Adobe is putting AI agents in Photoshop

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Adobe is putting AI agents inside Photoshop and Firefly LINK

• At its MAX event in Miami, Adobe added AI agents and new features across Photoshop, Premiere, Illustrator, and InDesign, while expanding its Firefly tool and releasing a Model Context Protocol that lets chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini use Adobe features.
• The local MCP exposes more Creative Cloud functions, with endpoints across Illustrator, Photoshop, After Effects, and Premiere; Firefly also gets a prototyping tool called Builder in private beta, an on-brand graph maker, and a video tool for assembling clips.
• Adobe plans to keep adding features based on user feedback, with vice president Deepa Subramaniam saying the company is still working out what to expose and has no desire to limit what the MCP endpoint can reach.

Maybelline just rewrote its 35-year-old 'Maybe' tagline LINK

• Maybelline has reworked its 35-year-old tagline, changing "Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's Maybelline." to "Maybe. We're born with it. Maybe. It's Maybelline." to credit beauty to the person rather than the product.
• Swapping "she" for "we" is meant to broaden the customer base so the brand speaks to every woman, a shift that follows YouGov data showing 49% of American women wear makeup for a "confidence boost."
• Global ambassador Miley Cyrus, who recorded a new jingle last year, fronts a 45-second spot that will roll out on social media, where Maybelline will put most of this year's marketing behind the tagline before building on it in 2027.

Amazon secretly inflated ad prices up to 250%, lawsuit says LINK

• The US Federal Trade Commission alleges Amazon secretly inflated ad prices above auction results, pushing costs up to 250% higher during major shopping events like Prime Day and Black Friday, and pulling more than $20 billion from advertisers.
• On ordinary days the increases reached as much as 50% above auction results, and internal discussions reportedly aimed to extract an extra $40 million from reserve pricing to meet 2023 financial targets, according to newly unredacted claims.
• Amazon disputes the auction-rigging allegations, saying advertisers never pay more than their maximum bid, while critics argue advertisers cannot independently verify fair pricing when one company runs the marketplace, the bidding tools and the performance dashboard.

Shopify is expanding its own ad platform LINK

• Shopify has broadened its advertising business with Campaign Autopilot, an AI-driven product that automatically manages merchant campaigns across outside platforms, marking its next step after years of only sharing first-party data with other ad players.
• Merchants set the price they will pay per sale, with extra controls like higher incentives for new customers or targeting by region and time of day, running across Meta, Microsoft Advertising and Snapchat, with X coming next.
• Shopify calls it a risk-free ad product because the merchant only pays per sale rather than per impression or click, taking on the media risk itself, while adding guardrails such as campaign caps and recently SEO optimization.

Outlook is now bouncing some emails without DMARC LINK

• Microsoft now blocks some messages sent to Outlook.​com, Hotmail, Live and MSN addresses when the sending domain has no DMARC record, a rule it began enforcing on Thursday with no advance notice.
• DMARC adds a layer of email authentication that tells a server how to handle a message when SPF and DKIM checks fail, and rejected messages bounce back with a "Message rejected" error.
• The rule hits ordinary senders, including domains that send very few messages and those with SPF and DKIM already set up correctly, since the missing piece in these cases is generally the DMARC record.

Strategies & Tactics

> Website migrations can hurt SEO even when URLs don’t change: Document how the old site handled SEO signals like canonical tags and error codes, then verify the rebuilt site preserves them, since migrations break these even when addresses stay the same.

> How to use AI for competitive intelligence (10 prompts to try): Use AI to automate gathering and organizing competitor data so teams spend their time making better decisions, not reading more reports.

> AEO benchmarking: What market data reveals about AI search: Measure your brand's AI search visibility against competitors and market trends so you can tell whether a drop reflects an industry shift or your own content.

> How to use AI to write a blog post (that isn’t slop): Treat AI as a first-draft collaborator by giving it a detailed brief and fact-checking every claim, because unedited output becomes worthless "slop."

> Synthetic audiences fall short: What marketers need to know: AI-simulated customer panels cheaply test campaigns on existing audiences but fail at reaching new customers and risk pushing teams toward safe, average ideas.

> How to Edit Videos With AI (No Editing Skills Required): Explains how to turn raw footage into finished videos by directing AI coding tools like Claude Code with clear filming rules and accurate transcripts.

Other news you might like

• TikTok updates its AI video ad tools LINK

• ChatGPT Ads While It Creates Your Image Live LINK

• The drivers of local AI visibility for multi-location brands by SOCi LINK

• LinkedIn explains its improved content recommendation system LINK

• Google Ads Loosens Channel Restrictions LINK

• AI search activity is nearly invisible in Google Ads search terms reports: Study LINK

• Yahoo’s Economists Ran 25 Ad Experiments and Could Not Tell Profit From Loss LINK

Trending tools

CREEM 2.0: a payments platform for AI builders combining checkout, tax, payouts, affiliates, and usage billing, so you can charge customers globally without stitching together separate tools. LINK

OpenSEO: handles keyword research, competitor analysis, backlinks, and site audits on real DataForSEO data, with MCP support so AI agents build SEO strategies. LINK

Naise AI: an AI marketing teammate that turns one brief into social posts, visuals, influencer outreach, PR, and multilingual market research. LINK

Articos MCP: runs synthetic user interviews and generates full research reports in under 30 minutes, validating product ideas without recruiting real participants. LINK

GenPage 3.0: generates personalized landing pages per ad, keyword, or account and auto-tests variations to convert more traffic into pipeline and revenue. LINK

Busabase: open-source shared database and workspace where people and AI agents like Claude Code store records, docs, and apps with access controls and change tracking. LINK

See you tomorrow for a new dose of ☕️ MarketingShot!