Good morning {{first_name|friends}},

While everyone's frantically wrapping up Q4 campaigns and pretending they've finished their holiday shopping, the deal-makers are closing out the year with some massive bets. Pinterest just decided that visual search wasn't enough—they want your living room TV too. And IBM apparently looked at their AI strategy and said "you know what we need? Real-time data streaming... for $11 billion."

The martech industry is moving from "AI features" to "AI infrastructure." Pinterest isn't buying tvScientific for the revenue—they're buying the measurement layer that makes CTV performance legible. IBM isn't buying Confluent for Kafka—they're buying the data pipes that make AI actually work. Even California's new browser mandate (AB 566) is really about infrastructure: who controls the privacy signals that flow through the web? The winners in 2026 won't be the companies with the flashiest AI demos—they'll be the ones who own the underlying rails that make the demos possible.

The visual discovery platform is coming for your living room.

Pinterest has announced its acquisition of tvScientific, a connected TV performance advertising platform that specializes in outcome-based measurement—solving the "did that TV ad actually work?" problem that's plagued brands for decades.

The real story here isn't reach; it's measurement. By integrating tvScientific into Pinterest Performance+, advertisers will be able to evaluate TV the same way they measure search and social: with actual conversion data, not brand lift studies that take six weeks. For performance marketers who've avoided CTV because it "felt" like brand advertising, this changes the calculus entirely.

(Via Pinterest Investor Relations)

The agentic AI marketing wars are officially heading to Vegas. Zeta Global has announced its CES 2026 programming lineup, centered around Athena by Zeta—their conversational AI agent designed for enterprise marketing that they're boldly calling "superintelligent."

CEO David Steinberg will host a fireside chat with tech analyst Dan Ives on the future of AI-powered marketing, plus live demos throughout the week. Whether Athena lives up to the "superintelligent" billing remains to be seen, but the positioning is clear: Zeta isn't content to be an AI-assisted platform—they're pitching AI as the primary interface for enterprise marketing decisions. If you're an agency that bills for "strategic recommendations," start watching.

(Via Zeta Global)

Here's a brutal truth: your reps are out there on LinkedIn crafting their own "thought leadership" posts while your brand team screams into the void about messaging consistency. Meanwhile, your competitors are running coordinated social selling plays that actually convert.

Olli Social fixes the chaos. It's the platform that turns your scattered sales team into a synchronized social selling machine—centralized content, AI-powered personalization, and analytics that actually connect posts to pipeline.

Stop hoping your AEs remember the brand guidelines. Start orchestrating.

👉 Turn your team into social selling champions →

Here's your "follow the money" stat of the day: the Customer Data Platform market is projected to grow from $9.72 billion in 2025 to $37.11 billion by 2030—a 30.7% CAGR that makes most SaaS categories look sleepy.

The drivers? Digital transformation, AI integration, and the desperate need for unified customer views in a post-cookie world. But the real insight is what this growth implies: companies are finally accepting that their fragmented data systems can't support the AI ambitions they keep announcing in earnings calls. CDPs aren't sexy, but they're becoming the foundation everything else sits on. If your 2026 budget doesn't include "data unification," your 2027 AI strategy is going to hit a wall.

(Via GlobeNewswire)

The SEO-to-AEO transition just got its first major enterprise validation. Conductor is reporting record momentum as brands scramble to optimize for AI-powered answer engines—not just traditional search.

Their latest benchmarks report shows AI referrals now account for roughly 1.08% of all website traffic, with nearly 90% coming from ChatGPT. That might sound small, but it's growing fast enough to matter. Conductor's platform now spans "Answer Engine Optimization" alongside traditional SEO, helping brands show up in both Google and the AI assistants that are increasingly intercepting queries. For SEO teams still optimizing exclusively for blue links, the writing is on the wall—and it's being generated by an LLM.

(Via Conductor)

IBM just made its biggest bet since Red Hat, and it's all about data pipes. The tech giant has agreed to acquire Confluent, the data streaming platform built on Apache Kafka, in an all-cash deal valued at $11 billion.

The thesis is straightforward: AI models are only as good as the data feeding them, and most enterprise data is locked in batch processing systems that update overnight. Confluent solves real-time data streaming at scale—the infrastructure layer that makes "instant insights" actually instant. For CMOs who've been promised AI-powered personalization that "responds in milliseconds," this is the backend that makes that possible. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna called it a "smart data platform for enterprise IT." Translation: they're buying the plumbing that makes AI actually work.

(Via Reuters)

Chrome, Safari, and Edge—you're officially on notice. California has signed the "Opt Me Out Act" (AB 566) into law, requiring all web browsers operating in the state to include built-in settings that let users automatically signal their preference to opt out of data sales and sharing.

Currently, only privacy-focused browsers like Brave and Firefox offer these controls natively. AB 566 mandates that by January 2027, every browser must include opt-out preference signals (OOPS) as a standard feature. The implications for adtech are profound: when the opt-out button moves from "buried in settings" to "default browser UI," expect opt-out rates to spike dramatically. For marketers still relying on behavioral targeting, this is another nail in the coffin. For first-party data strategies, it's validation.

(Via California Privacy Protection Agency)

In a year where everyone's chasing AI-generated content, Gap went old school—and absolutely crushed it. The retailer's fall "Better in Denim" campaign, featuring global girl group KATSEYE dancing to Kelis's early-2000s hit "Milkshake," has racked up over 8 billion impressions and driven significant denim sales growth.

The genius is in the execution: choreography blending Fosse technique with hip-hop, low-rise jeans capitalizing on the Y2K fashion resurgence, and a deliberate callback to Gap's iconic dance-focused ads of the late '90s. It's proof that the fundamentals still work—music, movement, and emotional resonance beat algorithmic optimization every time. For CMOs wondering whether to invest in "brand" or "performance," this campaign is Exhibit A for why you need both. Sometimes the most innovative thing you can do is remember what made you great in the first place.

(Via Forbes)