their first instinct is to fact-check on their own.”

 

Calling On Creators: Almost A Third Now Self-Publish Their Own Work

The publishing field is swarming with creators who do not write for legacy outlets, judging by The State of Creator Journalism 2025, a study from Muck Rack. Of those surveyed, 34% independently publish news, commentary or other content under their own name outside of a traditional media organization.

 

America’s Deepening Need For Human Connection In An AI-Driven World

The new research, fielded through Critical Mass Media for iHeartMedia, found that 82 percent of respondents worry about AI’s societal impact, and 9 in 10 believe it’s important to know the media they consume is created by a real person. Most respondents long to feel “human” again through deep, meaningful relationships, but simultaneously feel overwhelmed by their phones, hindering the ability to pursue these connections. These conflicting sentiments are driving new consumer behavior.

 

The State of Social Media Marketing

45% of marketers said they use AI for social media, and that number climbs to 53% among those posting multiple times a day. The heavier the posting load, the more likely teams are to rely on AI.