Weekly Edition September 18, 2026 Charlotte, N.C.

AI IN MARKETING WEEKLY

Wake Forest University · School of Professional Studies
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AI in Marketing Daily

A short read on what moved in AI and what it means for marketers · Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, 8:45 ET

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Issue · September 18, 2026 · AI Advertising + Disclosure

On Wednesday, ChatGPT became an ad account you can open from inside HubSpot. That same afternoon, California made you say when the actor in your ad isn't a person.

Two announcements, hours apart, on September 16. OpenAI shipped Sponsored Agents, an Ads Manager you create campaigns in by typing a sentence, and same-day ChatGPT Ads integrations with HubSpot and Shopify. Governor Newsom signed SB 1050, which requires explicit disclosure on any video or audio ad that uses an AI-generated performer. One of those gives you a new place to spend money. The other gives your legal team a new reason to call you.

By Ged King · Sources: OpenAI, “Reimagining advertising with AI,” September 16, 2026 (primary) · Office of the Governor of California, September 16, 2026 (primary)

Start with the ad platform, because that's the part with a budget line attached. OpenAI's announcement has three pieces, and the third one is the one that changes your Monday.

Piece one, Sponsored Agents. In OpenAI's words, “After seeing a relevant ad, a user can choose to start a clearly labeled conversation with a business-sponsored agent in ChatGPT.” So the ad isn't the destination anymore. The ad is a door into a conversation your brand is paying to have. This one is a test, and OpenAI says so plainly: “Sponsored Agents are now being tested with select advertisers in the United States.” No reach numbers, no advertiser count, no pricing.

Piece two, the Ads Manager. “Advertisers can now use simple, natural-language prompts to create, update, and analyze campaigns directly in ChatGPT with the Ads Manager plugin.” You describe the campaign and it builds it. It'll also suggest copy and imagery off your landing page and your objective.

Piece three is the quiet one, and it's the one I'd read twice. “Starting today, businesses managing their customers in HubSpot can connect a ChatGPT Ads account, create ads, track performance, and follow up on leads directly in HubSpot powered by their HubSpot context.” And US Shopify merchants can install a ChatGPT Ads app straight from the Shopify App Store, going international on September 23.

Think about what that actually does. For most of the last year, buying inside an AI assistant meant a pilot, a rep, a spreadsheet, and a conversation with procurement. As of September 16 it's an app install. The person who can turn on a new media channel at your company is no longer the media buyer. It's whoever has admin rights in Shopify.

Now the other half of the day. SB 1050, from Senator Angelique Ashby, requires, in the Governor's own words, “explicit disclosure on any video or audio advertisement that uses AI-generated performers to sell a product or service.” It also “prohibits the continued use of any advertisement found to be in violation of the law.” That second clause is the sharp one. It isn't a fine you budget for. It's a takedown.

I'll be straight about what I couldn't confirm. The Governor's release does not state an effective date, and California's bill text server blocks automated retrieval, so I'm not going to put a date on it that I haven't read myself. SAG-AFTRA, which helped write the language, says New York's comparable law took effect in June 2026. Treat that as a neighbor's timeline, not California's. If you run video or audio in California, have counsel pull the enrolled text this week rather than waiting on a summary.

What it means Two calls, both short. The first one is about who owns the ChatGPT ad account, and you want to make that decision before someone in ecommerce installs the Shopify app on a Thursday afternoon and starts spending against a landing page nobody in brand has read. A channel that installs in ninety seconds will get turned on in ninety seconds. The second call is an inventory: every spot currently running with a synthetic face or a synthetic voice, including the ones your agency generated to save a shoot day. Then add one line to the creative brief template asking whether any performer in this asset is AI-generated. That line costs you nothing today and saves you a pulled campaign later.

Sept 16ChatGPT Ads becomes installable from HubSpot and the Shopify App Store, US first, international from Sept 23
SB 1050signed the same day: disclose AI-generated performers in video or audio ads, or the ad comes down
3.75–4%new federal funds target range, raised a quarter point on a 12–0 vote that same afternoon
Brand & Agency Spotlight

Pinterest put ads inside the picture

On September 17 Pinterest introduced Visual Search Ads, a format that, in Pinterest's description, “prominently places advertisers in Pinterest Search Results and Pin closeups.” The context Pinterest gives for it: users “conduct more than 80 billion searches per month, the vast majority of which are visual,” and “more than half of which are commercial.” Those are Pinterest's own platform numbers, unaudited, so hold them loosely. The rollout is a beta “for eligible advertisers in all Pinterest ad markets in the coming weeks.” Pinterest also cites one advertiser seeing “up to an 85% improvement in cost per install” on its new App Promotion objective, which is a single result with no methodology attached and should not go in anybody's forecast.

