According to the Trump Ventures website, Donald Trump’s family business is licensing the president’s name to a mobile phone service that later this year will release a series of gold smartphones with a $47-per-month cost. 

The announcement -- made by Trump’s eldest sons -- states that Trump Mobile will offer 5G service through AT&T, Verizon and T Mobile, with unlimited talk, text and data, device protection, roadside assistance, telehealth services, free international calls and more. 

Notably, the Trump family says the gold-colored smartphones will cost $499 and will be American made, giving consumers an alternative to mobile devices made internationally by Apple and Samsung. By putting down a $100 downpayment, consumers can reserve their phone now before its planned September launch. 

The phone is designed to run on the Android operating system, and will be unlockable via a fingerprint sensor.

The service will be owned and operated by a separate business called “T1 Mobile,” which will license the Trump brand. 

In its description, Trump Mobile resembles other MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) mobile companies, like Mint Mobile and an upcoming brand owned by the SmartLess podcast hosts.

Its potential, however, has already been doubted by experts. 

For example, David Pierce wrote in The Verge that the venture “seems utterly unfathomable.” 

Pierce “absolutely” doubts that the phone will be “designed and built in the USA,” citing the likelihood that the smartphone prototype shared on Monday “appears to be nearly 100 percent Photoshopped,” with specs “that don’t make a lot of sense together,” including the lack of information regarding a processor. 

Whereas a senior analyst at telecom research firm Counterpoint told The Washington Post that mass-producing a modern smartphone in the U.S. is “not possible” due to the development of tech components being based almost entirely overseas. 

Despite a history of failed “Trump” businesses,  the president has made hundreds of millions of dollars on his family’s ventures, reporting over $600 million in income and $1.6 billion in assets on Friday. 

Businesses have relied on Adobe Experience Cloud applications to manage and optimize their presence across major channels including web and mobile.

As of today, Adobe LLM Optimizer allows teams to stay ahead of shifting consumer behaviors.

A suite of features introduced Monday at Cannes Lions in France enables businesses to monitor AI-driven traffic and benchmark brand visibility, while receiving recommendations that marketers can deploy across their digital properties. The tools are intended to improve discoverability and performance, and to support engagement and conversions.

The LLM Optimizer aims to make it easier for marketers to track and boost visibility across chatbots that have begun to compete with Google search.

Loni Stark, vice president of strategy and product at Adobe Experience Cloud, believes generative AI (GAI) interfaces have become go-to tools for how customers discover, engage and make purchase decisions.

Adobe LLM Optimizer, an enterprise application announced today at Cannes Lions, enables consumers to have conversations with their favorite brands.

It was built to support the existing work of search engine optimization (SEO) leads, content strategists, digital marketers and web publishers — with dashboards, workflows and alerts for each persona.

Insights and recommendations are supported on AI-driven traffic, making the data accessible across an organization.

The application also supports enterprise-ready frameworks such as Agent-to-Agent (A2A) and Model Context Protocol (MCP). LLM Optimizer can also integrate with third-party solutions and agency partners.

Data from Adobe Analytics shows a 3,500% increase in traffic to U.S. retail sites and a 3,200% increase to U.S. travel sites from generative AI sources in May 2025. Those figures can be compared with July 2024 data that measures the traffic of users clicking on a link, despite some data suggesting otherwise.

The tool can monitor and increase AI-driven traffic being leveraged by interfaces to deliver query responses. This provides teams with real-time data on how brands are showing up across browsers and chat services.

Teams can better understand queries that consumers ask. Visibility into data identifies the most relevant parts of the company's business and how their product offerings serve up on their sites.

Side-by-side benchmarking allows teams to evaluate visibility against competitors across high-value queries — identifying gaps in areas where business should be more prominent.

Suggested changes can include technical fixes -- non-production URLs being indexed, pages returning 4xx or 5xx code, or missing/invalid page metadata.

LLM Optimizer also can project traffic value via dollars, allowing teams to understand and prioritize the optimizations that will drive the greatest increase in visibility across AI-powered browsers and chat services.

As if the creative advertising TV community wasn’t worried enough, the NBA Finals -- a major sports TV event -- witnessed its first AI-generated advertising spot, produced with some help from Google Gemini, its AI tech group. 

The basic Google Gemini was originally designed to perform tasks such as writing, brainstorming, summarizing and generating images. 

