💰 Adobe acquires Semrush for $1.9B.

🤖 As AI slop spreads on social media, brands have lessons to learn.

📩 YouTube is finally testing direct messaging.

🛍️ Target to launch new shopping app within ChatGPT.

📚 Merriam-Webster punks everyone with the “original LLM.”

💧 Graza and Yahoo release an oil for quieter keyboards. But not actually.

🎬 Sony will produce the Labubu movie, reportedly.

Holiday creator campaigns are failing because brands and creators are operating on completely different calendars and incentives.

Later’s new research suggests that the brands winning the holidays are those designing creator programs around creators instead of internal timelines.

By the time most brands slide into a creator’s inbox, those creators have already committed to competing campaigns or they simply don’t have the bandwidth. And then it’s a landslide: rushed briefs, unclear expectations, generic content, and weaker performance overall.

Here’s how to realign your creator planning for max ROI: 

• Start planning holiday campaigns in Q2, not late summer.
• Pitch long-term partnership potential > single activations.
• Use hybrid compensation models (base + performance).
• Brief creators clearly but leave room for creative ownership.
• Diversify channels, especially YouTube and Facebook, where competition is lower.
• Expand beyond short-form video with long-form, carousels, and interactive formats.

Get the full scoop from Later.

Google has just launched Gemini 3.

The new model is built to reason deeply, understand multimodal inputs, and act as a creative and technical partner with more precision, and fewer prompts.

In a head-to-head test by Tom’s Guide, Gemini 3 Pro consistently outperformed ChatGPT 5.1, winning six of nine rounds across coding, reasoning, writing, and multimodal tasks.

It’s available across Search, the Gemini app, AI Studio, Vertex AI, and Google’s new agentic development platform Antigravity.

FYI: We just had some ad space open up during the hottest email season of the year.

The weeks of Black Friday and Cyber Monday give us a generous boost in impressions and engagement, but you can still snag a sweet spot for the same old prices.

Get in touch ASAP to claim a date before they’re gobbled up.

Honda’s new “Engineered for Fun” campaign uses facial-expression tracking to literally measure joy sparked by the 2026 Honda Prelude hybrid-electric sports coupe.

The John Cena–narrated spot brings drivers to Honda’s Mojave Desert proving grounds to capture their real-time reactions as they push the Prelude’s new S+ Shift mode, which mimics a performance transmission.

In plain English, vroom.