What it means Here's the pattern worth noticing. A visual search happens when somebody can't name the thing they want. They know the sofa when they see it. If your product photography was built to look good in a grid, it was built for the wrong judge. Shoot for the crop, label the attributes, and quit treating alt text like an accessibility chore you do at the end.

In This Issue

Three More That Mattered

The CRM · the assistant · the rate
Martech + Data

HubSpot rebuilt itself around the thing it already had

Also on September 16, HubSpot shipped its Fall 2026 Spotlight: a self-updating Smart CRM, a completeness score called Context Home, an agentic Marketing Studio, and a Revenue Hub. The organizing idea is what HubSpot calls Growth Context, meaning your business, team and customer data as the fuel the AI runs on. The claim attached to it: “When AI is fueled by this high quality context in HubSpot, businesses can create 3.6x more MQLs, win 3.2x more deals, and close over 2x more tickets.” Read HubSpot's own footnote before you repeat that in a deck. It compares “Professional and Enterprise HubSpot customers using AI with high quality context versus Professional and Enterprise customers not using AI,” with no sample size and no control for the obvious fact that companies with clean data tend to be better run companies. Marketing Studio's “81% more campaigns” figure is labeled early customers, also unsized.

What it means Strip out the multiples and there's a real point underneath, which is why I'm covering it anyway. The bottleneck on AI in your marketing stack stopped being the model a while ago. It's the mess in your CRM: the duplicate companies, the lifecycle stage nobody has trusted since 2023, the notes field holding information that should be a property. That cleanup has always been an unglamorous project that loses the budget fight. It just became the thing that decides whether your AI tooling works. Go find whoever has been asking for two weeks to fix data hygiene and give them the two weeks.

Consumer Tech + CX

Siri can see your screen now, and act on what's there

Apple began rolling out Siri AI in beta on September 14. Two capabilities matter commercially. Onscreen awareness means Siri “can answer questions or take actions related to the content on a user's screen.” In-app actions mean it can do things inside apps, with WhatsApp and Audible working now and Microsoft Outlook, Notability and Tripsy named as coming. It also draws on “personal context understanding” across messages, email and photos. The scoping is real: English only at first, five more languages next month, not initially available in the EU on iOS, iPadOS and watchOS, and not in China pending regulatory approval. It's a beta on Apple Intelligence hardware, not a finished product on every phone.

What it means Your website and your app now have a second reader, and that reader is standing on the customer's side of the glass. When the assistant can see the page, the parts of your experience that depend on a human squinting at a layout stop being protected by the layout. Clear product names, real prices in text rather than baked into an image, honest availability, structured data that matches what's actually on the page. None of that is new advice. What's new is that sloppiness there used to cost you a little conversion and now it costs you the whole interaction, because the assistant summarizes and moves on.

The Economy You're Selling Into

The Fed raised rates, and the consumer kept spending anyway

The FOMC raised the target range by a quarter point to 3.75 to 4 percent on September 16, unanimously, 12 to 0. The statement says “Economic activity is expanding at a solid pace,” that “domestic spending has been resilient,” and that “Inflation remains elevated.” The same morning, Census reported August retail and food services sales of $773.9 billion, “up 1.2 percent (±0.4 percent) from the previous month, and up 6.0 percent (±0.5 percent) from August 2025.” Nonstore retail ran up 9.9% over the year. Thursday brought two more. Initial jobless claims for the week ending September 12 came in at 196,000, down 10,000. And Freddie Mac put the 30-year fixed at 6.95%, up from 6.76% the week before, against 6.26% a year ago.

What it means This is a split market and you should plan two of everything. Nonstore up almost 10% on the year says the online basket is healthy. A 6.95% mortgage, up nearly seventy basis points from a year ago, says anything financed or tied to a house move is getting harder to close, which is my world at Sales Factory and probably yours if you sell furniture, appliances, or anything a contractor installs. Same consumer, two different answers depending on whether they're reaching for a card or a loan. Build the Q4 plan so the discretionary online side can scale up and the big-ticket financed side leans on payment clarity and patience rather than urgency.

The Marketer's Playbook

What To Do Monday Morning

Three moves with dates on them. Two are free.

1 · MondayDecide who owns the ChatGPT ad account, and write it down. The Shopify app installs in a minute and the HubSpot connection is live now, which means the decision gets made by whoever moves first unless you make it on purpose. Name an owner, set a test budget, agree on what a win looks like before the first dollar goes out.
2 · By WednesdayInventory every running ad with a synthetic face or voice, agency-produced included, and add a disclosure question to the creative brief. SB 1050 lets a violating ad be pulled, and pulled creative in Q4 costs far more than the disclosure would have.
3 · Before Q4 spend locksRe-run the plan against a 3.75 to 4 percent funds rate and a 6.95% mortgage. Split the budget so online discretionary can flex up while financed big-ticket gets payment clarity instead of a countdown clock.

