Happy Friday Marketing Engineers!

Today:

🚀 How To Use Disruptive Storytelling To Thrive As A Marketer
🤔 Using Your Company Culture As Marketing
🌅 Venture Capital’s Cautious Reawakening
😬 The Right Way To Pitch VCs And Accelerators
🔮 Meet The Marketer Of The Future
😏 Why Mischief Will Define The Next Era Of Advertising

🚀 Ada{m}

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🗞 News

YouTube has introduced a new "brand pulse report" that helps brands measure the full impact of both organic and paid advertising across the platform to maximize return on ad spend. The report uses Google AI with multimodal support to detect brand mentions across YouTube through visuals like logos and product shots, audio, and video titles, capturing even passing mentions by creators in non-sponsored content. Also, the report shows how paid ads lead to more views on organic videos and how exposure to both paid and organic content drives brand searches, providing previously underreported value for paid media investments.

OpenAI is transforming ChatGPT into a platform where users can access third-party apps like Spotify, Canva, Zillow, and Expedia directly within conversations, either by calling them by name or through automatic suggestions based on context. This shift could turn ChatGPT into a powerful marketing channel, reaching 800 million users at the moment of intent through contextual discovery and interactive experiences, with brands appearing naturally as users describe their needs rather than through traditional search. More brand integrations are coming including Target, Uber, and Instacart, with OpenAI planning an app store later this year and even testing "agentic commerce" features that enable one-click transactions within chat.

TikTok is consolidating its performance advertising into a single Smart+ experience that gives advertisers flexible control, allowing them to choose between full automation, partial automation, or manual control of their campaigns. The platform is integrating new Symphony AI-powered creative tools that can recommend high-performing content and automatically enhance videos with features like resizing, music refresh, translation, and quality improvements. Also, TikTok is expanding its measurement capabilities with new attribution solutions including Google Analytics integration and Assisted Conversions tracking to help advertisers understand TikTok's full impact across the customer journey.

🤖 AI

OpenAI launched the Apps SDK at DevDay 2025, transforming ChatGPT into a platform where developers can build actual apps that allow users to interact with third-party services moving ChatGPT toward becoming an operating system. The company also released AgentKit for building and deploying agentic workflows and made Codex generally available after it experienced 10x usage growth since August, with live demos showing how developers can quickly create and deploy functional agents. Also, Sam Altman announced that GPT-5 Pro, gpt-realtime-mini, and Sora 2 video generation are now available in the API, allowing developers to integrate these advanced models into their own products for high-accuracy reasoning, conversational AI, and video creation.

🧠 Hacks & Tactics

Disruptive storytelling requires marketers to master three key elements to stand out in an AI-dominated landscape. First, disrupt your narrative by breaking conventional rules to create memorable, emotionally impactful content that pushes boundaries. Second, disrupt where you tell your story by reaching audiences in unexpected places where they actually spend time, and third, disrupt who tells the story by leveraging word-of-mouth marketing through customers, employees, and natural "super sharers" rather than relying solely on traditional advertising.

Strong internal marketing consists of two key types: employee engagement that gives workers purpose beyond paychecks, and employee-generated content where staff share workplace experiences to build authenticity. This approach delivers real ROI because customers directly sense and respond to company culture, with engaged employees driving better productivity, retention, and profitability. Building this culture requires practical steps like hiring for values alignment, empowering decision-making, creating community identity, recognizing contributions, and leading by example from leadership down.

🏗️ For Founders

Venture capital is cautiously reawakening as AI investments drive market recovery, with early-stage AI companies growing 2-5x faster than historical SaaS peers and "vibe coding" enabling rapid prototyping that's increased discovery meetings despite low overall deal counts. Investors have adopted a more disciplined approach, strongly preferring founders with deep operating experience who have shipped products and scaled teams, as execution risk remains critical after years of over-funded, underperforming startups. September 2025's busy IPO window, featuring notable listings like StubHub and Netskope, signals the return of liquidity and exit opportunities, though VCs are pricing conservatively and maintaining alternative strategies like secondaries and M&A amid ongoing macroeconomic uncertainty.

Successful founders avoid the trap of copying generic pitch templates and instead focus on telling compelling, original stories that resonate with aligned investors who already see the potential, rather than trying to convince skeptics. Understanding investor differences is important: VCs need early proof of market existence through traction and revenue, while accelerators bet earlier on founders who understand their problem even without perfect product-market fit. The three critical slides that determine success are explaining what you do in simple language, showing why the future will be different if your vision is correct, and providing proof of traction that validates your solution.

🔮 The Future

The "Gen Marketer" is a new type of marketing generalist who combines skills across product marketing, growth, and content/brand while mastering AI orchestration—a role that will replace many traditional marketing specialists. Unlike previous marketing shifts that created more specialization, AI is enabling generalists by making specialized skills accessible to everyone, creating pressures like harder differentiation and volatile channels that demand cross-functional orchestration. Any marketer can evolve into a Gen Marketer by broadening their skillset to master campaign orchestration, develop audience understanding, and learn to balance AI with human creativity for greater strategic impact and ownership.

"Mischief Marketing" is emerging as a defining trend in advertising, with brands moving beyond post-Covid nostalgia to embrace a more mischievous, irreverent tone that deliberately breaks rules and challenges conventions to surprise consumers. Successful campaigns use humor and audacity to disrupt traditional categories, as seen in examples like Geeta's pixelated "naughty" food pairings, Burger King hijacking competitors' Google Maps listings, and Liquid Death's provocative "Kegs For Pregs" water campaign. This trend also tackles formerly taboo topics like female sexuality and late-night flirtation, proving that irreverent marketing can be both attention-grabbing and meaningful when executed with wit and purpose, potentially driving social progress alongside commercial success.

👩‍🏫 Vocab

Affiliate Marketing: A performance-based marketing approach where businesses reward partners for driving traffic or sales to their site. Partners earn commissions for successful referrals or sales. Affiliate marketing extends reach through trusted third-party recommendations.

Example: A tech review blogger earns commission by including special links to products they review, earning a percentage when readers make purchases.

Channel Marketing: The strategy of using different distribution channels to reach your target market. It involves working with partners, resellers, and distributors to sell your products. Channel marketing expands your market reach through established networks.

Example: A software company sells its products both directly through their website and through a network of certified IT consultants who recommend and implement their solutions.

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