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So Adobe decided the best way to compete with Canva isn't to build a better product—it's to just live inside the tool everyone's already using.

As of today, you can edit photos, design assets, and manage PDFs without ever leaving ChatGPT. The creative suite just became a conversation. Meanwhile, Uber quietly launched a platform that turns your trips into targeting data, which is either brilliant or dystopian depending on how you feel about your commute being monetized.

Today's stories share a common thread: the infrastructure layer of marketing is being completely rebuilt. Adobe moving into ChatGPT isn't just a product update—it's a signal that creative workflows will live inside AI interfaces, not alongside them.

Uber Intelligence shows that every company with behavioral data is now a potential ad platform. And the Retail AI Council's Shopper Context Protocol hints at a future where AI agents, not humans, are making purchase decisions.

We're not optimizing marketing anymore; we're optimizing for a world where AI is both the audience and the intermediary. The brands that figure out how to show up in that environment will own the next decade.

The creative suite just became conversational. Adobe has integrated its flagship tools—Photoshop, Adobe Express, and Acrobat—directly into ChatGPT, letting users edit images, create designs, and manage PDFs without leaving the chat interface. This isn't a plugin or a clunky workaround; it's a full integration that positions Adobe as the default creative layer for the world's most popular AI assistant. For marketing teams, this could collapse the gap between "brief the designer" and "it's done" to about 30 seconds.

(Via MarTech.org

Your commute is now a data product. Uber has launched "Uber Intelligence," a platform that packages trip and delivery data into consumer behavior insights for brands. Using clean-room technology (so no, they're not selling your name), the platform lets advertisers understand real-world movement patterns—where people go, when, and how often. It's the holy grail of location intelligence, and it's now available to any brand with a media budget. The implications for retail, QSR, and local marketing are massive.

(Via Boston Institute of Analytics)

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Here's your "incrementality matters" stat of the day: the real-time analytics market is projected to nearly triple, reaching $193.71 billion by 2032. The growth engine? AI, IoT, and 5G finally maturing enough to process data at the speed of business. Marketing analytics currently holds the largest application share, which means the pressure to move from "monthly reports" to "live dashboards" is only going to intensify. If your MMM vendor still delivers insights on a 6-week lag, you're bringing a knife to a gunfight.

(Via GlobeNewswire)

SEO just got an existential update. Akii has released the AI Search Tracker, a monitoring tool that shows brands whether AI-powered search engines and assistants mention or cite them in responses. Forget ranking #1 on Google—the new game is whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Gemini even knows you exist. For brands that built their acquisition strategy on organic search, this is the wake-up call: if you're not optimizing for AI visibility, you're optimizing for irrelevance.

(Via MarTech.org)

The SEO tool wars are heating up. Semify has acquired Dragon Metrics, a digital marketing reporting platform, to bolster its international reach and AI-powered optimization capabilities. It's a classic roll-up play: consolidate the niche tools, integrate the data layers, and sell a "platform" to agencies tired of juggling 15 dashboards. For the broader martech M&A market, this signals that the SEO/content optimization space is entering its consolidation phase. Expect more deals like this in Q1.

(Via MarTech.org)

Here's a privacy story that's actually about the future, not the past. The Retail AI Council has announced a working group to develop the Shopper Context Protocol (SCP)—a set of standards designed to preserve shopper context and relationships as AI-driven commerce evolves. Translation: they're trying to solve the "AI agents shopping on your behalf" problem before it becomes a regulatory nightmare. When AI assistants start making purchase decisions, who owns the customer relationship? This group is trying to answer that before Congress does.

(Via MarTech.org)

The e-commerce boom is officially cooling off. Adobe Analytics is projecting U.S. holiday online sales to grow just 5.3% this season to $253.4 billion—a significant slowdown from last year's 8.7% surge. Economic uncertainty and persistent inflation are the culprits, and Cyber Monday is expected to clock in at $14.2 billion (up 6.3%). For performance marketers, this means the days of "throw money at it and watch it scale" are over. Efficiency, incrementality, and creative differentiation are now table stakes.

(Via Reuters)