Now with Google Veo 3 -- launched last month -- it added in an AI video-generation model that produced a buzz -- and a loud, fan-centric commercial to spin NBA action excitement including images of the individual fans loudly talking and screaming for their favorite NBA Finals teams, the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers.

The ad was for Kalshi, a  federally regulated exchange that allows trading on the outcome of future events -- including political elections, economic indicators, sports, and more.

While text-to-video AI models have been around for a while, the difference here is that Veo 3 can place realistic looking, lip-synced, spoken dialogue onto people and around big time cinematic video.

CNBC says this is the start of how advertising can be more fully disrupted -- with no actors, no location shoots, and no sound stage. 

Should TV viewers be alerted to this -- especially in the spot where a small, shirtless Pacers fan holding a dog exposes his not-so-appealing physique?

Does that guy really exist?

Consumers are probably well aware these days that certain images and short videos on mobile devices could be artificially produced and manipulated.

Now more than ever, we need to assume that some big-screen images -- especially in places where we don’t expect them -- could be revealed through AI technology.

If that isn’t enough, high-profile AI executive and CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman now says AI may already have surpassed human intelligence.

But can it drive downhill to the basket, and hit the big three to win the game with two seconds to go.. and then yell -- boo-yah?

Oh yeah. But not in real life.

Humans love excitement. AI already knows that.

Metaverse gaming developer Gamefam has announced a playable Roblox launch dedicated to FIFA’s upcoming Club World Cup tournament -- a U.S.-based competition among 32 men’s club soccer teams with a $1 billion pot. 

Starting on June 14, the established Roblox game, “Super League Soccer,” will make 13 of the Club World Cup’s participating teams -- including Manchester City, Borussia Dortmund and Boca Juniors -- playable for the first time on the popular gaming platform. 

“The experience will reflect real-life FIFA Club World Cup look and feel including branding and FIFA sponsor presence, with virtual merch and pitch-side signage,” FIFA says. 

While competing as a top club in point-driven challenges, players will be able to unlock exclusive virtual merch, like shoes, gloves, hats, soccer balls, and goal effects branded by the tournament and Adidas.

The game will also feature live tracking of the real-world tournament via a continuously updated bracket within the game. 

Advertisers will also have the opportunity to appear as in-game tournament sponsors through in-game signage and social-media content, with FIFA sponsors showing up on virtual wearables and pitch-side signage.

The Club World Cup has been active for over 20 years, but has never been this big. In 2025, FIFA has expanded the competition from seven to 32 teams, providing the winning team with a newly designed trophy and the chance to make over $125 million. 

Super League Soccer is one of Roblox’s top sports-centric experiences, amassing over 725 million visits and 550 thousand average daily gameplay sessions among the platform’s 380 million monthly active users. 

With Gen Z and Gen Alpha users spending an average 2.4 hours on Roblox everyday, FIFA is following other professional sports leagues, like the NFL, in trying to appeal to a younger audience. 

Gamefam’s Chief Business Officer Ricardo Briceno believes that the way newer generations of gamers “experience sports is shifting from passive viewing to active participation…They’re not just watching matches, they’re stepping into the game, customizing their avatars, and building real-time connections with global fandoms.”

Briceno says that FIFA plans on continuing to work with Gamefam on “a broader vision…where leagues, clubs, tournaments, member associations and brands come together” in new ways. 

Gamefam originally worked with FIFA last year, hosting the Club World Cup trophy reveal in Super League Soccer, which attracted over 5.5 million visits and 70 million minutes of engagement over the course of three days. According to FIFA, 84% of players said they planned to follow the tournament after playing. 

The Club World Cup 2025 Roblox integration will be live for the next month on consoles, PCs, mobile and tablets. 

Apple iOS 26 is getting a visual search feature by combining Visual Intelligence with Apple Intelligence, giving brands another way to be found on iPhones and iPads. 

The role AI plays gives brands a new marketing channel to help consumers shop for products on their devices by snapping a screenshot.

The search function found on the bottom of the screen can recognize images in similar products in the screenshot. It also can identify events and pre-populate a user's calendar.

The feature is intended to remove the middle step of unlocking the phone, opening Google or ChatGPT, and typing a query or uploading a photo to get an answer. Removing the middle step has been a recent topic of discussion, from all types of companies such ad-tech platforms to search engines.

Billy Sorrentino, senior director of human interface at Apple, said it works automatically with any app in the App Store.

