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Marketing AI Pulse Brief (June 2026): Cannes Lions, CMO AI Gap, NY Disclosure Law & AI Shoppers

The BCG study highlights a transformation gap: 96% of CMOs say AI is driving end-to-end transformation, but only one in three say AI has transformed significant parts of their work, with limited use of multiple autonomous agents.

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By Aby Varma · · Aby VarmaMatt CyrThe Marketing Ai SparkcastMarketing Ai Pulse
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Key takeaways

01

At Cannes Lions, AI became the default across platforms while human-made work won the top awards.

02

New York's synthetic performer law puts the burden on advertisers to disclose AI-generated people.

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The Marketing AI SparkCast brings you the Marketing AI Pulse Monthly Brief, a curated look at the most relevant stories shaping the field and what they mean for CMOs and marketing leaders. In the June 2026 edition, host Aby Varma of Spark Novus and co-host Matt Cyr of Loop AI work through four stories that pull in opposite directions at once: platforms making AI the default while juries reward work made by hand, CMOs who talk transformation but haven't restructured, a new law that forces brands to disclose AI-generated people, and consumers who distrust AI messaging while shopping through AI anyway.

Cannes Lions: AI Becomes the Default, Human Craft Takes the Awards

Cannes Lions draws about 15,000 CMOs, agency leaders and brand executives to the South of France every June. Varma said one theme dominated this year: AI. The platforms used the stage to make it the standard way marketing gets done.

Meta launched brand memory, which ingests a brand's existing library, learns its identity and tone, and generates creative from what is already performing. Google embedded Gemini directly into Google Ads to surface creative insights during campaign optimization, including which visuals to use and what is trending on YouTube. TikTok introduced Symphony Agent, which reads campaign goals, matches them to TikTok trend data, and identifies and briefs creators. Amazon debuted Alexa+ agentic ads in beta, a format where consumers can complete transactions directly inside the ad. Canva announced Grow 2.0 for creating ads, publishing them to TikTok, LinkedIn and Meta, and tracking performance without leaving Canva, and acquired MagicBrief. OpenAI attended Cannes for the first time, pitching ChatGPT as a marketing channel.

The awards told a different story. Apple TV took the Design Grand Prix for work shot entirely in camera using physical glass sculptures, with no AI and no CGI. The jury called it "gloriously human made." Coinbase won in Film Craft for a spot whose sets, costumes and performers were physically built to look like a video game.

Varma's read for marketers: AI is now "the default and not the experiment." Agentic ads are collapsing awareness, consideration and conversion into a single moment, and creator strategy and paid media are merging into one workflow on the platform side. His advice to CMOs is to decide where humans lead and where AI executes, treat brand clarity as infrastructure, and stop ignoring ChatGPT as an emerging channel.

Your positioning, your voice, your visual identity, if those things are not locked down, it's like garbage in, garbage out. — Aby Varma, Spark Novus, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

Cyr connected the theme to Backrooms, a film that grew out of YouTube and Reddit and whose director made a point of doing almost everything physically, using AI only for repetitive tasks. "I think that intersection of human creativity and technology is one that is just beginning to get uncovered," he said.

BCG: Nearly Every CMO Expects Transformation, One in Three Have Done It

Cyr's first story was a Boston Consulting Group study of hundreds of CMOs around the world. Ninety-six percent said AI is driving end-to-end transformation of their function. Only one in three said AI has actually transformed significant parts of their work. Just 8% are running campaigns with multiple autonomous agents, and 42% are using generative AI to help individuals with one-off tasks. Cyr also cited a figure of about 31% of B2C CMOs who made deeper transformation seeing measurable revenue impact.

The gap tracks with what he sees in client work every week: teams stuck between experimentation and real adoption.

It's not just about the technology or, in fact, it's often not at all about the technology. It's about the humans and the change management involved in really moving from one way of doing work to another way of doing work. — Matt Cyr, Loop AI, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

His prescriptions start with an honest audit of AI maturity. "This is not about aspiration," he said. He asks CMOs whether their tools talk to one another and share context, and almost to a person, they say no. Second, stop equating tool access with transformation. One client asked what it would cost to give its 200-person organization access to both ChatGPT and Claude for a year. The answer was about $240,000.

