Today, we’re bringing you the latest in AI-powered marketing and business strategies. Here’s what’s inside:

🚨 AI Top Story: OpenAI just dropped two smarter, more collaborative models—here’s how o3 and o4-mini are built for real marketing workflows.

🎥 AI YouTube Resource Of The Week: An overview of OpenAI’s latest models in action: visual reasoning, memory, deep search, and serious coding speed

🎯 AI Use Case Of The Week: L’Oréal Builds a Global AI-Powered Creative Lab with Google

🌟 Creator Spotlight: Charlie Hills on how to export your LinkedIn data and use ChatGPT o3 to generate a personal performance analysis

We tested OpenAI's New Models—Here's What Stood Out

Meet o3 and o4-mini: AI That's Actually Useful

So OpenAI just dropped two new models: o3 and o4-mini—and they’re pretty impressive. If you’ve been keeping an eye on where AI’s headed, this is one of those moments where things clearly level up.

o3 is designed for the kind of work that takes more than just speed—it’s tuned for depth, structure, and real reasoning. It’s sharper, more analytical, and especially good when there’s a visual or data-driven element involved.

If you’ve been following our recent takes on large vision-language models (LVLMs), this feels like a major step toward turning that promise into something you can actually use in day-to-day work.

You can feed it diagrams, whiteboard sketches, product mockups, even fairly complex images, and instead of just identifying what’s in the image, it can interpret the structure, understand spatial relationships, and reason through what the visual is trying to convey. Zooming in, rotating, analysing - basically treating visuals like part of the problem to solve, not just static info.

Then there’s o4-mini, built for speed and versatility without compromising on capability. It’s smaller, faster, and super efficient. Ideal for those everyday marketing workflows that need to move quickly without cutting corners. It’s fantastic for generating content at scale; ad variants, subject lines, social copy - but it also handles things like adjusting tone across platforms or personalising copy for different segments. Essentially, It does the unglamorous stuff so you don’t have to.

Both models support tool use, so they can browse the web, write and run code, analyse documents, generate images—the full toolkit. That opens up even more creative workflows: ask o3 to analyse campaign performance data, then spin up fresh creative based on what’s working. Or have o4-mini iterate on landing page headlines while you focus on big-picture messaging.

The exciting part isn’t just that these models are smarter; it’s that they’re becoming more useful in the way we actually work. They’re faster at turning insights into output, better at navigating across formats, and much more aware of the context they’re operating in.

What stands out here isn’t just that the models are getting more advanced, it’s that they’re starting to feel genuinely more collaborative. They don’t just respond to prompts, they help you work through problems.

Whether you’re deep in a creative sprint or just need help getting the next thing out the door, o3 and o4-mini is showing us what useful AI actually looks like in the day-to-day.

📦 How AI and Data Are Shaping the Future of Packaging - Smart packaging is here—AI is helping brands personalise, optimize, and even track engagement through the box itself.

📈 Global Survey: 92% of Early Adopters See ROI from AI - Early AI adopters are seeing returns—and fast. It’s paying off in efficiency, revenue, and competitive edge.

📬 I Tested the Top 5 Email Marketing AI Tools: Here’s the Smartest Way to Grow Your Audience - Which AI tool writes the best emails? This deep dive compares the top five to help you grow faster, smarter.

🔍 How To Get Brand Mentions In Generative AI - Want your brand to show up in AI search results? Here’s how to start getting mentioned by chatbots like ChatGPT.

CHARLIE HILLS - This post walks through how to export your LinkedIn data and use ChatGPT o3 to generate a personal performance analysis

A great overview of OpenAI’s latest models in action: visual reasoning, memory, deep search, and serious coding speed

L’Oréal Builds a Global AI-Powered Creative Lab with Google

The Overview

L’Oréal is using Google’s generative AI tools to streamline how it produces campaign content across its massive portfolio of beauty brands.

Through its internal generative AI beauty lab, “Creaitech,” L’Oréal is deploying tools like Imagen 3 and Gemini to accelerate creative tasks like concept development, storyboard creation, and packaging redesigns. What once took weeks now takes days; saving time, cutting costs, and unlocking new creative flexibility.

Their approach is rooted in efficiency and localisation: one product photo can now be placed in settings like a Japanese garden or a Parisian street, instantly adapting to different markets while staying true to brand.

The Implementation

Imagen 3 & Gemini (Google Cloud): Used to generate product visuals and storyboards that reflect L’Oréal’s global creative strategy.

Prompt-to-Visual Workflow: Marketers describe a campaign concept (e.g., “L’Oréal Paris shampoo ad”) and the model generates tailored imagery to support it.

Location-Aware Customisation: Generated visuals can be automatically placed in locally relevant settings to boost resonance with specific regional audiences.

Veo 2: L’Oréal plans to experiment with animating static visuals into short-form video loops, adding motion to its AI-generated assets.

Ethical Guardrails: L’Oréal has committed not to use AI to generate images of people—no life-like faces, skin, or body visuals in external marketing.

The gift that keeps giving, or doing too much?