📉 Shopify is hit by a login outage on major sales day.

💸 BFCM shoppers spent more than ever, whether or not they had the cash.

🤖 AI takes over the holiday shopping wars.

💎 Luxury isn’t collapsing. It’s recalibrating downward.

🥤 Inside RC Cola’s comeback campaign.

🍳 NYT Cooking taps McCormick for its first product placement.

📚 The Oxford Word of the Year 2025 is rage bait.

Not to be dramatic, but 2026 is looking to be a year of structural shifts.

Here are the 7 trends shaping the next year:

1. Marketers become product managers. AI prototyping tools let us turn insights into shippable product concepts. Marketing is moving upstream, influencing features, shaping UX, and embedding growth loops directly into the product.
2. SEO blogging returns, but for AEO. AI search rewards lived experience and niche depth. Bottom-of-funnel content (comparisons, “best for X,” hyper-specific reviews) becomes a conversion engine that influences both SERPs and AI Overviews.
3. Employees become internal influencers. The most credible content comes from the people building the product. Marketers who can communicate publicly become career-defensible.
4. AI video ads level up. With generative tools, the creative bar rises. Taste and narrative will determine winners.
5. Network effects become the new moat. Distribution gets baked into the product. Templates, communities, and sharing loops turn customers into marketers.
6. Design taste becomes the #1 skill. Clarity, craft, and aesthetic judgment become true differentiators across content, UX, and product.
7. Human-first media takes over. Trusted creators, niche newsletters, and employee-led storytelling become premium ad real estate. There’s hope!

Think like a builder, design like a creator, and communicate like a real person. Take a closer look at Marketer Milk.

Rephrase lives natively on MacOS and works inside Slack, Notion, Mail, Discord, etc. to help you clean up sentences, rewrite messages, and fix messy notes.

Just highlight text, hit your custom hotkey, and tighten up your prose without switched tabs or contexts. Instantly format lists, shift tone, translate, summarize, or create your own custom prompts for any task.

In “Lazy Mode,” type lowercase, shorthand, or half-formed thoughts and Rephrase will turn it into polished writing.

Whisker is selling an $899 “premium” box for your cat to fits-and-sits in.

It does come with the new Litter-Robot 5, but your cat won’t give AF about that.

The campaign comes with a 12-day social giveaway and partnerships with animal rescue organizations to help more cats get adopted.