Just working in those tools isn't gonna get you very far. You have to build systems and processes and workflows and training and all of those things around it. — Matt Cyr, Loop AI, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

Third, make AI transformation a leadership priority. BCG called out that efforts driven solely from a marketing operations lens or from the ground up won't deliver the value needed. Varma agreed, naming strategy, ICP, brand values, governance, training and change management as the pillars of any transformation, and calling a tech-first leap "just leaders being naive."

New York's Synthetic Performer Law Puts the Burden on Advertisers

Varma covered New York's new law, the first in the country requiring ads to disclose AI-generated synthetic performers: digital humans that look and sound real but don't exist. Signed by Governor Hochul last December, it took effect June 9, 2026. The obligation sits with whoever makes the ad, not the platform running it. Disclosure must be "conspicuous," a term Varma said the law doesn't define well enough. Fines are $1,000 for a first violation and $5,000 for each one after. SAG-AFTRA backed the law, which doesn't ban synthetic actors but forces brands to say they're using them.

Varma said 13 states already have disclosure laws for political ads, but New York is the only one covering commercial advertising. Connecticut is coming in 2027, Massachusetts has a bill that isn't finalized, and he doesn't expect federal action soon. Beyond the fine, he flagged the reputational hit when audiences find out a brand used a fake human without telling them.

His guidance: audit the tools your team and especially your agencies use, and write a formal marketing governance document with rules for AI inputs, outputs and disclosures, built to meet the highest obligation in the coming patchwork of state laws. Done right, he argued, disclosure becomes a trust play, the way sponsored-content labels went from awkward to expected.

Cyr described AI-generated attack ads from South Carolina's recent election season that depicted real candidates with no disclosure. He could tell they were generated. Many viewers, he said, won't be able to.

Seeing is believing was a thing, and I think it's not gonna be a thing anymore. — Aby Varma, Spark Novus, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

Consumers Reject AI Messaging, Then Shop Through AI

Cyr closed with two studies that landed within about 24 hours of each other. A survey of 2,000 respondents, including 800 enterprise CMOs, found 60% of U.S. consumers say brands using "AI" in their messaging is a turnoff. Eighty-six percent don't fully trust AI content and still want to find the original source, and 42% trust AI-generated answers without attribution less than airline fees or medical bills.

On the other side, an Adobe analytics report on retail shopping data from May showed AI traffic to retail websites up 138% year over year. AI-referred shoppers converted 54% better than non-AI-referred shoppers and spent 53% more time browsing.

Cyr's guidance: audit AI-forward messaging and strip out "AI-powered" wherever it isn't necessary, invest in AI discoverability as a serious acquisition channel, and earn trust in the open.

Building trust through transparency, not AI theater, I think is super important. — Matt Cyr, Loop AI, on The Marketing AI SparkCast

Varma reads the split as efficiency versus authenticity. People embrace AI for search, writing and agentic tasks, but distrust AI-made faces and video because they can't be sure what they're seeing. He also called out AI washing among martech vendors and predicted "AI-powered" will stop being a selling point, the same way SaaS became simply how software is delivered.

Watch or listen to the full June 2026 Marketing AI Pulse Brief on The Marketing AI SparkCast, and join the community at marketingaipulse.com.

