Google Analytics is introducing cross-channel budgeting tools designed to help marketers plan and manage their ad spend across various marketing channels.

Within Google Analytics, users can now create two different kinds of plans. Projection plans allow marketers to forecast performance and see whether campaigns are on track to hit spend, conversions, and revenue targets. The scenario planning tool, meanwhile, enables marketers to model different budget levels to compare how specific adjustments to spend might impact returns. 

The cross-channel budget planning tools are currently in beta and will be rolled out to Google Analytics customers gradually over the coming months, a company spokesperson told ADWEEK. 

Taken together, the features act as a planning dashboard—not to change existing budgets or in-flight campaigns, but to provide data-backed recommendations and forecasts for future spend allocation. 

In a post Thursday, Google Analytics director of product management Steve Ganem positioned the update as part of the platform’s broader efforts to enhance performance measurement and budgeting. He suggested that projection plans and scenario plans could be used in tandem with attribution and conversions reporting features integrated into Google Analytics earlier this year. 

“Our long-term vision is to give you a truly unified and simplified measurement experience that will enable you to confidently make advertising budget decisions,” Ganem wrote.

Other recent Google Analytics updates include more flexible options for conversion tracking and automated importing of cost and impression data from platforms including Meta, TikTok, Snap, Reddit, and Pinterest. 

Last week, Google posted its first-ever $100 billion quarter, with significant revenue growth stemming from its Cloud business and YouTube advertising. The tech behemoth is on track to shell out between $91 billion and $93 billion in expenditures this year, with much of it going toward AI investments.

When Kat Cole was first approached about joining AG1 post Covid-19, she hesitated. After years running billion-dollar brands like Cinnabon and managing portfolios spanning multiple products and markets, stepping into a smaller company — one with a single hero product and a niche following — felt like a step down.

Cole knew the business could grow, but she questioned whether it was the right fit for her ambitions, and whether she could make an impact in a category so different from her past experience.

The hesitation lingered until a personal moment put things into perspective. Cole was navigating postpartum recovery, low energy, and the demands of a high-pressure career while raising a family. Her kitchen cabinet was a cluttered testament to trial and error, stacked with powders, pills, and supplements she had tried to regain her vitality.

One day, her husband opened the cabinet, surveyed the chaos, and handed her a single packet. It was AG1. “Stop everything. Just start here,” he said. Cole recalled it at Brandweek 2025 as a near-“ikigai” moment. Within weeks, she noticed better energy, improved digestion, and a newfound clarity. 

Since taking the helm as COO in 2021, Cole has expanded AG1 from a single-channel DTC business into a multi-product, multi-channel brand stocked in stores like Costco, while maintaining its premium image and community-driven ethos. Now CEO, she has leaned into storytelling that highlights daily rituals, wellness, and accessibility rather than positioning the brand exclusively for peak performers.

That approach is on full display in AG1’s first global campaign, “Good Morning, Moon,” which went live this month. “We’ve evolved beyond our roots, got $160 million in revenue, and changed our name from Athletic Greens to AG1,” Cole said.

Involving the CEO early 

Cole emphasizes close collaboration with her marketing team and CMO, ensuring campaigns reflect both the brand’s identity and the science behind the products. 

“The concept [‘Good Morning, Moon’] was first introduced in February and launched in November. A lot changed in markets and business in that window,” she said. “A CEO wants to be brought along in the creative process because your financial stakes are higher, you could also have really material things happen in the world that make your approach to how the creative will show up in the world need to be tweaked for maximum impact.” 

One example, per Cole, came from customer feedback. Marketing under the old Athletic Greens brand skewed male and felt aimed only at athletes, when in fact the audience is roughly 50/50 male and female, with most women over 40 and busy professionals.

Cole said the insight was clear: Aspirational messaging matters, but customers also need to see themselves in the campaigns. The solution was creative variants highlighting families, professionals, and everyday high performers — relatable without losing the brand’s edge.

“The CMO might not see those sprouts of what’s coming right away. And if we have a touch point regularly, we can calibrate,” she said. 

Axing marketing dollars

Cole has also bet heavily on science over traditional marketing. AG1 redirected substantial marketing dollars into double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled human trials and committed an additional $20 million over three years to research at the intersection of nutrition, gut health, and metabolic health.

“It was very clear that the category is going to get more crowded. The only thing that will cut through is more science and credible research,” she said. The brand raised the bar on its own formula, running four human clinical trials before rolling out the updated product to existing customers over six months.

Flavor variants launched directly into Costco, marking the first time AG1 entered brick-and-mortar retail. AGC, a sleep-support product under development for two years, followed.

Through it all, Cole said, the brand has stayed focused on quality research, understanding its customers, and competing not with lookalikes but with the broader behaviors and habits that shape health.

