Each day, New Digital Age gathers the most interesting digital marketing industry news from around the web…
RETAIL
Performance Marketing World – Bethany Lee, 12th August 2026
UK consumers forecast to spend £17.9bn during Black Friday and Christmas Sales
71% of shoppers are planning to cut back on non-essentials this year as brands fight for consumer loyalty.
AI
Decision Marketing – Charlie McKelvey, 12th August 2026
Gartner: CMOs risk falling into $910bn AI platform trap
Marketing chiefs are being urged to not get caught in the AI advertising trap, amid claims the technology will soon have such a tight grip on campaign management that CMOs will be unable to control how their ads are bought, priced and delivered.
Digiday – Kimeko McCoy, 11th August 2026
Why agentic media buying is becoming a client-by-client configuration job
There’s a lot of promise in agentic media buying. The issue is in the governance. Butler/Till should know. The independent media agency has been testing programmatic media buying agents for months now, concluding at least half a dozen new tests since May, Scott Ensign, chief strategy officer at Butler/Till, told Digiday.
Digiday – Krystal Scanlon, 12th August 2026
Lifestyle brand Stanley 1913 adapts its marketing for the AI search era
Adapting to AI search is a muscle memory problem, not a hacking problem — at least that’s how Stanley 1913 sees it.
DIGEST
ExchangeWire – Sheila Obeng-King, 11th August 2026
In today’s Digest, we discuss a New Mexico judge ordering Meta to pay an additional USD$567m (£419.5m) over child safety issues, Burnham fast-tracking subscription trap crackdown as cost-of-living tour begins, and YouTube extending its shopping affiliate program to UK creators.
AMAZON
PPC LAND – Luis Rijo, 12th August 2026
Amazon DSP gains publisher-hosted creatives for GAM deals in 33 markets
Amazon opened a creative pathway that lets buyers run programmatic guaranteed deals in Google Ad Manager without shipping the ad file through its own systems, extending the reach of its demand-side platform into inventory that has stayed out of arm’s-length reach for years.
BIG TECH
Forbes – Luis E. Romero, 11th August 2026
Meta’s Muse Glimmer Courts Users As Big Tech And Governments Shape AI
The most consequential feature of Meta’s new AI model is not its 30 billion parameters. It is where the model can live, and therefore who can control it.