Video TranscriptExpand ↓

Welcome to the Marketing AI SparkCast, where AI meets modern marketing. Hosted by Aby Varma, a global leader in marketing, AI, and innovation, each episode brings you real conversations with leaders putting AI to work in strategy and execution. This episode is brought to you by Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. Here's your host, Aby Varma. Welcome to another episode of the Marketing AI Pulse monthly brief for June 2026. The Marketing AI Pulse is one of the fastest growing communities at the intersection of marketing and AI. If you are not a member of that, we'd love for you to join. You can learn more about that at marketingaipulse.com. For today's episode, it is always a pleasure to welcome my partner in crime, mister Matt Cyr from Loop dot ai. Matt, welcome back. Aby, how are we today? Everything good? Good, man. How's the summer been for you? It's been good. It's been busy. We're... We got a lot going on, but it has been extremely hot here in Charleston, South Carolina. I think yesterday was 99 degrees without the without the humidity, so probably about about a 110 here yesterday. So, obviously, good weekend for some for some yard work. So I got out there and just about dropped dead from the heat stroke. So all good. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Atlanta has been equally hot, but I've been I've been very comfortable in my little basement dungeon where I'm recording this podcast. But, yeah, I think we have a packed podcast today. We have four exciting stories. So we're just going to do a quick table of contents for our four topics. So the first topic that we're going to talk about is Lions. So for those of you who are not familiar, Cannes Lions is the largest marketing and creativity advertising festival. It started in the mid fifties. It draws about 15,000 CMOs, agency leaders, brand execs, and they all head to the South Of France every June to celebrate the best creative work on the planet and set the agenda where marketing is heading next. Lots of important announcements are typically made at this event, and this year was nothing different. As expected, one theme dominated Cannes Lions this year, which is everything AI. And there were two things that became very clear. So the first is the platforms have decided that AI is essentially going to be the default way of how marketing gets done. The second thing in a weird juxtaposition is the award winning work that got the most attention was deliberately and visibly human. We're we're gonna unpack that more. Matt, over to you for the second time. Great. Yeah. The topic that I wanna talk about here at the start is a recent study by BCG, the Boston Consulting Group. This month released a study as well as an article that really covered two different ends of the AI adoption spectrum for marketers. And I think we're... You and I are both living this, but the data is kinda proving this out, which is that most CMOs across the world are saying that AI is really driving a transformation of their own roles, of their teams, of their expectations. But the data that they shared also shows that only about one in three marketers and CMOs have actually transformed significant parts of their organization with AI. And that disconnect, I think, is a really important thing for marketers to hear and understand. This is something I see literally every week with our clients, folks who are really trying to bring AI into their organizations in a meaningful way, but in many cases, struggling to make the move from experimentation to real transformation. So really important and compelling study by BCG that I think shows where we are and where we're headed. So New York just passed the first law in the country requiring ads to disclose when they're using AI generated people. They're called synthetic performers, digital humans that look and sound completely real, but don't exist. So as of June ninth, this year, twenty twenty six, if you run any kind of ad in in the state of New York, if you don't label it, you can get fined. My second topic for the day is another disconnect that we're seeing out in the market when it comes to AI. On the one hand, TechCrunch published a story last week or about a week and a half ago that said 60% of US consumers say that AI and brand messaging is a turnoff. Yet on the other end of that spectrum, interestingly, visitors who are referred to a website via AI are much more likely to stick around and are much more likely to convert. So bit of a disconnect there that we need to try and sort out. So unpacking map the Cannes Lions last week, which from everything that I've read and seen seems like almost like a south by Southwest and in the South Of France, and people have bragging rights and whatever. But there was lot of I need to figure out how to get there next year, Aby. I think you and I in the South Of France could be could be a good time. Let's do it, man. Let's do it. We gotta find one of those cabanas to go park ourselves in. But, yeah, there was a lot of announcements and things like that. And one thing became very clear that AI is becoming the default way of all these AI marketing platforms and how things are going to get done. So I'm gonna unpack a few things from what I compiled. So Meta launched something called brand memory, which ingests your existing library. It learns about your brand identity and tone and generates the creator from what is already performing. So it sits inside a new into AI creative workspace, sees what works, generates, well, you can test it all in kind of one place. So that's Meta. Google has embedded now Gemini directly to Google Ads. So AI powered creative insights during campaign optimization, telling you which visuals to use, what is trending on YouTube, and how to improve performance in real time. TikTok launched something called Symphony Agent, where it's like agentic AI that reads your campaign goals, matches them to TikToks, trend data, identifies and briefs creators and scales content across markets. Amazon debuted Alexa+ agentic ads in beta. It's a new format where consumers can interact with and complete transactions directly through the ad. It's the first truly agentic ad product from a major platform. Canva announced Grow two point o. They had launched it earlier, but it says two point o where you can now create ads and then publish them to TikTok, LinkedIn, and Meta, and track performance all without leaving Canva. And they also acquired this company called MagicBrief, which is an AI platform that analyzes what ad formats and content are performing the best, feeding those learnings into your creative. And, course, OpenAI attended Cannes for the first time ever and made a statement about they're clearly in the advertising business now, pitching ChatGPT as a marketing channel and highlighting the fact that one in five queries carry commercial intent are really originating from OpenAI. So you can see that there's a general trend for all of these platforms focused