🤖 Yahoo launches AI answer engine, Scout.

🧠 LinkedIn adds new gen AI qualifications for your profile.

🎙️ Google launches Ads Decoded podcast.

🛒 TikTok Shop sellers are pulling back ahead of the end independent shipping.

🔁 Study: AI recommendation lists repeat less than 1% of the time.

🏈 Lessons from Nationwide’s 2015 “dead boy” Super Bowl ad.

😏 Brands are using generative AI to make fun of generative AI.

Apple and Google’s 2025 platform updates have quietly rewired how email and SMS perform.

Now, inbox interfaces are more automated and filtered and less forgiving, which means we have to rethink visibility, measurement, and trust across owned channels.

What this means for email and SMS in 2026:

• Inbox placement matters more. Apple Mail’s updated categorization and Gmail’s subscription management tools reduce passive visibility. Emails are increasingly grouped, summarized, or hidden behind extra taps, making “send and hope” a losing strategy.
• Opens are even less reliable. AI-generated previews, collapsed messages, and background loading are further eroding open rate usefulness. Clicks, conversions, and downstream behavior now carry more weight.
• Send frequency is under scrutiny. Gmail’s “Manage subscriptions” view makes it easy for users to spot and unsubscribe from brands that over-send. High-volume, low-value programs are most at risk.
• Content has to earn the tap. Subject lines and preheaders no longer fully control first impressions. Clear value, relevance, and scannable copy matter more than cleverness.
• SMS is no longer inbox-guaranteed. Apple’s expanded filtering for unknown senders can route brand texts away from the main message feed, especially for promotional traffic.
• Trust signals are critical for SMS. Saved contacts, conversational messaging, consistent sender IDs, and transactional value help messages bypass filtering.
• Cross-channel orchestration wins. Email and SMS need to work together. Use SMS for urgency and confirmation, email for depth and storytelling.
• List quality beats list size. Engagement-based segmentation, suppression of inactive users, and preference centers are now defensive tactics, not “nice-to-haves.”

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True story: Jet-Puffed’s “Love ’Em to Death” from Kraft Heinz and agency GUT Miami is the first major creative platform for the nearly 70-year-old marshmallow brand.

And it’s shaking up a pretty dead category with a darkly funny insight: marshmallows are literally made to suffer, to be roasted, squished, melted, and TBH, if you’re doing it right, set aflame.

So, the campaign personifies puffed marshmallows as adorable characters who gleefully accept their delicious fate. Basically, the leading marshmallow brand has come out of left field to change the way we look at marshmallows forever. Worth a watch.

Budweiser, 1994