In partnership with
TGIF!!!
Two announcements, same week, opposite directions. Read only one and you will draw the wrong conclusion.
Adobe acquired Rilo, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. Six people, founded in 2025, one million dollars raised, a product that lets marketers write plain-language workflows for competitor intel, repurposing, sales-call analysis, and lead gen. Terms undisclosed, the product shuts, the team joins Adobe. After the $1.9 billion Semrush deal, it fills a gap: the piece that strings research, analysis, creation and distribution into one chain an agent can run.
Now the other release.
Adweek wrote the same day that August brought "the less glamorous realities" of generative AI at scale. Omnicom, which staffed its Omni platform with hundreds of people and showed off a rebuild months ago, moved more than 460 of them to the contractor Endava and cut product and engineering roles on top.
Adobe is buying the workflow layer so its customers never assemble one from six tabs. Omnicom built its own and would now rather rent the people. Both rational. Together they say one thing. The platform was never the moat. Running it profitably is, and that is a much smaller club.
Today’s sponsor:
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
TALK ON THE MARKET
Tim Soulo, CMO of Ahrefs, on Thursday, after eleven years in the job:
This from a man whose calls feed a second brain, whose Slack activity a Claude Code workflow logs for a twice-monthly blind-spot review, who runs a team of custom agents. Then the line for the wall: "If you have nothing worth saying, AI just helps you say nothing faster."
The most instrumented CMO on X automated the execution and reports the hard part, having something to say, is untouched. Adobe cannot buy that for its customers. Omnicom could not outsource it. Neither can you.
NUMBERS MATTER
10.2%. Of 216 marketers who completed the MiniMBA in Marketing, that is the share who named keeping pace with AI as their biggest skills need.
The rest chose strategy. Trained marketers were asked what they lack. They did not say prompts.
Today’s partner highlight:
DAILY PROMPT
You are a strategic content operations advisor helping a marketing leader maximize the value of a single hero content asset across multiple executive and stakeholder channels.
## Your Task
Take the following hero content piece and create a comprehensive briefing document that outlines how to repurpose and distribute it across executive-facing channels. This briefing should help the marketing team move beyond manual, one-off content creation and build a repeatable system.
## Hero Content Details
**Content Type:** [e.g., CEO blog post, executive whitepaper, thought leadership article]
**Topic:** [Main topic or thesis]
**Key Message:** [Core insight or value proposition]
**Target Audience:** [Primary stakeholder group]
**Original Format:** [Current format and length]
**Publication Date:** [When it will/did go live]
## Required Output Sections
### 1. Content Audit
Identify the 3-5 core insights or data points from the hero content that have standalone value. These become your "Lego bricks" for distribution.
### 2. Channel Distribution Map
For each of these channels, specify:
- **LinkedIn Executive Post:** Recommended length, hook, CTA
- **Email Executive Brief:** Subject line, structure, personalization approach
- **Internal Stakeholder Memo:** Key talking points, format
- **Partner/Customer Newsletter:** Angle and positioning
- **Sales Enablement Asset:** How sales teams can reference this
- **[Custom Channel]:** [Your specific need]
For each channel, include:
- Recommended format and length
- Tone adjustments needed
- Specific call-to-action
- Optimal posting/send timing
- Measurement KPI
### 3. Operational Handoff
Create a simple checklist and timeline showing:
- Who owns each piece
- Dependencies and sequencing
- Review/approval gates
- Distribution dates
- Measurement tracking
### 4. Scalability Framework
Provide 2-3 recommendations for how to systematize this process so it doesn't depend on one person (the "Brenda problem"). Include template suggestions, workflow automation opportunities, and team role clarity.
## Tone & Style
- Professional but accessible
- Assume the reader is a busy executive or marketing leader
- Be specific and actionable, not theoretical
- Include realistic timelines and effort estimates
## Output Format
Structure as a one-page executive briefing followed by a detailed distribution playbook (2-3 pages). Use tables, bullets, and clear headers for scannability.Use this when you have said something true once and are about to let a tool say it forty times. The idea is the scarce part. Spend the automation on carrying it, not faking it.
CMO CORNER
If you're proud of being busy, you've lost clarity.
The busiest leaders in this story built a platform, staffed it with hundreds, showed it off, and quietly moved the people out.
Ask your team what it is proud of this quarter. If the answer is a count of things produced, you have found where the automation went. If it is one thing you said that people repeated, you have found the job.
We provide consulting services for CMOs on AI strategy for marketing teams through our Teamless offering.
TOOL UPGRADE
Three worth your time this Friday, on one theme: the voice stays yours, the production does not.
ElevenLabs — best for turning what you wrote into every language and format without booking a studio. Try ElevenLabs here →
Tella — best for the CMO who should be on camera more and is not, because editing takes an afternoon. Try Tella here →
Simplified — best for small teams that need design and copy in one place and have no creative bench. Try Simplified here →
→ We have 300+ curated, filtered, and categorized AI tools in our directory. Browse to find the best ones that help your marketing team.
LEARN THIS
Soulo's Slack-review workflow runs in Claude Code, and so does much of the marketing engineering Flanagan described on Tuesday: Claude Code Essentials.
Written for marketers, not developers, it gets you from the terminal you have been avoiding to a working automation on your own data. For the leader who would rather build one small system this month than buy a large one.
→ We publish workshops, courses, guides, manuals, and more on AI marketing for free. Browse our learning resources for free.
BRAND SLOP
Sonny Criss played saxophone with Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He died in 1977. This year he released a single.
Futurism reported that the Spotify, YouTube and Amazon Music profiles of Criss, Jean Carne, Red Nichols and Jimmie Noone have picked up "new" 2026 tracks with AI cover art and AI music, uploaded by spam farms and copyrighted to strangers. The platforms' own rules let it through.
A catalog is a brand asset. Three platforms let anyone append to one, and the estate finds out when a fan does.
The Friday chore: look at every verified profile your brand holds and check what has been attached to it lately. If a dead bebop player can get a new release without consent, your product page can get a new review, your podcast a new episode, your founder a new quote. The platforms are not watching. The spam farms are.
Get ready for Return on Influence Festival ‘26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world. Free and online. October 21, 10-5 pm (ET) Save your spot now