on advertising, where they're trying to keep you in the platform. And then they try to use the ad to reduce the friction for creation and optimization. And the thing is as this technology evolves, my punch is that there's going to be a lot of autonomous type advertising where you can identify your target audience, identify your budget, point it to your web, find your existing assets, and that's saying, and then letter one autonomously. Are we there yet? Sorta. But I think this is just a matter of time. I'm seeing everything that I just rattle off. Meta, Google, TikTok, Amazon, Canva, all heading kinda in the in the same direction. So clearly, advertising, it's looking like it's it's going autonomous or headed in that direction. But in a in a weird juxtaposition with AI and the human side of the equation is the awards that were announced were really celebrating the craft, the human craft. So Apple TV took the design Grand Prix for a shot entirely in camera using physical glass sculptures. No AI. No CGI. And the jury called it gloriously human made. Coinbase one film craft for a spot where sets, costumes, and performers are all physically built to look like a video game entirely in camera. And like I said, both were kind of celebrated because they chose craft over technology. So the weird thing where AI is taking over and making advertising more autonomous, but at the same time, the human creative outputs are being kind of celebrated. And what does this really mean for marketing folks? Right? So it really means that we're getting to a paradigm where AI is the default and not the experiment. The platforms are building AI into standard workflows, like all the things I told you, Brand Memory, Gemini, and Google Ads, Symphony Agent, and so on and so forth. They're not add ons. They're becoming the baseline. And some of these tools and capabilities are even coming to the entry level tools. So even if you're not on the Adobe platform, smaller teams are using tools like Canva, means that even smaller marketing teams without dedicated tech or media buying resources can now run fully AI assisted campaigns end to end, or so they claim. So we'll see how all this happens, and then ChatGPT. Now that they're an advertising channel, you can't really ignore that. You have to have ChatGPT as a channel strategy. And then I feel these agentic ads are collapsing the funnel. So they're not just driving awareness. You can transact within the ad itself. So the traditional funnel of awareness, consideration, and conversion are essentially becoming one moment, and the funnel is getting collapsed, and it just needs some kind of rethinking along the way. And then finally, when it comes to strategies around creators and AI, those two swim lanes are merging. And what do I mean by that? Means like platforms like TikTok and Meta are using AI for brands to help find creators, write briefs, really scale content. So it's becoming one workflow on the platform side. Now, historically, most marketing organizations have a separate team for those that run influencer marketing, a separate team for paid media. And I think those two worlds are colliding because now you can do all those things within the platform. So it becomes way easier for brands to find creators and scale content right within the within the platform. So what should CMOs do? So really three things. One is decide where humans lead and where AI executes. Right? AI can handle volume, versioning, scaling, optimizing. So all operational decisions sounds like the tool they're catching up where AI can help optimize those things. And when it comes to strategy or judgment or taste, that capability needs to be protected and essentially be focused on the on the human side of it. And that really, from a CMO standpoint, should be a a very strategic way of approaching it. So that's number one. Number two, you can really treat your brand clarity as infrastructure. So like I was saying, pretty much every platform announced AI tools that will generate, publish, and speak on your brand's behalf, if you let it. But they would only be as good as the brand identity you feed them. Right? So your positioning, your voice, your visual identity, if those things are not locked down, it's like garbage in, garbage out. Right? AI is going to scale that inconsistently and in, like, a really fast way, which you obviously don't want. So making sure that your brand guidelines and brand clarity needs to be really treated as like an infrastructure element so you can start feeding these things to AI in order to leverage some of those operational gains. And number three is really, you know, can't ignore ChatGPT as an emerging channel. Like I mentioned, 20% of queries coming are... Carry commercial intent from OpenAI, and it's too early in my opinion to see how this is gonna play out. But CMOs who understand how the brand shows up in AI generated answers will be better positioned than those who don't. So that's the whole world of GEO and those things that we've discussed in the past. So a lot to unpack. Obviously, a lot happened at Cannes Lions. But, Matt, did you read anything about it? Cannes Lions was all over the place in the last week for sure and across all the different feeds. But it's interesting. I think this intersection of technology and humanity is something that to me is... I think we're just starting to get our minds around. I don't know if you saw the movie that's really blown up this summer called the Backrooms, but really interesting movie. The kid who directed it made a point of saying that almost everything in that movie was done physically and that he really came out in a pretty strongly anti way against AI and using it as part of his craft except to do repetitive kinds of tasks. And if you see that movie and where that that trend came from when YouTube and Reddit, that's a very organic human feeling story and world. And so I think that intersection of human creativity and technology is one that is just beginning to get uncovered and I think is fascinating. I'm not surprised that Cannes Lions is digging in on it. I think it's a super compelling topic that everybody's wrestling. Perfect. Arnold. Alright. I'm gonna dive in, Aby. I've got a... My two topics today are about disconnects or, you know, two two stories where we're hearing two different story lines. The first one is about a research study in an article that was released by the Boston Consulting Group, also known as BCG. And they, like many other large scale consultancies and organizations, are starting to really study AI adoption and how it is being meaningfully adopted or not, in particular, in marketing organizations is the topic of this study. The study that that they did, they surveyed hundreds of CMOs all around the world. And no surprise, 96% of them said that AI is driving end to end transformation of their function, of their teams, of the way that people are thinking about marketing, and what they're expecting from marketing. But the reality is