Do you know them like a friend?

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In this newsletter, you’ll find:

🤩 Do you know them like a friend?

🧠 Google Is Rewiring Ads Around Agentic Commerce

🏆 Ad of the Day

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Together with Modash

Influencer Risk Is Changing Faster Than Budgets

Spending money is part of marketing. But when it comes to influencers, it often means betting on variables you can’t fully control: will the algorithm push the content? Will the audience engage? And more importantly, will they buy?

Modash’s latest influencer marketing study, marketers need a 30% budget increase to feel safe experimenting, but only a 24% cut to shut risk-taking down entirely.

Influencer risk isn’t about confidence. It’s about how fragile experimentation becomes under pressure.

Inside the report, Modash breaks down the decisions marketers are struggling with right now:

• What actually happens to experimentation when KPIs rise faster than budgets?
• At what point does a “smart test” quietly turn into a reputational risk?
• How are top teams protecting upside when one bad collab can kill future spend?

Access the full report for free here (non-gated).

🤩 Do you know them like a friend? 

When ads stop scaling, everyone says the same thing.

“We need fresher creative.”

New hooks. New formats. New edits. Maybe a new creator. Maybe a new angle.

But creative rarely dies on its own. It suffocates when the audience is undefined.

If the person you’re speaking to feels like “people who want this product,” the work will always feel slightly generic. You can polish it. You can shorten it. You can add urgency.

It still won’t cut deep.

Because you can’t write something precise for someone blurry.

targeting generally stops at demographics. Age. Gender. Income. Location.

None of that tells you why someone hesitated before buying. Or what they needed to justify in their own head. Or what version of themselves they were trying to become.

That’s where scale actually lives.

Take a simple example. A comfort product.

If the audience is “people who like being cozy,” you get soft lighting and lazy Sunday ads forever.

If the audience is “people who work from home and feel slightly guilty about choosing comfort during work hours,” now you have tension. Now comfort becomes productivity. Or rebellion against hustle culture. Or earned reward.

Same product. Different depth.

And depth multiplies creative.

There’s a practical way to find it.

Look at your last 100 buyers. Not their age. Not their gender. Look at the words they used. The objections they mentioned. The context in which they bought.

Group them by reason.

Status seekers. Efficiency chasers. Permission seekers. Security buyers.

If you can’t describe the group in two words, you don’t understand it yet.

Then ask one uncomfortable question: what are they slightly insecure about?

That answer gives you angles no competitor is testing.

Creative scale isn’t about producing more ideas. It’s about increasing the resolution of the person on the other side.

When the audience sharpens, the work gets sharper without trying. When it stays fuzzy, you can test forever and still feel like something is missing.

It’s not the hook. It’s the clarity.

🧠 Google Is Rewiring Ads Around Agentic Commerce

Google isn’t just adding AI to ads. It’s rebuilding the plumbing underneath them. In her annual letter, Vidhya Srinivasan laid out how AI Mode, commerce infrastructure, and creator matching are converging across Search, YouTube, and Gemini in 2026.

The Breakdown:

1️⃣ AI Mode Becomes Monetizable Real Estate - Google is testing sponsored product placements directly inside AI answers, clearly labeled but embedded at the moment of consideration. Direct Offers will expand beyond discounts into loyalty perks and bundles.

2️⃣ UCP Turns AI Into a Checkout Layer - Universal Commerce Protocol now powers in-chat checkout for Etsy and Wayfair in AI Mode and Gemini, with Shopify, Target, and Walmart coming. Google positions UCP as infrastructure for agentic commerce beyond retail.

3️⃣ Creator Matching Gets Algorithmic - Google’s Open Call lets brands source UGC from creators, and AI will increasingly match brands with creator communities using content and audience analysis. 

4️⃣ AI Max Expands Reach + Creative Scale - Gemini-generated assets tripled in 2025, with 70M assets in Q4 alone. Veo 3 joins Asset Studio. AI Max claims to unlock billions of net-new searches previously unreachable through traditional query targeting.

This isn’t about shiny features. It’s about Google moving commerce inside AI conversations. Search is no longer just traffic. It’s becoming a transaction infrastructure. If UCP scales, if AI Mode captures mid-funnel intent, and if creator matching becomes automated, the auction shifts closer to decision moments than ever before.

Together with Thesys

Go From Idea to Live Agent in Minutes

You want to launch a product advisor, a campaign insights tool, or an interactive assistant… and someone says, “We’ll need engineering.”

Suddenly it’s scoped, ticketed, delayed, and deprioritized. Thesys Agent Builder removes that barrier.

You connect your data, define how the agent should respond, and deploy it instantly with a link or embed. No workflows. No dev cycles. No waiting.

Now you can:

• Turn campaign and revenue data into conversational agents that generate charts, tables, and board-ready reports in seconds
• Launch AI product advisors that compare SKUs and guide buyers toward purchase inside chat
• Add website assistants that respond with cards, forms, and interactive UI instead of static text

Teams are already shipping internal and customer-facing AI in minutes, not quarters.

Claim your $10 free credits and launch your first live agent today!

🏆 Ad of the Day

What Works:

This Is Mood Before Meaning - You have no idea what it smells like, and that’s intentional. The ad sells atmosphere first so your brain fills in the scent on its own.

Why the Bottle Feels Important - The heavy glass, sharp angles, and dark tones make it feel serious and collectible. It looks like something you display, not toss on a shelf.

This Is a Brand-Building Ad - It’s not trying to convert fast. It’s trying to burn an image into your head so the name feels familiar and desirable later.

When you can’t explain the experience easily, don’t try. Create a feeling strong enough that people project their own meaning onto it.

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