It's officially over for agencies

This week:

The new marketing trend of 2026, creators are paying the “AI tax” in hardware, and why fashion still dominates mixed-reality ads.

Brands Don’t Need Agencies. They Need Showrunners.

Entertainment is swallowing advertising: Netflix is scaling the ad tier fast and is planning interactive ad formats for 2026, pushing ads closer to “watchable/interactive content” than classic spots. At the same time, platforms are framing creator content as studio-grade programming—the battleground is no longer “ads vs content,” it’s content vs content.

The clearest “this is real” signal is who’s getting hired: Gap literally created a Chief Entertainment Officer role (Pam Kaufman). And “entertainment operators” are increasingly becoming marketing leaders in adjacent worlds too—like the LPGA hiring a former Dude Perfect brand chief as CMO, explicitly to scale storytelling and fan-style content.

The proof is in the output: Gentle Monster used an interactive horror escape game (“THE ROOM”) as a collection launch mechanic. Audi leaned into slot-machine fantasy. Reins turned product discovery into a “Guess Who” game.

What it signals creatives: you don’t just need better ads, you need entertainment-grade production systems (modular assets, real-time pipelines, interactive layers).

Check out our collection of the most recent gamified ads we spotted and loved.

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Yes, we have now an AI tax on creators.

The “$900 RAM kit” meme is funny because it’s hurtfully true: AI is turning memory into the new choke point. TechRadar just flagged the DDR5 “RAM price crisis” getting worse again, with DDR5 in Germany 4.4× more expensive than July 2025 (and still climbing).

Data centers don’t just buy GPUs — they hoover up HBM and server-grade DRAM at scale, and memory makers follow the margin.

The knock-on effect is a memory supercycle where PC and creator-grade RAM gets squeezed and prices stay elevated longer than people expect.

For creative tech this is basically an “AI tax” on creators. As memory prices rise, the cost of doing 3D, compositing, local AI, high-res edit, and multi-app workflows goes up — not because artists suddenly “need more,” but because AI infrastructure is bidding the supply away. Compal even warned memory could jump from ~15–18% to 35–40% of a PC’s material cost, which is exactly how “hardware inflation” sneaks into creative budgets

Signal to watch: teams will shift toward efficiency-first pipelines (smarter caching/proxies, tighter texture budgets, scene optimization), plus more hybrid cloud workflows where compute/memory lives in data centers instead of on every desk. Tools that deliver “good enough” results with less RAM become a competitive advantage, not a nice-to-have.

‼️REMINDER

💡 Industry Insights

Why Fashion Wins at Mixed-Reality Ads

Fashion & apparel kicked off the mixed-reality wave, and it’s still the category that understands the format best: product-first, location-coded, instantly shareable.

In our latest breakdown, we pulled 14 fashion executions that actually went viral—from Jacquemus’ rolling Bambino bags in Paris (48.8M views) to Adidas’ Messi spot (43.5M views)—and extracted the creative patterns you can reuse in pitches.

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