that only one in three of those same CMOs say that AI has actually transformed significant parts of their work in their organizations. Just 8% are running campaigns with multiple autonomous agents. And, again, no surprise, 42% are using GenAI to help individuals with one off tasks. And this tracks very much with what I see when I'm talking with clients and other marketers out in the world is that there's this real strong disconnect between AI experimentation and adoption. And I think that transition from experimentation to adoption, I think, is beginning, but the reality of the challenge of that, I think, is sometimes catching up to people. One other really interesting data point that they identified is about 31% of b to c CMOs who made deeper transformation are seeing measurable revenue impact. So, again, those folks that are really doubling down and paying attention to workflows and meaningfully adding AI into the core of what they're doing are showing benefit, but I think most other marketers are showing the opposite, which is that they're spending a lot of time, energy, and money and not really seeing the value from that on the bottom line. So what this means for marketers, I think the gap between the rhetoric and reality is really widening. I have heard this from so many people in just the last couple of months. People are talking an awful lot about all the great work that's getting done with AI, and probably Cannes Lions is an example of some of that. But the reality of the actual transfer and transition of the work is just simply not there yet. A lot of what I see is that the change and the challenge is around the human side of this. Right? It's not just about the technology or, in fact, it's often not at all about the technology. It's about the humans and the change management involved in in really moving from one way of doing work to another way of doing work. So I think marketers need to really start looking at this even more through a lens of the human change, the anxiety that it's producing, the opportunities it's presenting, the training that's needed, all of those really important things. And the last thing that I would add here is around what CMOs should do about this. I would start honestly with an audit of AI maturity. This is not about aspiration. It's about reality, and it's about what is actually happening in your organization. I've talked to CMOs many times who talk about all the different tools that they're implementing, and I'll ask, are those tools talking to one another? Are they bringing shared context and compounding knowledge? And they are almost to a person saying that those things are not happening. And so you're seeing a lot of one offs that are not really adding up to an awful lot of value. One plus one equaling two, definitely not three. So that audit is a really important starting point of what are we doing? What's working? What are we not doing? What should we be doing? I would say the second big thing to me, Aby, is stop equating tool access with transformation. We had a client tell us or ask us a couple of months ago what it would cost to give everyone in their 200 person organization access to both ChatGPT and to Claude. And how much do you think that would cost for 200 person organization? Oh gosh. A lot. A lot. So about 240,000 to give everybody in the organization access to those two tools on an ongoing basis for a full year. Now just working in those tools isn't gonna get you very far. You have to build systems and processes and workflows and training and all of those things around it. So the value is really not coming back to people for the expense that they're putting out there. The last thing I would say is that making AI transformation a leadership priority is an... Is enormously important. BCG talked about this in the report and really called out the fact that if this is just happening from a marketing operations lens or being driven solely from the ground up, you're not gonna see the kind of value that ultimately is needed here. And so a really great study from BCG, we'll include the link in the show notes. But are you feeling and hearing similar things, Aby, when you're talking to folks, this disconnect between experimentation and implementation? Oh, 100%. There's a lot of hype, to be honest. I think there's a fine line between optimism and hype, but certainly can't get away from the hype. But I think for a lot of marketing leaders, if it is not grounded in strategy, there's an expectation that using the tool equals ROI, and the reality is far from it. Right? You have to have a sound strategy. You gotta understand your ICP. You gotta make sure you're looking at it through a point of view in the lens of the overall business strategy, your brand values, the creative identity, have some governance in place, have team training and enablement, and all those things. Change management. So these are major pillars of any transformation. Beginning just diving in straight to tech and expecting a really transformed org is just leaders being naive. And I think that recognition is dawning on people clearly as the data shows that. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. Compelling stuff, and I think we're in a definitely in a big transitional phase here when it comes to AI adoption. So your second topic of the day is getting into something that I think a lot of us are hearing about and struggling with, which is when we see AI generated materials, advertisements, and things like that, how do we know that they're real? What what can you tell us? Yeah. Absolutely. So this is... Goes to the heart of governance. Right? And I mentioned that even when they were talking about Cannes Lions, but this is this is the law. So New York... The state of New York just passed the first law in the country requiring ads to disclose when they use AI generated synthetic performers, aka fake people, people that don't exist. So the law was signed by Governor Hochul back in December last year, and it went into effect this month. And it's just one of those things where you're required to fully disclose the fact that you're using AI generated human beings. The obligation is on whoever is making the ad and not the platform running it. So that's super important. Right? So if you are creating the ad and you're pushing it through any ad platforms, it's not the ad platforms that are responsible for it. You are responsible for it as the ad creator. And the disclosure has to be conspicuous, whatever that means. It didn't go deep enough, in my opinion, just define what is conspicuous. But that's the ask. And it's a thousand dollars for your first violation. It is $5,000 for everyone after that. So as you can imagine, it can add up really fast. And you're familiar with SAG-AFTRA, which is the Screen Actors Guild, the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists, they backed this law because actors are watching their livelihoods get replaced by digital copies of AI and that stuff. And this law