The buyer you're selling to Here's the tension I keep chewing on. The hard numbers this week were good. Spending up 1.2% on the month, claims down to 196,000, the Fed describing activity as solid enough to justify a hike nobody dissented from. But the last sentiment read, the preliminary September figure of 47.8 from the University of Michigan, was a sharp drop from 51.7 in August. People are spending while telling surveys they feel worse. That gap is not irrational. It's a household that is fine this month and braced about next year, and bracing shows up in your funnel as longer consideration, more comparison, and a customer who wants to feel certain before committing. Sell to the bracing. Certainty is the offer right now, and it's cheaper than a discount.

Watch List & Sources

What I'm tracking into next week
  • 01 The ChatGPT Ads Shopify app goes international on September 23. OpenAI says it will be available “in markets where ChatGPT Ads are available.” If you run stores in more than one country, that is the date your team can start spending outside the US, and it is five days out. OpenAI
  • 02 Colorado's revised ADMT and Chatbot Safety rules are due by September 23, with the formal comment period open through October 26. Both laws take effect January 1, 2027. If you run a customer-facing chatbot or any automated decision-making in targeting, the revised draft tells you what you'll actually owe. Colorado Attorney General
  • 03 California SB 1000 is still sitting unsigned, and the Governor's action deadline is September 30. It carries an urgency clause, so it would bind on signature rather than on January 1. Coming the same month as SB 1050, it is worth a daily glance if you produce AI-generated creative at volume. California Legislature
  • 04 The FTC's comment period on its proposed personalized pricing policy statement closes September 25. The Commission's definition reaches any use of personal data to set prices based on what it believes an individual will pay, which is broad enough to touch individualized discounting and dynamic offers. FTC
  • 05 Amazon's Prime Big Deal Days run October 6 and 7 across 22 countries. Amazon's release promises “over one million items at Amazon's lowest price of the year so far,” with dates varying by country. If you sell a physical product, pricing, inventory and retail media budgets need to be locked well before then. Amazon

Every claim above traces to a primary source, and each story carries its own sources rather than pooling them. Where a figure is a company's own number, it says so in the copy. Past issues live in the AI in Marketing Weekly archive, the show is on the AI in Marketing Daily podcast page, and the reader questions I get most often are answered in the FAQ.

Four sourcing notes I owe you. I could not read the enrolled text of SB 1050 myself, because California's bill text server blocks automated retrieval, so everything here about the law comes from the Governor's own announcement of the signing and is described only that far. HubSpot's 3.6x, 3.2x and 2x figures are the company's own comparison of its customers to its other customers, with no sample size published. Pinterest's 80 billion monthly searches and the 85% cost-per-install result are Pinterest's own numbers, the second one from a single advertiser. And the Michigan sentiment figure of 47.8 is the preliminary September read published before this week, included as standing context rather than as news.

Pro Humanitate
A recurring close · The week, for humanity

Say Who's Talking

Wednesday handed our industry two things at once, and I don't think the pairing was an accident so much as a coincidence that happens to tell the truth.

One was a new way to buy a conversation. A person asks a question, and a brand that paid for the moment answers. The other was a rule that when the face in your ad was made by a machine, you have to say so.

Put them next to each other and you get the question underneath all of this work right now. When a customer is talking to something, do they know what they're talking to?

I'm genuinely excited about the ad product. Ten years of media buying has been about interrupting somebody, and a format built on a person choosing to keep the conversation going is a better deal for both sides. But it only works if the labeling is real. OpenAI says the sponsored conversation is “clearly labeled,” and I'd like us to be the industry that holds that line rather than the one that finds out how small the label can get.

Pro Humanitate doesn't mean being gentle. It means remembering there's a person on the other end who did not sign up to figure out what's real. They're already doing that work everywhere else this year.

So here's my ask, and it's a small one. Before you launch anything in Q4 that a person will talk to or watch, ask one question out loud in the room. Does the customer know who is talking to them? If the answer takes longer than a sentence, you have your next piece of work. It is the question we spend a whole term on in the Master of Digital Marketing and AI at Wake Forest. And honestly, that's a good problem to have, because it's the kind you can fix in an afternoon.

Sources: OpenAI, September 16, 2026 · Office of the Governor of California, September 16, 2026 · Wake Forest: Pro Humanitate

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