Good morning {{first_name|friends}},

If your LinkedIn feed isn't 50% "Spotify Wrapped" screenshots and 50% hot takes about AI creative today, are you even in marketing? It's December 4th, which means we officially have three weeks to hit Q4 goals before the entire industry shuts down for "strategic planning" (skiing).

AWS is still dropping bombs in Vegas, Coca-Cola is finding out that consumers actually care about "soul," and OpenAI just released an ad that... looks like a normal ad?

Here are the 7 things you missed:

Sam Altman's appetite for capital has officially entered the staggering phase.

OpenAI is in talks to raise up to $100 billion in a funding round that would value the company at $830 billion—roughly the GDP of the Netherlands. The ChatGPT maker wants to close by Q1 2026 and is reportedly courting sovereign wealth funds to get there. For context, this would make OpenAI more valuable than Meta and Tesla combined. The money would fuel inferencing costs, data center buildouts, and the ongoing model arms race against Anthropic and Google. CFOs budgeting for AI tools in 2026 should prepare for a world where OpenAI's infrastructure costs get passed downstream—and fast.

(Via TechCrunch)

OpenAI's mobile app just hit a milestone that puts every other app in perspective: $3 billion in lifetime consumer spending, achieved in just 31 months.

For comparison, TikTok took 58 months to reach the same figure, and Disney+ needed 42. The bulk of the spending—$2.48 billion—happened in 2025 alone, representing a 408% year-over-year jump. The data suggests AI isn't a feature anymore—it's a consumer behavior. For marketers still debating whether to build AI into their mobile strategy, the answer is now empirically obvious. The subscription economy just got an extremely aggressive new player.

(Via Appfigures)

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Here's a stat that should haunt every media buyer: most creative testing happens after you've already spent the budget.

Clinch just launched Predict IQ Scores, an AI-powered system that predicts how effective your creative assets will be at capturing attention before campaigns go live. The tool is powered by Adverteyes, whose methodology was trained on 18 million real human responses across digital platforms. Early users can filter predictions by channel, device, age, gender, and time of day. For MMM practitioners, this is huge—finally, a way to reduce garbage-in at the creative level before it corrupts your model's outputs.

(Via ExchangeWire)

The French CRM challenger formerly known as Sendinblue just raised $583 million at unicorn status, and the implications go well beyond email marketing.

Brevo is positioning itself as the anti-Salesforce: faster deployment, simpler pricing, and AI embedded from day one rather than bolted on. The company expects to hit $218 million ARR in 2025 and is targeting $1.09 billion by 2030. For mid-market teams drowning in Salesforce admin costs, Brevo's bet is that "good enough" CDP functionality inside a usable CRM beats a $200K/year platform you never fully implement. The incumbents aren't going anywhere—but they're definitely feeling the heat.

(Via CMSWire)

Zendesk just acquired Unleash, an AI-powered enterprise search platform, to supercharge its internal support capabilities.

The deal gives Zendesk access to permission-based RAG across 70+ content sources, plus native AI agents in Slack and Microsoft Teams. Translation: employees will be able to get instant answers from company knowledge bases without filing a ticket or waiting for IT. The bigger story here is the convergence of customer service and employee service tools—Zendesk is betting that the same AI infrastructure can power both. For organizations evaluating help desk consolidation, this acquisition just made the vendor shortlist shorter.

(Via PR Newswire)

Google quietly dropped Gemini 3 Flash this week, and the benchmarks are raising eyebrows.

According to Humanity's Last Exam and Simple QA Verified tests, Flash scores nearly as well as Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.2—at a fraction of the latency and cost. Flash will become the default model in Google's Gemini app and is now available to enterprises via Vertex AI. For marketing teams running high-volume AI workflows (think: creative generation, audience segmentation, real-time personalization), this is the model to watch. Speed + intelligence at lower cost is exactly what the "AI tax" complainers have been waiting for.

(Via Computerworld)

Mozilla just made a notable hire: John Solomon, the marketing executive who helped turn Beats by Dre into a cultural phenomenon, is now the company's Chief Marketing Officer.

Solomon previously led brand at Therabody and spent time at Apple's worldwide marcom organization. The timing is telling—Firefox is trying to remind hundreds of millions of users that they have a choice in browsers, and Solomon's playbook has always been about making products feel like cultural movements rather than utilities. For anyone who's watched Mozilla struggle to compete with Chrome's dominance, this is the most aggressive brand bet they've made in years.

(Via Mozilla Blog)