September 13, 2026

System1 ran ten well known human made ads for AI brands through its Test Your Ad Screen tool and checked the results against real human testing data on the same ads. The AI matched the human Fluency Rating in all ten cases and picked the correct Star Rating band in nine of ten, writes System1's Andrew Tindall. Its one miss was a refusal to score at all: the AI declined to rate Claude's 'Can I Get a Six Pack' Super Bowl ad, the campaign that scored the lowest possible rating from human testers. The tool correctly flagged Otter.ai's campaign, ChatGPT's pre pivot Super Bowl ad and Apple's email rewriting ad as one star performers, and correctly picked Coca-Cola's AI Christmas ad and Google Gemini's 'Dream Job' as the strongest of the set. It struggled most in the middle of the table, where ads like Samsung's Galaxy S26 launch landed.

In episode two of Ritson's Remedies, a video series from The Drum and MiniMBA, brand and marketing manager Lauren asked Mark Ritson how to convince a CFO to approve millions in long-term brand investment without certainty about the return. Ritson's advice: declare the uncertainty upfront, then present finance with a sensitivity analysis covering worst-case, expected and best-case outcomes. He also pointed to excess share of voice as supporting evidence, calling it 'a long-proven, 30-year, 1,000-case-study-wide proof point.' Ritson, a former marketing professor who now runs the MiniMBA, said marketers run into trouble when they try to produce certainty in a world where none exists. His closing advice to Lauren was simple: be honest, be upfront, and the pitch will likely go well.

Snap's new Commerce Power Pack brings AI-powered product recommendations to Sponsored Snaps inside Chat, the app's most-used interface, which the company says 85% of users open regularly. The update merges Dynamic Product Ads with Sponsored Snaps ahead of the holiday shopping season, letting advertisers surface catalog items directly in conversations. Snap says Sponsored Snaps have driven 22% more conversions and nearly 20% lower cost per action than other inventory since the format launched in early 2024. Alongside the Chat integration, Snap is testing a beta value optimization tool that targets ROAS and pairs with its unified attribution model, which pulls native and third-party metrics into one Ads Manager view. A third-party web optimization feature, also in open beta, produced a 23% lower third-party CPP and 37% higher third-party ROAS according to Google Analytics data cited by Snap. An alpha omnichannel optimization tool is also in testing.

Audicom, Italy's joint industry committee for audience measurement, admitted Netflix, Amazon, Disney and Google-YouTube to its governance at an extraordinary general meeting. The four platforms joined via Anitec-Assinform, the trade association that is now a shareholder alongside Upa, Una, Fedoweb, Fieg and Auditel. The meeting approved a capital increase, new articles of association and a 38-member board, with Anitec-Assinform, Fedoweb and Fieg each holding 16.61 percent, Upa and Una holding 24.92 percent each, and Auditel retaining 0.33 percent. Marco Travaglia of Upa continues as chairman. The new board takes office on 14 September and is expected to confirm Alberto Dal Sasso, formerly of Nielsen, as chief executive. The goal is a cross-media measurement system combining server-to-server data with existing SDK-based tracking, targeted for October 2027. Meta and TikTok remain outside the new structure.

Script lift measures the change in prescription volume an advertising campaign produces, comparing an exposed group against a matched control using pharmacy claims data. Pharmaceutical brands spent $4.95 billion on multiscreen television between October 2025 and March 2026, a 53% rise from $3.23 billion a year earlier, according to Video Advertising Bureau analysis of Nielsen Ad Intel data, and StackAdapt projects US healthcare digital advertising will pass $20 billion in 2026. Vendors report wide variation in results: OptimizeRx cited a 4.07% absolute lift for a chronic care therapy, with more than 16,000 incremental new prescriptions and over 1,100 newly activated writers, while a rare sleep disorder campaign produced a 44% absolute lift on a smaller prescriber base. No Media Rating Council accreditation covers script lift as a metric, and a Marketing Science study of fifteen randomised Facebook experiments found observational methods like it often overstated effects, sometimes by a factor of three.

Smart TV manufacturers in India have converted nearly their entire product line-up to ad-supported operating systems, pushing connected TV ad inventory past what advertiser budgets can absorb. Fill rates on programmatic CTV auctions have fallen far enough that remnant inventory is packaged and resold at a fraction of rate card, with some CPMs barely covering the cost of running the auction, ad tech professionals tracking the market say. Three gaps keep demand from catching up: measurement fragmentation across OEM platforms, streaming apps and exchanges leaves planners without one consistent definition of a completed view, many brand teams still buy CTV against linear-style GRP and reach curves, and performance marketing budgets, the fastest-growing pool of ad spend in India, have historically bypassed television formats altogether. Industry bodies have started convening working groups on cross-platform CTV measurement standards.

Legal review at Molson Coors now sorts creator decisions into three lanes: fast-track, needs-a-conversation and hard no, replacing the brewer's old TV-style approval process. The change, rolled out since March with creative agency Movers+Shakers and its consultancy arm The Shake Squad, has quadrupled engagement with Molson Coors' creator content across 230 marketers and more than 100 brands in the US and Canada, from Miller High Life to Fever Tree and Zoa energy drinks. Justine Stauffer, senior director of creative effectiveness at Molson Coors, declined to disclose how those engagement gains affected sales, but confirmed the framework now spans the full US and Canada marketing organization. The company also treats organic social as a testing ground for signals about each brand's audience, placing less weight on individual posts than it once did.

NP Digital's FinTech AI Visibility Index gave Apple a score of 65.6 out of 100, the top mark among brands evaluated across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude. The agency analyzed 68,334 AI-generated answers to 250 fintech prompts across 10 subcategories, scoring brands on frequency, position and coverage. SoFi placed second at 64.6, the highest score among pure-play fintech brands, ahead of Chase and Bank of America. PayPal generated the most mentions, 14,294, yet ranked third because rival brands appeared earlier in answers more often. Klarna appeared in 91.8% of buy now, pay later answers, well ahead of any lending or credit brand, which topped out at 43.7%. Sentiment stayed positive across the dataset: only 2% of answers carried a negative tone.

A CUInsight analysis lays out a three-horizon framework for judging credit union Connected TV campaigns: household reach and frequency in the first 30 to 90 days, movement in branded search, website traffic and branch activity across 90 to 180 days, and membership or deposit growth over six to 18 months. The piece describes a 'Performance Marketer's Paradox,' where CTV's digital targeting and reporting tempt marketers to judge it by the same immediate return-on-ad-spend standards used for search or social. Credit unions face extra constraints: privacy and compliance rules limit person-level attribution, and offline conversions such as branch visits rarely get linked back to the ad that started the process. The recommended fix is to agree on reach, frequency and measurement windows with CTV partners before a campaign launches, then track lagging indicators like new-member age, deposit balances and loan volume against those targets.

Netflix struck a content partnership with Spanish broadcaster Atresmedia last week, bringing a selection of daily programming onto its platform, while Disney+ signed a similar deal with France's M6 covering shows that will appear on Disney+ before they air on M6's linear channels. VideoWeek counts 16 such SVOD-broadcaster content deals since TF1 and Netflix opened the trend in the summer of 2025. Disney+ leads with eight partnerships, Prime Video has signed four but none since October 2025, and Netflix has three. Ten of the 16 deals are concentrated in France and Spain, where RTVE and Atresmedia have each partnered with both Netflix and Disney+. Deal structures vary: some cover a broadcaster's full streaming catalogue, others focus on curated selections, archive libraries or early access to new episodes ahead of linear broadcast.