Ai sparks more ambitious campaigns.
The three stories worth paying attention to this week point to a key trend: AI is extremely helpful in finding the spots in a campaign where spending can be better allocated. That’s awesome, but there’s so much more that advertisers and their agencies can do, besides just spending-better. Advertising (good advertising, anyway) is about innovation and growth. Optimizing spend, certainly. But pushing on ideas consistently to find the ways we can add more, do more, go farther. I think the most successful marketers are going to use AI to learn more, and use that learning to grow.
McKinsey: companies getting the most out of AI focus on growth. Not optimization.
McKinsey’s State of AI report is out. A lot of companies are using AI (no surprise), and nearly all of them are focused on generating efficiency. But the Leaders—a very small percentage of respondents—pursue growth and innovation in addition to efficiency. These Leaders are rebuilding core processes in the organization not just to run less expensively, but to achieve more. Agencies need to embrace this idea and approach. If you can do it cheaper, it also means you can do more.
IAB: Make incrementally testing always on.
The high cost of learning means that testing happens only occasionally at most agencies. The gap between knowing something and being able to do something about it forces agencies to act on limited datasets and significant uncertainty. The IAB is saying no more. Their new 2026 State of Data report recommends moving to a more consistent, always-on approach to testing, specifically calling for AI to help design experiments, monitor changes and (this is the big one) identify past assumptions that need retesting. We are going from testing being less an annual checkup and more a heart-rate monitor.
PetSmart uses AI to define the parameters of success. And let’s it rip.
Interesting case study from PetSmart’s grooming business. They use email to engage and engage customers. Their approach was to define their goal and let an AI platform explore different pathways to that goal. Thousands of pathways. The tools combined subject lines, offers, creative and send times to discover what would work, including for different segments. Leveraging AI’s ability to test and discover, rather than simply generate more stuff, led to a 22% incremental lift.
Mover of the Week: the learning agenda.
I love Learning Agendas. They outline the set of questions that we believe a campaign will answer. It focuses our experiments and our data and shows how the campaign will grow. The problem has long been that Learning Agendas occupy the last page of long decks and they don’t get much attention. I’m making Learning Agenda our mover of the week because it is literally moving from that back page all the way up to the front. It is becoming the operating guide for a growing campaign. I also think there is a chance that Learning Agendas will replace Creative Briefs as the core strategic deliverable. But more on that later.
As they say on Marketplace…let’s do the numbers.
Thursdai index: this week’s numbers.
Experimentation Capability: 9.0
Learning Quality: 8.9
Laboratory Reliability: 9.1
Market Traction: 9.0
Everything is up this week. The fact that McKinsey is pointing out the need for growth and ambition in AI planning and IAB is telling us to test-always is critical. It means well-respected voices are seeing a next phase. And the PetSmart story is one of many, showing the real world, actual number-based opportunities associated with using AI to learn.
The Thursdai Index and report is the work of 61 Hawk founder Gary Stein with assistance from an OpenAI research agent. The agent sources, sorts and scores news stories. Everything you read was written by Gary, a real human being.