doesn't ban that. It just forces the brands to say that they're using synthetic actors. So I think it has big implications, and New York isn't the only state. So we have 13 states that already have disclosure laws for political ads when New York is really the only one that is covering commercial advertising. Connecticut is coming in 2027. Massachusetts has a bill, but there's nothing finalized. There are a couple of other states. Nothing at the federal level just yet. I doubt it that with the current administration that has taken a stance, a more kind of a pro AI innovation stance. I don't really see this at the federal level. But what does this mean for marketers? So for marketers, obviously, if you're running ads in the state of New York, whether you are creating those ads or your agencies are creating those ads and are using AI generated talent without disclosing it, you're on the hook. I think more than a fine, there's a repudational hit when I got to a find out that you used a fake human without telling them. And honestly, my personal opinion is this is... Even without the law, that was just weird. A lot of UGC user generated content where AI was used for UGC ads just kinda has run me the wrong way because then you were just having fake people claim that they had used your product and are endorsing it. So so that was... That's been weird to me. But, obviously, now we have a law in place in in the state of New York. More more states coming soon. And disclosure is a key part of marketing governments. Right? So I think if it is done right, it can click this constraint into into a trust play. Right? The same way we've all seen sponsored content labels went from, like, awkward labeled in the beginning when they were launched to really expected, and now everybody's adopting it in similar fashion. I think that conspicuous disclosure for AI ads is so essential. What should CMOs do? So I think it's a common theme that you and me have mentioned that you gotta audit your tools that are being used, again, by your team and especially by your agency. A lot of times, brands are not involved up front in the agency production process. They're really looking at outcomes. But I think you should really have a sense of what exactly, what is the workflow, what's the tech stack being used in any of these ad production creative if if AI is being used or not. I say this to a lot of brands that we work with, and I believe in this in the the strategic, but also responsible use of AI within marketing teams where you have to have some of the marketing governance, a marketing standard. Most marketing teams get handed down a gigantic PDF from their IT or compliance people, which has a lot of technical information. I'm not saying that that they need to ignore that, but to me, it doesn't have specific requirements pertaining to marketing. So this is a good trigger for you guys to really come up with a formalized marketing governance document within your team to to establish what are rules for input, what goes into AI, what are rules for output, what are obligations that is coming out of AI, and then disclosures like this law. So that is something that we kind of believe in. And I think it's gonna help you because you gotta get ahead of this patchwork, which we are about to be hit with. So this is just New York. Other states are gonna come up with something similar as well, and I think we're gonna end up with a patchwork because I'm not sure, like, happens when there are state laws. The state laws can vary. Then I think having something overarching brand standard, which would need to comply with the highest obligation it was probably a good idea. But I think this is just an area that you can't ignore, and this is currently hot and active. Right? So Matt, are you seeing a lot of awareness from a disclosure or marketing governance standpoint with the folks that you work with? To some degree, yes. But what's been interesting actually to me is the advertising environment that I'm experiencing. So I live in South Carolina and have noticed a couple of things recently. There's one ambulance chasing lawyer who is using AI for his entire advertising. So you'll... You can tell when you see the ad that the... All the characters are AI generated. They look quite real, but they're all AI generated, and the entire ad has been created by AI. But what's more interesting to me is that, of course, we've just gone through a... An election season and a lot of elections down here in South Carolina. I noticed several campaign ads that were AI generated that showed the candidates that were being attacked in these attack ads that were clearly AI generated. So actual human beings, to your point, who were included in these advertisements where negative things were being say... Said about them, and that was... Made it look as if they were in the advertisement itself. And there was no disclosure to your point. There was no disclosure in any of these ads that said this person was AI generated. And South Carolina is obviously much more conservative than Connecticut or New York or Massachusetts, so I don't expect that we're gonna have a similar type of set of regulations here. But I think it's really challenging or gonna become increasingly challenging for people to be able to really separate the two because I know what I'm looking for, and I was able to tell that they were generated. But there's gonna be other folks who simply will not be able to tell the difference. Your point about some baseline level of disclosure and engagement, I think, is really important in that patchwork that you described. It's certainly accurate, so can be really interesting to see where this goes. Yeah. I mean, seeing is believing was a thing, and I think it's not gonna be a thing anymore. It isn't already. Right? Like, when I'm doom scrolling a night on Instagram and some of the things I'm watching, I know that it's not real. It looks very real. But because I'm immersed in this world of marketing and AI, I can spot some telltale signs, but I don't know if that's the same level of recognition or granularity without those disclosures that a layperson would have. The AI video avatar business is getting very good to where you can't really tell if this is the real person or not. So definitely something to watch. But, Matt, the next story is about really consumers starting to hate on AI marketing in the the same spirit? Or This next one is... I mentioned earlier, my two stories are about contradictions. And this is another example of that because, two stories, two studies landed within about twenty four hours of each other earlier this month, and they each tell a different side of the AI and marketing story. And I think it's an interesting thing to try to pull these two apart. So the first one was a study done by WordPress, the content management system company. They did a survey of two... With 2,000 respondents and... Including 800 enterprise CMOs. And what they found was that 60% of US consumers say that brands using the word... The phrase AI in their message is a turnoff. I think for a lot of brands, it's just become let's stick AI on there and hope that people think that we're staying on top of the trends. 