DATA & TECH

Illustration: Morning Brew Inc., Photo: Adobe Stock

In 2026, brands have approximately 1 million ways to place ads, whether via sponsored placements in creator videos, banner ads across the open web, or in any of the new ad formats digital giants roll out every year.

But what happens to targeting and monetizing audiences when bots increasingly surf the web?

It’s a question that has spawned a new class of companies that aim to help brands, creators, and publishers get compensated for content that’s almost certainly being crawled. However, experts say there’s still a lack of awareness of the issue across the board along with a lack of uniform standards around measuring the monetary value of pieces of content, creating a number of challenges for stakeholders.

“Publishers have many ways by which they monetize human traffic, whether that’s programmatic advertising or subscriptions and paywalls,” Toshit Panigrahi, CEO and co-founder of AI traffic management platform Tollbit, told Marketing Brew. “But in the future, humans might not be clicking through, and if you’re losing a human visitor, then you could need an altered way to monetize that traffic.”

The implications could also stand to affect the creator economy, if creator content is being digested without appropriate credit.

“There has to be shared governance and standards for how content gets licensed, used, and paid for in agentic web,” Li Haslett Chen, founder and CEO at creator commerce platform Howl, told us. “This is not the job of one company. This is the job of all of the platforms.”

For more on how industry stakeholders are discussing content compensation and what it could mean for creators, publishers, and brands, continue reading here.—Jasmine

      

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BRAND STRATEGY

Firefox

Nostalgia for the internet of yesteryear is all too common. And why not? Weren’t things better when going on the internet was an activity you did at a fixed time and place? When memes were random and hilarious, rather than bleak and dystopian?

Web browser Firefox is tapping into the feeling of yearning for a better internet with its new brand campaign, “Come Back to Firefox.” The marketing, which features icons of the internet of yore, pitches a return to the browser as a salve for some of today’s current user woes: privacy concerns, unwanted AI features, and too much advertising.

Firefox and ad agency We Believers gathered the people behind early internet memes—including Overly Attached Girlfriend, Numa Numa Guy, Bad Luck Brian, Where the Hell is Matt?, and Annoying Orange—for the 60-second spot. There is also a pointed shot at digital advertising: Liam Kyle Sullivan reprises his Kelly character and riffs on “Shoes,” which Noisey dubbed one of the “first viral music videos,” to complain about the digital ads that follow one around after shopping for shoes online.

It’s all a nod to Firefox’s “heyday” in the early 2000s, which was around the same time many of these early memes originated, John Solomon, CMO at Firefox parent company Mozilla, told Marketing Brew. The goal with the campaign was to find a way to communicate product updates and capabilities while also touching on the cultural conversation around tech and the internet today.

“People are really afraid and nervous about AI, they’re really questioning big tech and the decisions that are being made for them right now, especially with regard to their data, their privacy,” Solomon said. “So we thought it was a perfect time to start a conversation again with our hundreds of millions of lapsed users.”

For more on the strategy behind the campaign—and the sleuthing it took to gather the cast together—read more here.—KM

      

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RETAIL

Screenshot via @ThinkJerky/Instagram

Some brands pay big bucks for a Hollywood cameo. Think Jerky got Elizabeth Holmes, a prison vending machine, and a very confused internet.

But for founder Ricky Hirsch, that’s been quite the marketing package.

The snack brand appears in the closing sequence of You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s buzzy new documentary about the disgraced Theranos founder. Without spoiling the ending, the sequence involves Holmes requesting turkey jerky during a prison visit, a vending machine purchase, and a closing glimpse of Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, with the snack.

For Hirsch, whose Sriracha Honey Turkey Jerky gets the screen time, the business implications are considerably less mysterious than the film’s key subject.

• Over the 10 days preceding his interview with Retail Brew, sales of that flavor increased 345% on Think Jerky’s website and 93% on Amazon, per figures Hirsch provided.

“I think I got 12 minutes left of my 15 minutes of fame,” he said.

For more on the breakthrough moment for a company that has otherwise spent virtually nothing on advertising or marketing over its 11-year history, continue reading here.—Jeena

      

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Follower count is out, content is in. Brands still treat influencers as a top-of-funnel play: Sprout Social notes that only 24% use them for direct sales or conversion. But two-thirds of consumers made a purchase based on an influencer’s recommendation in the last year. Download Sprout Social’s report to get the data behind the post-follower era.

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IN AND OUT

Executive moves across the industry.

• American Express promoted Jessica Ling to CMO.
• McDonald’s USA chief marketing and customer experience officer, Alyssa Buetikofer, is exiting the role next month, per Marketing Dive.
• OpenAI hired Uber’s president and chief corporate affairs officer, Jill Hazelbaker, to serve as chief corporate affairs officer.
• Netflix hired Roberto Stanichi, formerly Mattel’s president and chief marketing and brand officer, as VP of consumer products and experiences.