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Tech News
OpenAI has expanded its influencer marketing, more than doubling sponsored Instagram posts for ChatGPT from 61 in June to 141 in August, according to HypeAuditor data cited by Business Insider. The company is reportedly pitching parenting, fitness and tech creators, urging them to frame ChatGPT as useful for everyday life and business rather than address AI safety worries directly.
Oatly creative director Michael Lee says the company has long refused to create a standard brand book, the style guide most large companies use to keep messaging consistent. He says new creative hires are told to 'unlearn everything you know about marketing,' and the company instead gives its creative team unusual autonomy to write and execute its own briefs. Oatly's shift traces back to 2012, when new CEO Toni Petersson and creative chief John Schoolcraft rebuilt the marketing department around creatives rather than traditional marketing structures.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that founders often mistake low customer acquisition cost for campaign success, when in fact a cheap first sale doesn't guarantee a customer understood the offer or will stick around. Metrics like CAC typically ignore refunds, support burden, discounts and fees, which can make seemingly efficient campaigns unprofitable over time. The piece recommends grouping customers by campaign and calculating true post-sale value before scaling ad spend.
Researchers from the University of Bristol and Oxford used the Isambard-AI supercomputer to analyse all 172.6 hours of live play across the tournament's 104 matches, finding over 93,000 visible brand appearances for unhealthy food, alcohol, gambling and speculative products. Food and drink brands made up 70% of these appearances, with soft drinks, fast food, sports drinks and crisps brands dominating exposure, which the team estimates generated 267 billion impressions in the UK alone.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that after years of brands chasing attention through content, emails and notifications, consumers are now seeking analog experiences like dinner parties, run clubs, and phone-free events. The piece suggests marketers should reframe their goal from maximizing time spent with a brand to helping people use their time more meaningfully.
A marketing analysis outlines four recurring reasons target buyers ignore campaigns even when they see the right messaging: audiences defined too broadly, content that describes products rather than buyer problems, insufficient buyer confidence to act, and marketing that answers questions nobody is actually asking. The piece recommends conducting five to ten interviews with people across different relationships to the company to spot which of these patterns applies before making changes.
A survey cited in the report shows daily AI usage among marketers climbed from 88% to 91%, yet less than half say it has meaningfully improved their results. The gap is compared to the early days of factory electrification, when productivity gains only came after work processes were redesigned around the new technology, not just when it was installed.
A growing number of TikTok creators are being paid by brands to produce content that mimics organic user videos while hiding its promotional nature, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal. Creators like Ceci Beck and Brooks Langford say they earn between $1,000 and $6,000 a month from this work, and one campaign manager reportedly told a creator to deny that a video was sponsored when asked directly.
An Entrepreneur contributor argues that most small businesses like restaurants and bars overprice branded merchandise, charging $25 to $80 for items that often cost only $5 to $15 to produce. The writer says this pricing discourages purchases and wastes an opportunity, since customers who love a product or experience are often willing but reluctant to pay high markups for logo gear.
Commentary on the AI industry notes that the widening gap between techno-optimists and doomsayers has left the public without a clear, trustworthy voice to follow. Both camps are accused of overstating their cases—one promising utopia, the other predicting catastrophe—while much of the underlying hype serves commercial interests rather than sober analysis.
Executives from Whalar Group's The Lighthouse, Pie, and Peach & Lily convened to discuss how influencer marketing is evolving beyond traditional sponsored posts. The panel addressed how brands should select creators, structure longer-term partnerships, and produce content that feels genuine rather than promotional.
Noise, a marketing platform that lets anyone with a smartphone create sponsored content for brands and get paid per view, has raised a $5.5 million seed round led by Capital Midwest, M25, and Grishin Robotics, bringing total funding to $7.2 million. The app connects brands seeking scalable content campaigns with a pool of over 1.5 million creators across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, handling briefs, payments, and sourcing automatically. Founded in 2025 by Diego Kafie, Stu Feldt, and Nic Weber, the company says its top creators earn six figures annually.