Plus: How AI Pays Off For The Non-Creative Part Of Marketing |
| As marketing becomes increasingly hypertargeted, those who aren’t using AI are paying a steep price, literally. A new report from DoubleVerify found that campaign managers are spending more than a quarter of their time on manually changing plans: tweaking bid modifiers, reallocating budgets and adjusting performance thresholds. The report estimates that time translates to $17,000 or more annually for each employee. These are definitely jobs for AI, and many companies are already taking advantage of it. About two in five marketers are already using third-party AI or automated bidding solutions, while another 49% are prepared to implement them at some point this year. AI can help with some of the most pressing challenges marketers face: The most critical challenge to optimizing campaign performance, the study found, is ad timing—something an AI agent can help improve upon. In the last year, the number of marketers using AI for this kind of function has increased 12%—though only 46% total are using the technology this way. There are other avenues in which marketers are using AI. A total of 41% are using it to activate campaigns, while there’s been a 106% increase in its application to upper-funnel functions, such as ensuring a campaign reaches its targeted audience and meets performance KPIs. While the use of AI use can be controversial for any job function, this study spends some time looking at fairly noncontroversial—and effective—uses. Not addressed is using AI for creative, which some say could diminish the human part of marketing. While creative takes a significant amount of marketers’ time, it may not be the best place to optimize—especially when tedious work that doesn’t benefit as much from human input can be addressed by AI first. While creativity makes a marketing campaign, B2C businesses tend to have more splash, fun and star power. However, some marketers are bringing more panache to the B2B space, and it shows. I talked to ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming about how he’s making the B2B area more exciting. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter. We’ll be taking next Wednesday off from Forbes CMO. We’ll be back in your inbox on August 27.
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| Less than a week after the blockbuster merger between Paramount and Skydance closed, the company’s new leadership landed its first massive deal: a seven-year, $7.7 billion agreement giving CBS and Paramount+ exclusive streaming and broadcasting rights for Ultimate Fighting Championship mixed martial arts fights. Under the terms of this deal, CBS and Paramount+ will stream and broadcast UFC’s 13 marquee events and 30 “Fight Night” events. UFC CEO Dana White told Forbes’ Matt Craig that he had a preexisting relationship with Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest people and father of new Paramount CEO David Ellison. White said that Paramount presented an “aggressive…all-or-nothing approach” to take over all UFC broadcasting, which White accepted. The new deal rockets UFC’s annual media rights fees above many other top sporting events. At $1.1 billion per year in average annual value, it’s close to the $1.8 billion for Major League Baseball and the $1.3 billion for the Olympics, and tied with the value of March Madness and Nascar. And the contract only covers the U.S.; UFC will sell its international rights territory by territory. This deal ends a previous agreement to stream the fights as pay-per-view events on ESPN, an approach that Mark Shapiro, CEO of UFC parent company TKO Holdings, told Craig they were hoping to end, since it was getting expensive for fans. Craig points out the political implications of the deal: The long-pending merger between Skydance and Paramount was just approved by President Donald Trump’s administration. Trump is a big UFC fan, and is planning a UFC fight at the White House next July 4 to commemorate the nation’s 250th birthday, which White confirmed this week in an interview with CBS. |
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| Last week, OpenAI launched its newest chatbot version, GPT-5. The company said it is its “smartest, fastest, most useful model yet,” and highlighted improvements in coding, math, writing and health-related questions. It has what OpenAI calls a deeper reasoning model that can solve harder problems, using a real-time router that can be directed to think harder about answers. It also can generate more highly targeted content for a specific audience, doing a better job of matching the tone of Instagram or TikTok audiences, writes Forbes senior contributor John Brandon. While some welcomed the update with open arms, other users revolted. When OpenAI added the new version, the company discontinued its immediate predecessor, GPT-4o. Many users liked GPT-4o’s writing style and the funny and playful “personality” OpenAI had given it, writes Forbes’ Richard Nieva. In response to the outcry, OpenAI brought GPT-4o back, allowing users to choose which version they want to interact with. |
