Super-Sizing The Data
The twin forces of data and efficiency can be great. They can also lead one badly astray.
AdExchanger has covered how retailers capitalize on locked store shelves (which reduce sales) by adding data-collection features. For example, customers can contribute a phone number to unlock an item without help from a sales assistant.
Meanwhile, self-checkout stations are now universal in part because they collect more phone numbers and loyalty logins.
The thing is, though, that customers mostly hate these changes.
McDonald’s went big on in-restaurant kiosks and self-ordering systems (which also prompt people to download the McDonald’s app for rewards points). But The Wall Street Journal reports the fast food chain is walking that strategy back, because customers flocked to less kiosk-heavy chains like Chick-fil-A instead. Now, McDonald’s fears people regret the lack of human engagement when picking up their food.
Tiffanie Boyd, McDonald’s global chief people officer, tells the Journal that there will be new companywide training programs based on a study of retailers with the best hospitality scores.
Also, employees will no longer be required to ask if customers are using the McDonald’s app when taking their orders.
As Far As The AI Can See
Consultancy firm Madison and Wall predicts global ad revenue will hit $1.3 trillion by the end of 2026, marking an 11% year-over-year jump.
That growth is “unusually rapid” due to AI, according to the report.
Advertisers are turning to AI to slash creative and operational costs so they can pour more money into working media. They’re also entrusting more of their media buying to algorithmic decisioning and AI agents, also for efficiency’s sake. For example, Madison and Wall expects ad spend within Google’s Performance Max and Meta’s Advantage+ to spike from $60 billion this year to $158 billion by 2030 – which would represent a whopping 27% of the US ad market.
As for AI companies themselves, they’re “spending aggressively” on advertising to attract a bigger user base and convince skeptics that AI is not a creativity killer.
Plus, social media is riding the coattails of AI growth, in part because social media is rife with rich customer data and thus represents a ripe opportunity for AI monetization, Adweek reports. Madison + Wall predicts social media advertising will grow 17% in 2027, which closely resembles the IAB’s 16.5% year-over-year social media growth forecast for 2026.
Learning The Hard Way
The biggest consumer tech and advertising companies – Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft – have made inroads into early American education by offering free computers, software, educator training programs and endowments.
But, when your kid’s homework includes Minecraft characters doing Microsoft PR or prompts to create a Google logo, all this attempted goodwill can feel like “brand-washing,” as The New York Times reported last month.
Bloomberg has a telling follow-up. Because many adults nowadays are skeptical of Big Tech exposure, schools that loudly proclaim new rules against social media, caps on screen time and stringent policies against AI are seeing surges of families sign up citing the low-tech promise.
Michael Rose, head of the Cincinnati Classical Academy in Ohio, says many new parents enrolling a first or second grader cite their previous school distributing Chromebooks as a reason why they left.
Granville County School District in North Carolina has banned all devices for its youngest students and blocks YouTube for the rest. And the district’s superintendent claims the ban “seems to correlate with […] improvements in discipline and achievement.” (The county is also a plaintiff in a suit alleging social platforms, including YouTube, are addictive and harm children.)
So, as the pool of students shrinks in many states, schools are changing their marketing programs to frame themselves as oases free from attention-hungry tech and devices.
Guess that’s what happens when brand-washing backfires.
But Wait! There’s More!
Agencies are revising contracts to account for AI usage, but haven’t rewritten their MSAs just yet. [Digiday]
OpenAI considers slowing down its AI development due to potential safety risks. [Bloomberg]
Meta wanted its employee data to train its AI. The employees revolted. [Business Insider]
California introduces new laws surrounding child safety on AI and social media. [NYT]
CSAM continued to appear on X through the first half of this year, including images produced by xAI’s Grok chatbot, despite the platform’s promises to remove such material. [NYT]
Enterprise software leaders – including Salesforce, HubSpot, Figma and Canva – are divided on whether to let LLM agents run client accounts, or if doing so is welcoming foxes into the henhouse. [The Information]
You’re Hired!
The Brandtech Group appoints Chris Garbutt as Global Chief Creative Officer. [release]
