Need to Know News - January 22nd, 2026
In this week's Need to Know News edition:
🤖 OpenAI is exploring a move that could put ads inside ChatGPT... and there's a specific format they're considering first.
🤖 TikTok's new "Smart+" campaigns automate targeting before you touch a setting... early tests show surprising results for ROAS.
🤖 YouTube's CEO hinted at how the algorithm will treat AI-generated content... discover what it means for your video strategy.
And a whole lot more!
Veo 3.1 Makes Short-Form Video Creation Stupid Easy
Short prompts finally work. Google's latest Veo update lets you drop in a reference image and get back a dynamic video with actual dialogue and storytelling baked in. Character consistency got a major upgrade too, so your subjects look the same across multiple scenes.
That alone is huge for anyone building narratives without starting from scratch every time. Native 9:16 vertical output means YouTube Shorts and TikTok content without cropping or quality loss. And if you need broadcast-ready footage, there's upscaling to 1080p and 4K.
OpenAI Will Start Showing Ads Inside ChatGPT
Free users, get ready. OpenAI plans to test ads in the U.S. for the free and Go tiers in the coming weeks. Ads will show up at the bottom of answers when there's a relevant sponsored product, clearly labeled and separate from actual responses. Pro, Business, and Enterprise subscriptions stay ad-free.
OpenAI says responses won't be influenced by advertisers and conversations remain private. Users under 18 won't see ads, and sensitive topics like health and politics are excluded. ChatGPT Go costs $8 per month with expanded features. Whether users will trust sponsored content inside their AI assistant is another question entirely.
🚀 Every Ad, Landing Page, & Offer Need these 5 Crucial 'Copy Blocks'
Two $100+ million copywriters discovered what REALLY drives conversions...5 simple building blocks arranged in a specific order. This framework is so powerful that beginners are generating 5-figure profits with it. And you can learn the full system in just 33 minutes.
Discover All 5 'Copy Blocks' Now
YouTube's 2026 Bet: AI Tools for Creators, War on Slop
More than 1 million channels used YouTube's AI creation tools daily in December. This year, creators can make Shorts using their own likeness, produce games from text prompts, and experiment with AI music tools.
YouTube's Ask feature already hit 20 million users last month, answering questions about lyrics and recipes while people watch. Six million daily viewers consumed at least 10 minutes of autodubbed content. But CEO Neal Mohan acknowledges the flip side: detecting what's real versus AI-generated is getting harder. Reducing low-quality "AI slop" is now a 2026 priority, building on existing spam and clickbait systems.
Liza Minnelli and Art Garfunkel Made an Album with AI
levenLabs dropped The Eleven Album, a compilation of fully original tracks created with its AI music model. Contributors include Liza Minnelli, Art Garfunkel, Patrick Patrikios, and rapper IAMSU!. Some artists used AI to generate compositions they wrote over. Others experimented with unfamiliar genres or accelerated their production workflow.
Artists retain full ownership and collect all streaming revenue. Minnelli put it simply: she wanted to use her voice and new tools in service of expression, not instead of it. That framing matters. ElevenLabs is positioning this as a collaboration model where humans stay at the center.
TikTok's Smart+ Wants to Run Your Entire Ad Campaign
unning TikTok campaigns just got less manual. Smart+ scans your existing ads and eligible creator content from TikTok One, then recommends what'll perform best for your goals. All surfaced creator content comes pre-approved. TikTok handles creator payments at no extra cost.
The platform added preview functionality so you can see every creative combination before anything goes live. Early beta tests showed a 36% drop in cost per acquisition versus manual campaigns.
Adobe Acrobat Now Turns PDFs into Podcasts and Presentations
Dump a few documents into Adobe Acrobat and walk away with a podcast. That's the pitch behind Acrobat Studio's new Generate podcast feature. It summarizes reports, transcripts, or web pages into audio you can listen to while commuting or working out.
The Generate presentation feature works similarly. Pull content into a PDF Space, and AI creates an editable slide deck using Adobe Express templates. You can also edit PDFs through chat now. Ask it to remove pages, add e-signatures, or delete images using plain language. Adobe says AI usage across Acrobat increased 4x over the past year.
Full Story
Shopify at NRF 2026: Commerce Moves Into AI Conversations
Shopify came to NRF with a clear thesis: the search bar is no longer the front door to commerce. People are having conversations with AI and expecting to buy right there in the chat. That shift is already real....orders from AI searches on Shopify stores have jumped 11x since January 2025.
To make sure merchants don't lose their brand in the process, Shopify announced the Universal Commerce Protocol with Google, an open standard that preserves your pricing, bundles, and subscriptions when AI agents close the sale.
CFOs Spend More Time on Investor Relations as AI Reshapes Research
Institutional investors are using AI to analyze companies faster than ever. That's forcing CFOs to keep up. A Gartner survey of 146 finance leaders found 35% or more saw increases in the volume, frequency, and time sensitivity of investor communications last year.
The firm warns that controlling your company's narrative through manual methods alone is becoming impossible. The fix? Private AI tools that help IR teams match the speed of AI-powered research. Some of the world's biggest companies already deploy these tools for investor relations work, according to Gartner.
AI Catches Fake Returns by Spotting $36 Sweaters Disguised as $200 Ones
Return fraud hit record levels last year. As many as one in nine returns are now fraudulent. Happy Returns, a logistics company processing millions of returns for major brands, built an AI system called Return Vision to fight back. It assigns a fraud risk score to each item based on customer behavior.
Flagged items go to secondary screening where AI image analysis compares them against the original product. In one case, it caught a $36.99 sweater someone tried to pass off as a $200 purchase by detecting differences in the knit pattern.
Full Story
Google Search Now Reads Your Gmail and Photos to Give Better Answers
Your search results are about to get weirdly personal. Google's AI Mode can now pull context from your Gmail and Photos to tailor responses specifically to you. Planning a trip? It'll reference your hotel confirmation and past vacation selfies to suggest activities.
Shopping for a coat? It knows your flight is to Chicago in March and which brands you actually buy. The feature is opt-in only, rolling out to AI Pro and Ultra subscribers. You control the connections and can shut everything off anytime. Google says it won't train on your inbox directl
Thanks for reading.
Until next time!
The AI Marketers
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