NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

Pop-art illustration of Meta walled garden with side door cracked open, ChatGPT and Claude logos as keys, ad data flowing through API connectors and lock-in chains

Meta Let ChatGPT and Claude Into Its Ad API to Lock In More Spend, Not Less

Meta launched its ads AI connectors in open beta on April 29, 2026, letting eligible advertisers manage Meta campaigns through ChatGPT, Claude, or any AI assistant that speaks Anthropic's Model Context Protocol. The connector exports campaign data into the chat and pipes the resulting commands back into Ads

Hellmann's Stuck Ranch on a Billboard Because UK Shoppers Won't Try It

Hellmann's launched an edible billboard in the UK on April 29, 2026, asking "WTF Is Ranch?" and inviting passersby to taste Creamy Ranch directly off the panel. Edelman built the activation around a single insight: UK shoppers have read about ranch on TikTok for two years

Spotify Made Biddable a Third of Ad Revenue. Podcast Buyers Still Need an IO.

Spotify reported Q1 2026 results showing 761 million monthly active users and biddable programmatic ads now top one-third of ad-supported revenue. The mix is uneven: music drove the biddable growth through higher impressions sold, while podcast revenue still came from sponsorships in Spotify's Owned and Licensed shows. Self-serve

Nectar's 'Asian Glow Up' Just Branded the Stigma 36% of East Asians Hide

Nectar, the Asian American hard seltzer Jeremy Kim launched in December 2020 with $20,000, ran an AAPI Heritage Month campaign called "Asian Glow Up" that reframes alcohol flush, a physiological reaction in roughly 36% of East Asians, as a brand identity. The category lesson: brands whose product

SE Ranking Faked a Brand. AI Mode Ranked It #1 for 90% of Branded Queries.

SE Ranking's Bogdan Babiak built a fictional brand on a brand-new domain in March 2026 and tracked 825 prompts across 15,835 AI answers. Google's AI Mode placed the fake brand at position 1 for roughly 90% of branded queries, while a single "Complete Guide&

Land O'Lakes and Getty Caught Brands Using Rural Clichés on 46M People

Two-thirds of rural Americans say advertisers don't understand them, according to Getty Images' VisualGPS panel, while only 5% of popular ad visuals are actually set in a rural place. That gap sits on top of 46.2 million people: 14% of the US population spread across 72%

Blueprint-style illustration of a crossed-out robots.txt BLOCK stamp next to a $40M cash stack and an Oreo cookie revealing data inside, on a technical grid.

Mondelez Spent $40M Unblocking the AI Crawlers It Spent Years Blocking

Mondelez originally blocked AI crawlers from indexing its content, then watched Oreo get cited in roughly 10% of AI chatbot cookie answers despite owning the most famous cookie brand on earth. The company has since reversed course, unblocked GPTBot and friends, and committed $40 million to an AI marketing platform