AI is picking your customers' gifts

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

🎁 AI chatbots are picking your customers' holiday gifts this year

📉 The average CMO job now lasts a third less time

🎯 You can now target your CRM lists in ChatGPT ads

🤖 Amazon Ads is turning your campaigns agentic

Plus: 💡 6 strategies & tactics, 🎁 6 more stories you might like, and 🧰 6 tools.

🎁 AI chatbots are picking your customers' holiday gifts this year LINK

AI chatbots such as ChatGPT and Claude are set to guide far more holiday shopping this year, with Adobe forecasting that traffic from AI platforms to U.S. retail sites will climb 130% year over year.

Adobe expects the biggest jump in AI-referred traffic on Thanksgiving Day, rising 159% year over year, while it projects gains of 95% on Black Friday and 88% on Cyber Monday.

In an Adobe survey of 5,000 shoppers, 77% who used AI for online shopping felt more confident in their purchases, and 69% said they were less likely to return items bought with AI's help.

📉 The average CMO job now lasts a third less time LINK

The typical stretch a chief marketing officer spends in the job has dropped by about a third, falling from four years for those who started in 2010 to 2.6 years for those who began in 2022.

The study by data platform Findem and community group CMO Huddles looked at more than 13,000 U.S. CMOs, and found 30% of current holders have been in the role for under 18 months while 33% have passed five years.

Company ownership shifts the numbers: CMOs at publicly owned firms average four years, compared with 3.1 years at private equity-owned businesses and 2.6 years at venture capital-backed ones.

🎯 You can now target your CRM lists in ChatGPT ads LINK

LiveRamp said today it has become a technology partner of ChatGPT Ads, letting marketers turn first-party data matched through its RampID identifier into Custom Audiences inside OpenAI's advertising platform, across 11 markets.

The routed data can include CRM, loyalty, behavioural, web or app records, and the audiences serve four purposes: sharper targeting, reach, suppression of unwanted people, and measurement and optimisation, though LiveRamp published no match rates or performance results.

The 11 markets cover only about 17% of the 63 countries where ChatGPT ads can be bought, and under OpenAI's rules a targeting audience still needs 25,000 matched users, while exclusion lists face no size floor since late August.

🤖 Amazon Ads is turning your campaigns agentic LINK

Amazon has begun turning its ad campaigns agentic, announcing at its unBoxed event in San Francisco today an ad tech overhaul that renames the Amazon Ads console to the Amazon Ads Agent and makes its DSP a chatbot by default.

A new in-chatbot format called Branded Conversations turns a shopper's search into a multi-turn exchange, letting advertisers guide people from a sponsored prompt into an experience with their brand's colors, fonts, imagery and product descriptions.

Brands can shape these chats through Conversational Briefs and a free text field, but Amazon says they cannot pick which customer reviews its AI surfaces, and buyers giving false input will get feedback through the console.

💡 Strategies & Tactics

> How to build a visual SEO strategy for AI search: Align each image with the product or place it shows plus current metadata, so AI search interprets it correctly and recommends your brand.

> The Fundamental Principles of Creating Meta Ads: Provide Meta multiple ad formats, aspect ratios, copy variations, and AI-generated options so its algorithm can match the right creative to each person and placement.

> Building Mini Personas to Write Content Your Target Audience Actually Wants: Build a quick, single-piece audience snapshot from one data source and an AI prompt so content connects with readers on tight deadlines.

> 8 Vibe Coding Best Practices for Marketers (+Ideas for Your First Project): Describe what you want built in plain language to an AI tool and let it write the code, letting non-coders create calculators, popups, and landing pages.

> LinkedIn Explains How Its Feed Decides What You See: LinkedIn ranks feed posts by professional relevance and quality rather than raw engagement, so brands should match followers' interests over chasing likes.

> Email Marketing Benchmarks 2026: What 100+ Client Accounts Say About Revenue, Flows And Open Rates: Track email's share of total store revenue and automated flows' share of it, since open rates broke in 2021 and no longer compare across senders.

Other news you might like

• LinkedIn Is Making Creator Discovery Part of the B2B Ad WorkflowLINK

• YouTube Turns Shorts Into Episodic TV With Shorts SeriesLINK

• This Creator Marketing Platform Has Gone Fully AgenticLINK

• YouTube Is Turning Video Editing Into A ConversationLINK

• Snapchat Is Making a Bigger B2B Ad BetLINK

• Google drops unrendered ads from DV360 and CM360 billing in February 2027LINK

🧰 Trending tools

Ami AI: analyzes your website to identify high-converting buyers, plans outreach backward from your lead goals, then runs and monitors campaigns automatically.LINK

CREEM 2.0: handles checkout, tax, billing, payouts, and affiliates for software and digital products, letting builders charge customers globally without stitching tools together.LINK

Meridian: open-source, locally-run activity tracker that logs work with context, showing where your time goes and which blockers stall your projects.LINK

Soloop: an agentic system that plays AI CEO, CTO, and CMO roles, helping solo founders plan, build, and sell without hiring a teamLINK

Clara AI SDR: engages and qualifies website visitors in real time, handles objections, books meetings, and syncs with your CRM continuously.LINK

claude-ops: business operating system for Claude Code with 57 skills and 21 agents, unifying messaging, payments, e-commerce, marketing, monitoring, and voice automation.LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!