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Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.
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In today's MarketingShot:
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🛒 Half of US shoppers now buy with AI, NIQ says 🕵️ Temu ran a $1B fake-influencer ad network on Meta 🎬 Best Buy is becoming a content studio for your ads 🔗 ChatGPT now sends 95% of your AI referral traffic 📉 Google's September spam update could hit your rankings for two weeks Plus: 💡 6 strategies & tactics, 🎁 7 other news & articles you might like, and 🧰 7 trending marketing tools.
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Watch the full system run live on Sep 30. Walk away ready to do it yourself.
Most founders have LinkedIn traction with nothing to show for it in the CRM. On Sep 30, Maria Gharib (Mindstream) and Valerie Chapman (Ruth AI) walk through the exact system live.
From AI-assisted content creation to sequenced outreach to booked meeting. You'll leave with a process you can run the same day.
Eligible startups also get the LinkedIn-to-Leads Toolkit: ad credits, Apollo, Captions, and HubSpot's Prospecting Agent.
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🛒 Half of US shoppers now buy with AI, NIQ says
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- More than half of US shoppers, 51%, used at least one AI tool to help them buy something in the past month, the first time the figure passed 50% in NIQ's Agentic Commerce Tracker.
- Product recommendations were the most common use at 20% of consumers, followed by AI personal shopping assistants at 16%, with people mostly comparing options, judging value and narrowing their choices.
- The monthly survey asks about 500 US consumers each month as part of NIQ's Quick Question research, and use has grown steadily over the past two quarters, now covering every step of a purchase.
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🕵️ Temu ran a $1B fake-influencer ad network on Meta
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- Temu has mostly stopped paying for a network of fake influencer accounts on Meta’s platforms after Fortune exposed it, having spent nearly $1 billion on partnership ads across Instagram and Facebook targeting the U.K. and 27 E.U. countries.
- Around 73 of the 100 influencers running the most Temu ads were probably fake, based in China, Russia, Bangladesh, or Iran, and together these accounts ran more than 1.4 million partnership ads reaching almost 17 billion pairs of eyeballs.
- After Fortune’s August 31 story, Temu’s daily partnership campaigns nearly halved, with weekly partnership ads dropping from 115,114 to 64,008, and the biggest fake account, “Ya Lilly,” stopped posting entirely on September 7.
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🎬 Best Buy is becoming a content studio for your ads
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- Best Buy has moved beyond selling advertisers access to shoppers and now offers to make the ads themselves, adding a studio, creator network and production workflow on top of its retail media business.
- Best Buy Studios spans 70,000 square feet with sound stages, editing and audio suites, a fabrication shop, a food stylist prep room and a prop warehouse, more than doubling the number of videos the retailer produces.
- Best Buy's influencer network splits awareness influencers from conversion influencers, its in-house team made more than 3,000 campaigns last year, and 93% of transactional revenue could be tied to a customer ID.
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🔗 ChatGPT now sends 95% of your AI referral traffic
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- ChatGPT sent 95.1% of the website traffic that AI chatbots referred in August, its highest share this year, according to new data from the search marketing company BrightEdge.
- Referral traffic from ChatGPT grew 101% between January and August, rising 36% in August alone, while Gemini came second with 2.4%, Perplexity had 1.1%, and Claude 0.8%.
- BrightEdge linked the rebound to OpenAI's push to improve ChatGPT after Sam Altman declared a "code red" in December, and found total AI referral traffic grew about 73% in under a year.
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📉 Google's September spam update could hit your rankings for two weeks
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- Google rolled out its September 2026 spam update to search rankings today, and unlike the three earlier cycles this year that wrapped in about three days, this one may take as long as 14 days to finish.
- The update applies across every country and language, and sites caught breaking Google's anti-spam policies can slide down the results or drop out entirely, while sites that stay within the rules are not the target.
- This is the fourth spam cycle of 2026 and the seventh confirmed ranking update this year, arriving 37 days after the August cycle began, with the 14-day allowance carrying the rollout to about October 8 if used fully.
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The best influencer marketing advice never comes from a report
It comes from someone who’s been there, done that, and has the receipts. Get ready for Return on Influence Festival ‘26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world.
October 21, 2026, 10 am - 5 pm ET. Free and online.
Other
news & articles you might like
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TikTok one adds AI creator search, faster payments, and a label for vetted creators, showcased at its LA Creators Summit
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Trusted creator recommendations make consumers 2.5 times more likely to buy, report finds
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Kalshi’s AI ad turned an Asian YouTuber into ‘a white dude’
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Google provides more Demand Gen ad features
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Podcasts are becoming more programmatic. But now advertisers have to keep the ad load in check
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LTK unifies AI search, creator discovery, and chatbot in new Search tab
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Creators drive discovery for 29% of Gen Z, but only 6% buy immediately: Report
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Trending Marketing Tools
| LeadPost: identifies anonymous website visitors and turns them into sales prospects. START FOR FREE |
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AdAnt AI: generates and tests editable short-form video ad variants for TikTok, Reels, and Shorts using AI agents that recommend hooks and templates.
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Anysite.io: delivers fresh web and business data via MCP or REST for outbound, ABM, research, and monitoring, with flat monthly plans and no setup.
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Browzer: connects to your codebase to auto-generate self-healing docs, blogs, quickstarts, and videos, freeing DevRel teams for community and growth work.
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akta.pro: private company data and signals API with event tracking, news, and entity resolution, helping finance and GTM teams source deals and target outreach
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Articos: tests messaging, positioning, and landing pages against simulated personas matched to your ICP, delivering audience feedback in under 30 minutes.
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line-harness-oss: a self-hosted CRM for LINE Official Accounts offering step messaging, broadcasts, forms, and reservations, with MCP and TypeScript SDK support.
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Our AI Academy has 330+ step-by-step tutorials on ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and every tool that matters. No fluff — just practical workflows you can use at work. Try it free for 7 days.
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