Women’s sports investments have become a winning strategy for brands, but companies that aren’t diving in are in danger of missing out.

At ADWEEK’s Brandweek in Atlanta on Tuesday, the team from female-sports-focused talent firm Always Alpha—Olympian and ADWEEK Brand Genius Allyson Felix, her brother and fellow sprinter Wes Felix, and CEO Cosette Chaput—took to the stage to illustrate the opportunity in women’s sports.

Among the stats, the group shared that women’s sports attract less than 1% of sponsorship dollars, but women athletes drive 2.8 times more purchase intent than lifestyle influencers. Chaput noted that, though influencers have vanity metrics, athletes have true engagement among their followers.

“With female athletes and broadcasters and coaches, the relationship to their fandom is so much more evolved, and the audience is undeniable,” Chaput said.

The group acknowledged that it’s easier for companies to stick with the same tactics and big names they’ve used in the past; however, taking a risk on women athletes and showing up in new ways can pay off in a big way. For instance, Allyson Felix and her team helped make Pampers part of the Paris 2024 Olympics by introducing the first nursery to the Olympic Village. This brand promotion went viral, making the company, which is not typically associated with sports, a talked-about part of the Games.

“We are just at the very tip of the iceberg of where we can go and where the potential is, but we have to make a long-term investment,” Allyson Felix said about the opportunity in women’s sports. “This is not something that is going to happen overnight.”

The group identified the upcoming LA28 Olympics as an opportunity for smaller brands to also jump in and help elevate the next generation of female athletes, growing alongside them in a Games taking place in the United States. For brands that get in early, the opportunity can provide exponential ROI, and there’s plenty of room to grow.

“When you look at the size of what’s possible in this category, we still have a long way to go,” Wes Felix said.

Elizabeth Banks was floating down a river in Utah when she first saw Archer Roose Wines fitting into her life. The Pitch Perfect star and Cocaine Bear director cracked open a can of sparkling rosé and sipped with a group of friends under a wide-open blue sky. 

She’d been pitched on a potential partnership with the burgeoning canned wine brand and decided to take the leap, signing on as a part owner and chief creative officer in 2021. 

At ADWEEK’s flagship annual event, Brandweek, in Atlanta, Banks joined the brand’s founder and CEO Marian Leitner-Waldman, to recount their shared journey of breaking into a buttoned-up wine industry with a relaxed new concept, and their plans for bringing canned wines to the masses. 

At the heart of their business proposition: the idea that wine need not be snooty, but can be a casual beverage that fits into everyday moments at movie theaters, baseball games, and in-flight. 

“My dad worked in a factory [when I was] growing up. My mom worked in a bank. We did not drink fancy wine,” Banks said onstage. “I did not know how to pronounce the word ‘sommelier’ until I was well into adulthood, and I always felt a little intimidated by wine.” 

In everything from packaging to distribution, Archer Roose is trying to upend archaic ideas about wine culture. Its marketing is a core part of this effort. 

“What does a wine ad look like? Close your eyes and think about it. It’s an older couple, and they’re walking through a vineyard, and the sun is setting behind them. They’ve got a goblet of red or something, and it’s called some French word, and they’re talking about terroir,” Banks joked. 

In partnership with Leitner-Waldman, Banks has taken a drastically different approach. In a handful of campaigns launched since Banks’ entry into the company, the comedian and actor plays an exaggerated, out-of-touch version of her A-list self, a foil to Leitner-Walman’s businesslike personality. 

Banks not only leads Archer Roose Wines’ marketing efforts, but has become a key business leader, working with Leitner-Waldman to ink deals with Princess Cruises, Target, and JetBlue, while drawing inspiration from the spirits industry to better inform the company’s distribution practices. 

As the brand pushes to get its cans in more venues and in more hands, a few benchmarks will remain top-of-mind. 

“We don’t just look at what our growth is like year-over-year,” said Leitner-Waldman. “We look at it on a per-account basis. How frequently does that account reorder, and how do those orders grow over time? We incentivize our marketing team on this, and we also incentivize our sales team on this, so that we’re all rowing in the same direction.”

The ultimate goal? Make Archer Roose the go-to casual option for wine drinkers everywhere. 

In Banks’ words: “In every stadium where sports is being played, I want people to be able to walk up to a bar and say, ‘Can I have an Archer Roose?’ like they would order a Budweiser.” 

Ahead of Stranger Things Season 5 premiering this month, Netflix has a whole new acronym to turn its ad reporting upside down.

Today, the company announced several advertising updates, including revealing that it’s using a new metric to calculate engagement. Rather than using Monthly Active Users (MAU), which focused on profiles interacting on its ad tier, the streamer will now use Monthly Active Viewers (MAV).