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| While President Donald Trump’s endorsement of the controversial Sydney Sweeney ad from American Eagle Outfitters helped the clothing retailer’s stock price spike, regular consumers seem to be voting on it with their feet. In the last two weeks, foot traffic at the company’s stores is down nearly 9% year-over-year, according to retail data company Pass_by, writes Forbes’ Conor Murray. The decline likely has a lot to do with the ad campaign, experts say. In the two months prior to the campaign’s release, foot traffic to the stores had been up each week compared to 2024. Meanwhile, Retail Brew took a look at foot traffic to American Eagle’s competitors: While fewer people have visited Abercrombie & Fitch and H&M stores in the last two weeks, their declines are a fraction of those seen at American Eagle. And even though the ad has brought more web traffic to American Eagle, Adweek reported, citing data from Consumer Edge, sales have remained flat. |
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 | | ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming. ServiceNow, Thomas Fuller/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images |
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| | | How ServiceNow’s CMO Makes B2B Marketing More Fun |
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| B2B advertising is not as boring as it once was, and people like ServiceNow CMO Colin Fleming are driving that shift. Fleming came to ServiceNow last year, following 13 years in marketing for B2B giant Salesforce. A former racecar driver—which Fleming described as a job in which marketing himself was key—he brings a different perspective to the formerly bland B2B marketing job. I talked to him about this shift and how ServiceNow is using personality, fun, and award-winning actor Idris Elba to build business and trust. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity. Tell me about B2B marketing and where you’re taking it. Fleming: When you think B2B marketing, you think stock photography, data sheets, white papers, long deal cycles—pretty mundane and consistent work. Whatever you think of the PwC ad in your head, that’s what B2B marketing has been, historically. It’s not inspiring. I joined Salesforce at a really interesting point in my career. [Salesforce] was this kind of upstart, opinionated death-to-the-world type of company. I joined relatively early. It was a fresh mindset, challenging that status quo and doing bold, interesting things. I saw a shift happen in people when you came in with a fresh point of view. It was exciting and created interest and pull from the industry. That company started to sell to the bigger companies, to the banks of the world, [and] they started to become that company. Everything that we stood for early on became vanilla. Basically, that company lost their soul by doing so. It took seven years to get that back. One of my charters at [Salesforce] was to bring the culture back, to bring the soul back at the company. What I’ve tried to do at ServiceNow is basically the opportunity to create whatever that should be at ServiceNow. Finding the DNA of the company—which is a San Diego rooted company with a chip on its shoulder—and have the work represent that. The company’s got this amazing culture, but the work did not reflect it. It looked like B2B, and it was doing everything that the B2B stigma is. For me, it’s all about finding the DNA and ways to create edge, tension and culture shaping, and really call it like it is in the B2B space—and to do work that is inspired by B2C. We call it ‘business-to-human’ inside the organization, but I hate the stigma. We basically tried to push off against it and say, ‘What if we marketed to humans?’ We’ve organized our whole lead funnel and our go-to-market engine around humans, not leads. We call it a buying group orientation. We’ve shifted the work to be a prominent, high fidelity, linear TV type of mindset. [We] hired Idris Elba, this distinctive asset cast, to help us just show up as a human company with a soul. It’s amazing what happens when you do that type of work and you see the numbers go as they have. We’re really proud of that work, but it’s always reacting to what the world is giving us. Speaking of Idris Elba, how does celebrity marketing work in the B2B space? I look at it a little bit more of a principle more than anything. Obviously the celebrity marketing mindset is well proven in B2C. In B2B, you’re looking for a couple things. You’ve got to be careful that you pick the right face of your company, and that they represent the morals, the values of your organization. We found that in spades, with Idris. He’s just an absolutely perfect person—charisma, charm, trust. His flexibility as an actor is incredible. But one of the things that we learned in the process was just his actual interest in the company and the product. It’s authentic and genuine. Integrating our storytelling with