86% of the people that responded don't fully trust AI content back to the conversation we were just having and still wanna find the original source. 42% trust AI generated answers without attribution less than, get this, airline fees or medical bills, two of the least trustworthy things in the world. You 3% say Internet feels less human than it did ten years ago, and I would say even much less than ten years ago. I think we all feel some of that. So on the one hand, on the one side, you have people feeling very distrustful of and disliking AI, advertising, AI being used as a phrase to describe the advert... The products, etcetera. But on the other end of the spectrum, you have a really interesting study that Adobe did, which is actually not a study. It's actually an analytics report that was completed in May of this year looking at retail shopping data across the web. Interestingly, AI traffic to retail websites was up a 138% year over year. So no surprise. Right? I think we're all seeing the Google AI summaries, and oftentimes, those are either answering our questions right in the space there or directing us to a very specific website so that the nature of search has changed. But a 138% increase in traffic year over year is significant. They also found, though, that AI referred shoppers converted 54% better than non AI referred shoppers. And AI and AI referred shoppers spent 53% more time browsing than non AI referred shoppers. So you have the folks on the one hand saying, hey. I really don't like AI in my advertising. I don't trust it. I don't wanna hear about it. But on the other hand, in actual usage, it's becoming a real driver of very strong engagement. Cool. So from marketing perspective, marketers need to understand that using AI powered or AI generated or AI fueled or whatever, you know, AI, phrase you wanna use is really is really a turnoff to people. It's a warning label that's gonna make people turn their backs on your brand. So I would suggest don't use it. But it's becoming a really strong driver of top of funnel activity. I think we know this, and you mentioned a minute ago about the the funnel really compressing. It's a different kind of consumer and a different kind of optimization, though. And I think marketers need to really be aware of the kind of intent that is being suggested someone is clicking through from an AI summary. And then I think the last thing that I would mention about what this means is that the consumer relationship with AI is really going in two different directions at once. People becoming increasingly comfortable using it as a way to shop and even make decisions for them if they're using AI agents to help them. But on the other hand, they're becoming, in some ways, allergic to brands using AI on that. It was interesting. One of my daughters told me the other day that you can now turn off AI when you're doing a web search. I had not heard of that before, but apparently, you can get an old school Google search that's not AI supported. I'm not sure how true that actually is in these day... In this day, but that's what... There's a little button that told us she could do. The last thing I would say here is we always end with what should CMOs do about this. Audit your AI forward messaging, strip out the jargon. If you're using AI powered, I would be really clear about whether that's necessary. And if it's not, take it out. Investing in AI discoverability is a serious acquisition channel, I think, important. You and I've talked a lot here about, you know, AI search and GEO and how to use AI to your benefit. And there's a lot of value there, but make sure that you're using it in the right way. And then the last thing I would say is building trust through transparency, not AI theater, I think is super important. I think people who are waving their hands and saying, oh, we're AI. One, it's often not true. There's an awful lot of vaporware out there. But I think, two, increasingly, you're seeing pushback from consumers that they don't wanna believe... That they don't wanna see it, that they don't trust it, and they prefer not to have it in their market. Aby, you spent a lot of time talking with both sides of this coin, the marketers themselves and, of course, the consumers of the marketing. Does this track for you? Are you seeing a bit of a two ended story here? Yeah. I mean, the way I process that is that I think people like the efficiency part of AI. Like, they're using it for search, using it for things that's gonna make their life easier, help them write, and that sort of thing. Agentic stuff, again, given a command and let go do things for you. So people love that part of it. But the the authentic part, making sure that seeing is believing those hangings, video ads, characters, and that stuff would be areas where I think people almost, like, mistrust it because they're not entirely sure. And, I mean, you and me are, again, deeply steeped in this industry, especially when it comes to Martech tools where it's, like, AI powered and those sort of things. There's a lot of AI washing happening there. Right? A lot of these Martech providers feel that without AI, they're falling behind. So I think that's where marketers and CMOs should really be careful about, to your point, drop jargon if it doesn't really truly have capability. And honestly, I feel when it comes to software, there's gonna be a time where that is going to be the norm. Like, the AI powered is not gonna be a thing, just like SaaS. I know we still use the word SaaS, but that... Back in the day when SaaS was a... Was... Came out and everything was like, hey, we're a SaaS platform, that's... Now, that is the predominant way that software is really delivered. Right? There is obviously exceptions to rules and thinking that in the world of AI, again, all these things, all the software and products that we consume is all going to be kind of AI driven, where it is not going to be a novelty. So I think people appreciate the efficiency part, but distrust the... Almost like the visual part of it. So it's a kind of a interesting way into into human psychology where you wanna be able to trust what you... What you're seeing. But when it comes to efficiency, absolutely less technology make your life easier. Yeah. Absolute. Awesome, Matt. Well, that wraps up our AI powered podcast. I'm kidding. No. This just... This was awesome. Thank you very much. Some really insightful stuff. For our listeners, thank you very much for joining in. You can follow Matt and me on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. But till next time, have a great one, Matt. Thank you. Hey, Aby. Good to see you. See you. Thanks for listening. Big thanks to Spark Novus and the Marketing AI Pulse community. You can join the community at marketingaipulse.com.