So what’s MAV? Well, since Netflix just invented it, here’s what the company says:

According to Netflix, the metric encompasses viewers who have watched at least one minute of ads on Netflix per month, with the number being multiplied by an estimated average number of people within a household—a number Netflix gets from its first-party data. The company says it’s a more complete metric. For example, Netflix’s WWE content includes ads, so viewers who watch WWE but have a non-ad account would now be counted.

Using this new calculation, Netflix says it has 190 million MAVs. Previously, the company reported it had 94 million MAUs. (Again, MAUs are not MAVs.)

“We did discuss a lot of the acronyms because we wanted to make it clearer, and we landed on viewers because we thought it really captured that co-viewing experience and let us catch that full audience,” Mitzi Reaugh, Netflix vp of financial strategy, told ADWEEK during a press call.

Regardless of the metric it chooses, Netflix has experienced significant growth in its ad tier since coming into the market around three years ago. This year, Netflix announced it was on pace to double its ad revenue, and ADWEEK previously reported that Netflix has around half of its household viewership happening on its ad tier.

“Nothing is going to change in terms of how we’re going to market and selling in,” Amy Reinhard, Netflix’s ads president, said during the press call. “We’re just trying to provide more information for our advertisers and buyers.”

In addition to the metric update, Netflix also revealed partners for some of its marquee shows and events.

Among the highlights, the company said Emily in Paris has partnered with Peroni Nastro Azzurro in the U.S. on a 360 campaign. Meanwhile, Stranger Things is teaming up with Doritos on a custom flavor, bringing a revival of the ’80s Gatorade Citrus Cooler, partnering with Fiat on a custom Stranger Things car in Latin America, and joining Nestlé to showcase a limited-edition cookie packaging.

Netflix’s NFL Christmas games are also partnering with FanDuel, Verizon, Accenture, and Tide. Additionally, after testing dynamic ad insertion (DAI) with live events such as WWE Raw and SmackDown, the streamer will introduce DAI to its Christmas NFL games in the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the U.K., with more DAI coming in 2026.

Other ad updates include Netflix testing interactive video ads in the U.S. and Canada, which will roll out globally in Q2 2026 and cater to members’ viewing behaviors while allowing advertisers to benefit from dynamic templates.

The company is also stepping up its targeting in 2026, with advancements in demographic targeting to include more categories, such as household income and education; a global partnership expansion with LiveRamp; and in-market targeting to reach consumers looking to purchase products. Netflix is also testing a planning API to help agencies utilize in-house planning tools and real-time forecasting across demos and geographies.

Coca-Cola is doubling down on generative AI. A year after its first AI-generated holiday campaign drew mixed reactions and anger, the company leaned even further into the technology this holiday season. 

Pratik Thakar, the Coca-Cola Company’s global vice president and head of generative AI, said there’s no retreating from AI.

“The genie’s out of the bottle,” he told an audience Monday at ADWEEK’S Brandweek 2025 event in Atlanta. “You either lead with it, or you keep crying about it.”

While last year’s AI-generated Christmas ad spurred backlash and anger from parts of the creative community, it turned out to be one of Coca-Cola’s most effective holiday campaigns with consumers. According to Thakar, research firm Kantar ranked it as the top-performing Christmas ad globally last year across all categories—a result that encouraged the company to continue experimenting with generative tools.

“It worked for our business,” he said. “That’s what motivated us to keep going.” Thakar added that while some in the industry criticized the ad’s visuals, such as the way “wheels weren’t moving properly,” consumers didn’t see it through that lens.

“We took that as positive feedback,” he said, noting that this year’s campaign benefitted from major advances in AI-generated cinematography, physics, and rendering quality.

Embedding AI throughout

Despite early skepticism, Coca-Cola has emerged as one of the most visible case studies of how a global brand can operationalize generative AI beyond marketing experiments.

The global beverage brand partnered with OpenAI in 2023, shortly after it launched ChatGPT, Thakar said, adding that Coca-Cola’s approach has been to embed AI into existing teams rather than build a separate department.

Thakar’s comments underscore a broader shift among brand leaders who see generative AI not as a passing trend or cost-cutting measure, but as an inevitable force reshaping how products are made, marketed, and managed. It also signals how legacy marketers are trying to turn early creative wins into long-term business transformation.

“The global Christmas campaign is our year’s biggest business opportunity. [Would we] want to do cost cutting with your biggest business opportunity? No, at least not at Coca-Cola,” Thakar said. 

Coca-Cola is also experimenting with AI through more than a dozen incubators with major tech companies, gaining early access to models to test how the technology can drive creativity and efficiency, he added. Beyond marketing, the company is now applying AI to research and development, supply chain, and knowledge management—but without creating a separate AI department. 

“We don’t want to, we shouldn’t [separate AI] because then it becomes a silo,” Thakar said.