The AI Promo Brief: Issue #26

Big Pitch? Build an Unforgettable Landing Page

We’re seeing an increase in distributors making landing pages for their clients after a big pitch. Here's a possible tool: Replit Design turns a prompt, a screenshot, a live URL, or a Figma file into a polished, interactive page, then extracts a design system from whatever look you feed it, so every frame after the first lands on the client's brand. One click converts the mockup into a deployable site — no handoff, no rebuild. And don't forget to include links to your commonsku presentations and shops! 

AI Writing is Controversial and Yet Successful?

How much of your writing is done with AI now? There's a new AI detection force out there: Pangram, a "content detector" that estimates whether writing was generated by AI. Pangram raised $9M led by Menlo Ventures, and when Substack turned it on, its own writers called it a witch hunt. The same tool flagged bestseller Daggermouth as roughly 60% AI-written; the author denies it, and it debuted at No. 1 anyway. I (Bobby, editor of the AI Promo Brief) ran one of my own articles through it and the results were mixed. Detection is obvious in many cases and unreliable in others, and some platforms are penalizing AI writing regardless. LinkedIn now puts a "seems like AI slop" button on every post. So the smart play is the one The Economist suggests: AI is getting better at writing, so humans have to get better at editing — precise instructions, repeated revisions, simpler wording, and a message tailored to your reader. A personal opinion as someone who writes and edits a lot: AI writing is here to stay, it's not whether we're using it, it's how.

No Screen Means No Logo Placement

How many Bluetooth speakers, earbuds, and power banks did you quote last quarter? Branded tech is a dependable line item and it's about to get a whole new category. OpenAI president Greg Brockman says the company is building a "family of devices" with ChatGPT as the interface rather than an app you open. First up is reportedly a screenless, movable smart speaker with cameras and sensors, and Brockman wants wearable APIs so third-party glasses and pendants run ChatGPT natively. So, start the merch conversation now but notice the decoration problem. No screen means no display real estate; your logo moves to housing, fabric, or packaging, and the first impression is a voice, not a screen. The first distributor with a credible AI-device gifting program owns “the next big thing.” Not shipping yet — but a category to watch for sure.

AI-Driven Traffic Tripled on Shopify YOY

What's driving successful sales on Shopify? Specificity. Shopify's Q2 report, out August 5, shows AI-driven traffic and orders tripled year over year, converting roughly 80% higher than organic search and three-quarters of those AI purchases landed outside the top-100 product categories, the exact niche long tail where custom promo lives. Which is why SEO's successor has a name: Answer-Engine Optimization. Structure your site, product data, and case studies so ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google's AI Overviews cite you when someone asks who produces a branded product. The smart play isn't ranking on a page nobody reads anymore — it's being the exact answer to a specific question.

commonsku Presents 15 Years Ahead

We're turning fifteen and marking it by looking forward. On August 19, from 2-4 PM ET, Bobby Lehew and Kara Parkinson host 15 Years Ahead, a free virtual premiere with two panels. The first digs into where the industry is heading, with PPAI's Drew Holmgreen, Fairware's Denise Taschereau, Gemline's Jonathan Isaacson, and commonsku's Catherine Graham. The second looks at merch as a marketing channel and where it sits in a client's budget. Bring your teams and register here!

Agentic Commerce On the Rise

The first time an AI agent quotes a client or places a PO on your behalf, ask the ugly question: who's accountable when it orders 10,000 mugs instead of 1,000? The guardrails are finally arriving. Jack Dorsey's Block just turned its AI agents into real employees with Buzz — each one gets its own account, a cryptographic identity, scoped permissions, and a signed hash-chain audit trail that lives right alongside your humans. A receipt of exactly what the bot did. A week later, Cloudflare announced Wallets: human-readable agent identities plus Virtual Wallets with owner-set spending limits and fast-spend flags — money the agent can move, but never past a cap you set. (Identity handles are claimable now; full spend-and-purchase functionality is rolling out in the coming months, per Cloudflare's own launch post.) Future-facing, sure. But imagine a Slack-like colleague who can place orders with control. A-Commerce (agentic commerce) is coming.

Your Team of One Is Already a Full-Stack Team

You're the designer, the copywriter, the account manager, and — when the contract lands — the one squinting at a legal clause before you sign. That's not a staffing gap anymore; it's now becoming the norm according to OpenAI. Its Work at the Frontier report found 43% of occupation-specific ChatGPT messages are tasks that formally belong to a different role, with marketers among the heaviest cross-role users (the full data's here). Translation: the team-of-one you've been running is already a full-stack team, because AI quietly covers roles you never hired for. With ChatGPT nearing a billion weekly users, this is the future shape of work, not a fluke. The smart play: start making agility and curiosity key traits for future hires! 

📸 Photoroom strips backgrounds and builds new scenes for product photography, which covers most of what a client mockup needs.

📊 Microsoft 365 Copilot passed 30 million paid seats in FY26 Q4, up from 20 million in April, and some of those are likely idle in subscriptions you already pay for.

⚙️ Anthropic is designing its own chips around Claude to run it faster and cheaper, which eventually shows up in what AI costs you.

🎥 Claude can learn a task by watching you do it, so record your screen, talk through it, and it runs the job again.

🧩 Anthropic deleted over 80% of Claude Code's system prompt and the scores held, which is the whole case for context engineering over clever prompting.

🔀 Aymo AI puts GPT, Claude, Gemini and 50-plus models in one workspace on pooled team credits, free tier up to $12/mo annually.

💰 Bending Spoons agreed to buy Airtable at a $1.285B enterprise value, down from the $11.7B it commanded in 2021.

😂 For funsies, a developer used Claude to build a replay system for Swervle so every player's daily run races back at once.

🔮 What's promo look like 15-years from now? Join us for two panel discussions on where promo is heading, August 19. Bring your team!