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Aby Varma
Aby VarmaAI-in-Marketing Futurist

Host of The Marketing AI SparkCast. AI Optimist and Futurist. Global B2B Marketing Leader. Aby Varma is a transformative CMO with extensive experience in driving growth and positive business outcomes through innovative B2B marketing strategies, recognized for blending compelling narratives with digital creativity to enhance brand engagement, lead generation, and customer loyalty. Varma excels in fostering cross-functional collaboration between marketing, sales, and product teams, enhancing efficiency and revenue operations. His leadership has been pivotal in guiding high-performing teams and navigating complex, multinational corporate environments, resulting in global market expansion and optimized strategies. As an exceptional executive communicator, Varma effectively influences stakeholders and secures buy-ins for key initiatives, underlined by his adaptability and dedication to positive business results. He has been influential in the Forbes Communications Council since July 2022, sharing insights on marketing and digital. At Hexagon AB, Varma held roles including Senior Vice President of Marketing and Executive Director of Marketing, Go-To-Market & Digital Strategy, showcasing skills in lead generation, sales enablement, and AI. His earlier tenure at Intergraph Corporation as Global Marketing Director, Digital, further highlights his expertise in B2B marketing. Varma's academic credentials include an MBA in Marketing & Management Information Systems from Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical University and a Masters in International Business from the Indian Institute of Foreign Trade. His extensive background and forward-thinking approach position him as a key figure in the evolving landscape of marketing and AI.

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