|
🛍️ Gap is turning employees into brand creators
LINK
|
- Gap, Inc. is opening its creator advocacy program to employees across offices, stores, and distribution centers for its brands, including Old Navy, Gap, Banana Republic, and Athleta, turning staff into content creators.
- Selected employees who apply gain tools to share content, access content opportunities, and earn commissions through affiliate sales, with guidelines set around transparency, disclosures, and brand standards.
- Since launching in October 2025, the program has generated nearly 30,000 unique posts that reached 154 million users, and 40% of consumers say they find products through employee content, rising to 61% among Gen Z.
|
🤖 Bots now outnumber your human audience
LINK
|
- Cloudflare reported that in June 2026 bots crossed the halfway mark and now generate 57.5% of web page requests, making human visitors a minority more than a year before the company's CEO had predicted.
- Cloudflare and the technology firm Thales disagree on the exact date of the flip, with Thales arguing in its annual "Bad Bot Report" that machines became the majority of web activity back in 2023.
- Human Security's 2026 benchmark report found that traffic from AI agents which click links, fill out forms, and complete tasks grew 7,851% year over year, meaning these bots are doing things rather than only scraping.
|
✍️ Meta can now rewrite text on your ad images
LINK
|
- Meta can now generate new versions of an advertiser's own ad image by swapping only the main headline text, keeping the original colors, font, formatting, top banner, and bottom icons exactly the same.
- The feature sits inside Meta's Advantage+ Creative Text Generation options, where Meta produced three alternate angles from one image input, each with text alternatives and at least two new image options, totaling eight.
- Advertisers can define Branding in Ads Manager, adding a logo, brand font, colors, text tone, visual style, and restricted words, though these controls are not always followed and Meta occasionally adds emoji or restricted words.
|
🛒 This AI assistant doubled a retailer's conversions
LINK
|
- Michaels reported that shoppers using Ask Mike, its AI-powered shopping assistant, converted at more than double the rate of customers who relied on the retailer's traditional search function.
- Launched in May, Ask Mike has handled nearly 75,000 conversations, with 27% of interactions leading to a product click or an item being added to a cart.
- Available on desktop, mobile, and iOS and Android apps, the tool lets customers describe a project in natural language, then asks about materials, colours, and budget before recommending products.
|
📊 Which Google Ads campaign wins your Q4 budget
LINK
|
- As retailers plan their fourth quarter budgets, new data shows Google's Demand Gen campaigns increasingly using product feeds, pushing them into the same auction space that Performance Max already occupies and blurring the line between the two campaign types.
- Product feed adoption in Demand Gen campaigns rose from 16 percent in 2024 to 26 percent in 2025 and reached 35 percent in 2026, according to figures Smarter Ecommerce published on LinkedIn on July 27, 2026.
- A Fospha and Google programme covering 25 retail brands across 28 market deployments found brands putting 10 to 20 percent of their Google budget into Demand Gen recorded double the return on ad spend of those allocating under 5 percent.
|
|
