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Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.
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In today's MarketingShot:
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🍔 McDonald's drive-thru menus are becoming a new ad channel 🎬 YouTube's new AI tools A/B test your thumbnails and dub your videos 😰 AI slop is upending your social media career 💳 Citi is turning 70M cardholders into an ad target for you 🔍 Google's new UK choice screen puts AI rivals in front of your searchers Plus: 💡 5 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 other news & articles you might like, and 🧰 7 trending marketing tools.
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Blu Dot surpasses 2,000% ROAS with self-serve CTV ads
Blu Dot used Roku Ads Manager to drive incredible results for its furniture sales event. Its strategy hinged on custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.
“Roku has been a top performer,” said Blu Dot’s Claire Folkestad. “We have seen…CPMs lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”
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🍔 McDonald's drive-thru menus are becoming a new ad channel
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- McDonald's started testing a media network last month in 450 company-owned U.S. restaurants, showing ads from other brands on its app, kiosks, menu boards and inside restaurants, aiming to grow it into a billion-dollar business.
- Global chief marketing officer Morgan Flatley called commerce media one of the fastest-growing areas in advertising, expected to top $100 billion in the U.S. by 2028, and said the offering adds revenue with little extra cost.
- Flatley said McDonald's Media Network brings no operational complexity and no disruption to the customer experience, and the formal announcement came during the company's first investor day since 2023 on Wednesday.
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🎬 YouTube's new AI tools A/B test your thumbnails and dub your videos
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- YouTube revealed a set of new tools on Wednesday that use AI to A/B test creators' video thumbnails and titles, plus auto-dub live videos into other languages in real time.
- The Ask Studio feature gives creators feedback on draft videos, suggests alternative titles and thumbnails, and explains channel analytics, and if permitted, it can monitor thumbnail performance and build tests for older videos on its own.
- Starting in 2027, the A/B testing feature will let creators upload and test three different cuts for Shorts, while a Dynamic Thumbnails tool lets YouTube pick which uploaded thumbnail viewers see.
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😰 AI slop is upending your social media career
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- AI slop is reshaping how people build careers in social media and marketing, as a Brandweek 2026 workshop co-hosted by Luma showed how AI agents and a creative platform are reaching creative teams.
- Luma's first annual report, "State of Creative Professionals and AI: 2026," surveyed 760 creative professionals and found that 81% use AI to create and release content, with agencies leading adoption while freelancers lag behind.
- Alexia Adana demonstrated Luma's tools using a real Oakley workshop, showing digital twins of models and a "Brand DNA" built from brand guidelines, though she stressed the hybrid workflow stays rooted in human authorship and real photography.
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💳 Citi is turning 70M cardholders into an ad target for you
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- Citi launched Citi Commerce Media on Wednesday, a business that lets advertisers reach the bank's more than 70 million U.S. cardholders while helping them understand audiences and measure how their campaigns performed.
- The new business draws on 6.5 billion annual transactions, putting Citi alongside Chase Media Solutions, which targets and measures merchant offers using data from about 80 million consumers, and Mastercard Commerce Media.
- Commerce media gives banks revenue from cardholder relationships beyond interchange fees, which reached roughly $66 billion in 2025, as merchants and brands pay for advertising, customer acquisition and measurable sales tied to spending.
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🔍 Google's new UK choice screen puts AI rivals in front of your searchers
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- Britain's Competition and Markets Authority today put out a revised proposal that would require Google to show UK users a search choice screen of up to 12 providers on Android devices and Chrome, with AI assistants now able to qualify.
- The selection would work as a "5+7" structure, showing the five most popular eligible providers plus seven picked fully at random, with users able to test-drive a rival for at least a week and getting an annual reminder about their choice.
- The regulator reopened the measure because the market shifted, citing Google's move of its conversational search to Gemini 3.5 Flash at its I/O conference on May 19, 2026, and rising numbers of users adopting generative AI tools for search.
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Exploring AI Voice With SuperBloom
For Deel's "Feeling of Deeling" campaign, agency SuperBloom needed one consistent brand voice across markets—deployed fast, without sacrificing quality or consent. In this on-demand video session, SuperBloom and Voices break down the casting, production, and governance, plus what they'd do differently and where AI voice is headed next.
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news & articles you might like
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Amazon opens its seller tools to outside AI agents, starting with Anthropic’s Claude
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DoorDash hands brands live shelf data and retail insights
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Adobe expands creative tool access to Google Gemini, brings Acrobat to Claude
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Multimodal search type filter in Google Search Console performance report
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Influencer promo codes outperform ads as holiday purchase driver, survey finds
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Google Ads investment strategy new holistic & growth modes
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Trending Marketing Tools
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Ami AI: analyzes your website, targets high-converting buyers, and plans outreach backwards from your lead goals, then runs and self-corrects campaigns automatically.
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Adomate: generates Meta ads at scale using your ad account, ad library, and customer reviews through traceable, transparent workflows
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Naoma AI Demo Agent V2: runs interactive AI-powered product demos in 33 languages, letting every stakeholder explore features independently and reducing your sales team's follow-up workload.
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AI Search Console: tracks brand mentions, rankings, and share of voice across ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity, generating client-ready reports without manual spreadsheets.
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Cekura: automates QA testing for voice and chat AI agents using simulated conversations, response evaluation, production monitoring, and CI/CD integration
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Backlink Skills: Awesome skills for submitting url to free websites. Get more backlinks for your website to get more traffic.
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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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