Idris’ work in Sierra Leone [with] our giving back mantra [is] be[ing] authentic in that world. I’m a firm believer in marketing principles that are very true in B2C, but very foreign in B2B. Things like the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute’s 95:5 rule or the power of distinctive assets. We’ve created this cast of characters inside of our advertising and marketing work that are representative of the people that actually buy our technology. We basically took our people that we sell our technology to and personified them in a reverse way. We have a CHRO and we have a CFO, and there’s backstories and interpersonal conflicts, and all the things that happen in the workplace. We’ve developed these really interesting stories, and it has been an amazing home run for us. This cast of characters that walk around our events [was] being mobbed more than Idris was. People see themselves in them. We’ve put a mirror up on the industry and said, ‘This is what we think your world looks like, and if you believe, we think we can help you.’ I think that’s just fascinating. The B2C principle is playing out in B2B in ways that we could only ever dream of. ServiceNow ranks highly on the Forbes Most Trusted Companies list. How does B2B marketing build trust? We try to be authentic, genuine, and represent the culture of the company. There’s so many companies that the marketing is here, and the experience with the product or the service is over here. We’re a fun, personality-oriented, San Diego-founded company, and we didn’t really represent that work. Now, I believe that we are, and I think we’ve got a wink and a nod and the personality there. I think it’s really important. The second part is we try to do what we say we do, so we’re not marketing so far out in front of the company and waving our hands when the reality of our product experience is poor. We’re very much in tune. We get to market X percent ahead of our roadmap, and we’re trying to be authentic and genuine towards that. Part of our efforts around ServiceNow University and things like this are bringing the future with us. There’s this huge concern in the space that AI is going to automate the jobs of today. Let’s be honest: there’s some truth to that. Every major industrial revolutionary shift has created job loss, but it’s more than offset it with job creation on the other side. So how do we skill people up and bring people along that way with us to do really interesting work and help them on their journey—not just for their current roles today, but for their future careers? I think that showing material investment in those areas to bring the people that make those decisions to partner with you—not necessarily the companies; Bank of America doesn’t buy ServiceNow, people at Bank of America buy ServiceNow—it could make their job easier along the way and make them almost future-proof from their career perspective. They’re going to be with us for a long, long, long time, and we have earned that trust. |
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National security firm Peraton appointed Ravi Dankanikote as its new chief growth officer. Dankanikote joins from SAIC, where he worked as a senior vice president of business development.
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Enterprise planning provider Epicor promoted Kerrie Jordan to chief marketing officer. Jordan previously worked as group vice president of product management and ISV partner programs, and has also held leadership roles at Oracle.
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Real estate company Keller Williams Realty selected Sandra Howard to be its new chief marketing officer, effective August 18. Howard most recently worked as principal of brand strategy at LERMA/, and has also worked in leadership at AT&T.
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| Send us C-suite transition news at forbescsuite@forbes.com. |
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| The right content and marketing strategies can be like an invisible sales funnel, bringing more people to your brand without needing to actively market to them. Here are three ways you can leverage content, relationships and strategic positioning to attract and retain customers. If you’re constantly finding yourself checking email, responding to urgent Slack messages, taking meetings and tweaking campaigns, you’re living the “infinite workday,” which is a recipe for burnout. While AI can handle some of this, the technology by itself won’t return you to a healthy work-life balance. Here’s how to use AI and set boundaries to take back your personal time. |
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| | A recent concert featured an eyebrow-raising AI-created video of Ozzy Osbourne taking selfies with other dead musicians—including Kurt Cobain and Freddie Mercury—in heaven. Whose concert was it? | | A. | Rod Stewart | | B. | Coldplay | | C. | Foreigner | | D. | Alice Cooper |
| | Check if you got it right here. |
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