This week proved something important: the tools and platforms your team relies on are changing faster than your contracts with them. Apple just undercut Adobe by $57/month. OpenAI decided ads inside AI conversations aren't "uniquely unsettling" anymore. And X only stopped generating deepfakes after governments forced their hand.

If you're a CMO or brand strategist, these aren't just tech stories—they're decisions that will hit your P&L, your workflows, and whether you can justify certain platforms to your board.

In today's issue:

Apple just bundled Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, and other tools into an exclusive Creator Studio for a $13/month subscription launching January 28th. The hook? Everything a modern creator needs, across every Apple device.

Smart move. It undercuts Adobe's $70 monthly Creative Cloud and packages Apple's best tools for less than lunch. Beforehand, it sounds like a good solution.

But here's the edgy part: must professionals abandon the tools they already mastered? Adobe owns 58-70% of the creative software market, and Canva grabbed 10-13% by making design simple for everyone, while Affinity is killing it with the pros.

(I'm excited to see how this plays out.)

Costs aren't only about money. Your team already has shortcuts memorized, workflows optimized, and files formatted for the tools they use daily. Apple's betting that ecosystem convenience beats years of muscle memory. For some, it's risky.

But marketing teams can also see it as a reduction of fragmentation between workflows. If your designers are constantly spending time exporting, reformatting, and switching between apps, delay might be your hidden expense.

If Apple actually delivers high-quality features and responsiveness, seamless handoff between devices, and eliminates workflow friction, speed can become the new competitive advantage in the industry.

Dystopian news. X confirmed that Grok will no longer allow users to edit people into revealing clothing, but only after Malaysia and Indonesia blocked the platform and California's Attorney General launched an investigation.

Here's what's happening: In late 2025, Elon Musk's AI venture, Grok, let users create sexualized deepfakes with prompts like "put her in a bikini" or "remove her clothes." Analysis of 20,000 Grok images found over half depicted people in minimal clothing, mostly women and minors (2%).

When backlash demanded accountability, xAI responded, "Legacy media lies." Then governments acted. On January 14, X announced geo-blocking the feature in countries where it's illegal. Image editing is now restricted to paid subscribers, linking the feature "to identifiable paid subscribers who can be held accountable," according to X's managing director.

If your brand advertises on X, you're funding a platform that needed government threats to stop generating child sexual abuse material. xAI's response wasn't to remove the capability; it was to charge for it and geo-block where legally required.

For CMOs, this is a board-level question: Can you justify ad spend on a platform doing the legal minimum under pressure? The move to restrict features to paid users doesn't eliminate risk. It just makes exploitation traceable.

Food for thought.

OpenAI announced Friday it will start testing ads in ChatGPT for free and $8/month "Go" users in the coming weeks. Ads will appear at the bottom of responses when there's a "sponsored product or service based on the topic of your current conversation." Plus, Pro, and Enterprise subscribers stay ad-free.

ChatGPT's responses won't be influenced by ads, user data won't be sold to advertisers, and ads won't appear near sensitive topics like health or politics. At least, this is what they mentioned about it.

CEO Sam Altman once called combining ads with AI "uniquely unsettling." Now OpenAI has signed over $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals and needs to pay for it. With an estimated 800 million weekly active users, ads suddenly look less unsettling and more essential for the business.

The playbook is known: build trust, scale audiences, then monetize. Meta did it. Google did it. Now OpenAI's doing it, just inside conversations instead of beside search results.

Ads won't sit beside search results anymore. They'll appear inside the conversational flow, right after ChatGPT delivers a helpful answer. This is contextual persuasion at the exact moment someone's deciding what to buy.

For marketers, this creates a new playing field where it isn't about keywords anymore but topics instead. Will you let your competitors get there first while you're still optimizing Google?

The moment someone asks ChatGPT for a brand, service, or product recommendation, the race is on.

Last week, Lenovo unveiled Football AI Pro at CES, a generative AI tool that gives all 48 teams at the 2026 World Cup the same analytical capabilities. Built on FIFA's Football Language model, it analyzes hundreds of millions of data points and generates insights in text, video, and 3D graphs.

So, tournament rookies like Curaçao and Cabo Verde now get the same data resources as major footballing nations. Elite teams have always had sophisticated analytics; they just paid privately for them. Football AI Pro makes it equal for all.

AI-powered 3D player avatars (each scanned in one second) to improve offside calls, plus digital twins of venues to monitor crowds in real-time, will be some of the tech features deployed at the World Cup. With six billion people watching across 104 matches in three countries, it deserves it.

Lenovo's not sponsoring the World Cup. They're rewriting how it works. By changing the rules of who gets access to elite analytics, they're proving that innovation isn't about having the best tech. Instead, it's about changing the game itself.

When brands take that leap, they set a new standard that forces competitors to follow or look behind. Sponsorships that transform infrastructure create more value than those that just buy visibility.

e.l.f. and Liquid Death just dropped Lip Embalms: limited-edition lip balms packaged in mini Liquid Death cans, featuring flavors like Severed Lime and Sweet Reaper.

The launch keeps on showing bizarre and grotesque humor, including a horror-musical spot starring Glothar, their death-metal mascot, serenading his daughter about the dangers of chapped lips.

What makes this work isn't the shock value (it's also their second collaboration). What matters is that both brands actually have strong points of view and fanbases willing to follow them anywhere, even into makeup aisles. When you commit to weird, weird commits back.

Most brand collaborations go surface-level because they co-brand products that play safe. Liquid Death and e.l.f. went the opposite direction and sold out their first collab limited edition in 45 minutes.

The lesson is that customers don't want safe partnerships. They choose brands bold enough to do something nobody else would try.

When brands with powerful personalities team up, they create cultural moments that feel organic and unique. That's what drives engagement, earns media, and builds brand equity, not safe moves.