AI in marketing: ChatGPT ads, agency token bills, and Instacart’s Clementine
AI in marketing crossed a line this week. It stopped being a topic on agency decks and started showing up on invoices. Four stories from the same week make the shift concrete.
ChatGPT ads that open a chat, not a website
OpenAI is piloting a format called Sponsored Agent. When you click the ad, you don’t land on a brand’s website. You open a conversation with a branded business agent inside ChatGPT. Wayfair confirmed it’s in the pilot, testing at limited scale with guardrails around product accuracy, transparency, and handoffs to human service.
Seven months into ChatGPT ads, buyers still describe spend as experimental and say the ROI case hasn’t been made. If you’re considering this format, the first-party data capture, conversion tracking, and handoff logic you rely on from a normal click don’t exist here. You’d need to scope the agent before you spend on the ad.
Agencies are figuring out who pays for tokens
Agency AI bills now stack subscription costs across Claude, ChatGPT, and Google, plus metered token usage and staff time to manage the tools. Dept says its biggest token costs run across all three vendors and has set up a monthly AI Tool Committee to approve, test, or drop tools. Crispin runs around 100 enterprise AI tools and has moved most to flat annual fees to avoid monthly surprises. Markacy treats AI as a variable cost rather than a fixed budget line.
Omnicom CFO Phil Angelastro said the holding company is building a model to measure token costs and get reimbursed for them, moving toward a more outcome-driven pricing model. At least one agency is already billing tokens to clients as materials, separate from labour. If your agency contract doesn’t address this yet, it will soon. Decide whether you want AI usage billed as pass-through, bundled into fees, or tied to outcomes before your agency decides for you.
Instacart puts its AI assistant on Sunday Night Football
Instacart launched a campaign during NBC’s Sunday Night Football promoting Clementine, its AI shopping assistant rolled out across North America. The campaign runs across linear TV, OTT, YouTube, audio, social, and in-app. Four spots show people watching food scenes in Shrek, Scooby-Doo, The Office, and A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving, then using Clementine to turn the craving into a recipe and a filled cart. Hormel and Hillshire products appear in the creative. The work came from Instacart’s in-house agency Local Produce with Prettybird on production.
Clementine draws on 1.6 billion lifetime orders, learns preferences over time, spots promotions and cheaper alternatives, and can turn a handwritten list into a cart. The operator implication for CPG brands: getting your products into an assistant’s answers is becoming more important than shelf placement at the retailer.
Google upgrades Meridian and takes GeoX global
Meridian, Google’s open-source marketing mix model, now has agentic capabilities that audit data quality, resolve errors, and guide model building in real time, plus back-end speed improvements. Marketers can feed brand-building signals directly into the model to measure TV and out-of-home. Meridian GeoX, a publisher-agnostic geo incrementality tool, has moved from beta to global availability. Google is also integrating Data Manager into Google Analytics and DV360, and adding a Data Strength Uplift Metric that counts conversions recovered by first-party data setup.
If geo-testing has been on your list but the tooling felt too fiddly, GeoX going global removes that friction.
⚡ Quick hits
- Anthropic launched Claude Docs, with Slides and Design in beta, exporting to Word and PowerPoint.
- Google is quietly paying publishers per significant contribution to AI answers. Participants describe the payouts as minimal.
- Perplexity is hiring creators at multi-million dollar budgets, tying influencer work to conversion rather than reach.
- NP Digital’s fintech index finds SoFi beating Bank of America in AI search answers. Gemini names 10 brands per response.
- Meta’s Creator Marketing Hub went global with an AI business assistant built in and an MCP connector for Partnership Ads.
- Adthena added Decision Intelligence: describe a paid search problem in plain English, get ranked fixes.
- Fingerprint launched a Bot Directory, a public register of AI agents and crawlers by provider and purpose.
- Magnite extended agentic buying across linear TV, streaming, audio, and display via DIRECTV, Samsung, and iHeart.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
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