“Open a social media app, and you see a great jacket,” he said, adding that taking a snapshot of the jacket and one tap on the image search button on the bottom right of the iPhone screen allows the user to find similar images on Google or other frequently used apps like Etsy.

Sorrentino also took a snapshot of a lamp to find other similar products to the one identified in the photo.

There also is an Ask button on the left side of the screen. Taking a photo and clicking on Ask takes the user to ChatGPT to inquire about an object or place. He took a picture of an instrument and asked ChatGPT “what rock songs is this instrument featured in?”

The App Intents framework allows to integrate this feature into their app.

Apple formally announced Visual Intelligence Monday at its annual WWDC event. It has now been designed to use across other apps in the App Store.

This may sound very similar to Google’s Circle to Search feature announced last year now available on Android devices through the Google and Chrome Apps. Google.

Apple also announced an AI-driven live translation function, similar to Google Meet. It works the phone and messaging apps.

InMobi Advertising will introduce a Buyer Hub Wednesday to support agentic, programmatic mobile services for media buyers, including agencies, media owners, direct brand teams, curators, retail media networks, and demand-side platforms (DSPs).

The goal is to reduce costs and integrate AI agentic agents to automate tasks. The platform gives buyers direct access to build, plan, discover, optimize, and purchase programmatic deals with transparency and control.

Kunal Nagpal, chief business officer at InMobi, told MediaPost that DSPs produce a lot less value to marketers compared what they offered in the past, although they still take the signal biggest chunk of ad-technology tax. The thinking is that this change will level what is paid in margins across the advertising supply chain. 

“We understand that you don't want a trillion auctions just to get to seven million users per campaign, for example,” Nagpal said. “The dynamics of relationship across the supply chain changed during the last couple of years," he said, and now the change has "gathered full steam.”

Nagpal said advertisers and their agency partners have been working more directly with companies selling advertising space like supply-side platforms (SSPs), which now bring what DSPs did in the past.

They no longer provide that service, he said. Instead, they charge a higher fee for services that no longer make sense. 

“The platform of tomorrow is fully agentic,” Nagpal said. “Brands are free to make agents on our platform, and those agents become the interaction model between the advertiser and the consumer.”

Agentic AI will power InMobi’s hub. The platform streamlines the curation process and enables the creation of high-quality programmatic deal IDs.

Media buyers gain access to a self-serve interface, designed to be a seamless experience that maximizes campaign performance.

Curators such as Audigent, @curate, Givsly, and Antipodes that live in the hub can expand audience data across all programmatic campaigns.

Rhys Denny, co-founder and CEO of @curate, believes the future of programmatic is not about more noise, but rather more signals -- and smarter curation, cleaner supply paths, and faster activation across the open web.

The platform will show the brand the type of audiences it should find and target. “Here's the provider of that audience,” he said. “Here's the cost of that audience. We could run it over these many days during this time to get better efficacy.”

It also will tell the brand which type of creative to run based on its priorities.

InMobi Buyer Hub will allow buyers to leverage their first-party data along user-level and contextual signals, drawn from its proprietary SDK and proximity to publishers wrapped in privacy.

It uses brand-safe, omnichannel premium supply, insights, and campaign-directed measurement and analytics and enables media buyers to remain in control throughout the process.

Nagpal said InMobi has begun working on those agents. “I have to first, you know, eat my own dog food,” he said. “So, we will start to test them internally very soon.”

He said that's what programmatic promised, but the industry lost that during the last decade.

“I think now we're at a point of an inflection in our technological advances to truly deliver on those promises,” Nagpal said.

Demand for scalable, data-led solutions has driven a 20% rise in performance-related deals and a 196% increase in median-size deals during the past decade, according to WY Partners, a UK-based media and technology advisory firm. The company combined data from its tracker service with data from PitchBook. 

Several UK deals in this space that WY Partners advised on include Croud’s acquisition of data analytics firm Metageni, a UK-based company focused on marketing analytics and optimization that the firm advised on, and the sale of gaming specialist agency Miri Growth to MSQ Partners. Both support growing demand for digital performance-driven businesses.

Croud also took a new investment from ECI Partners as LDC exited after five years as a minority investor.

The report published Tuesday outlines three key themes in the UK, mainly because the company is based there, but also applies to the U.S.

1. AI integrations and machine-learning algorithms that drive much of the bid optimization and predictive analytics used in campaigns.
2. Phasing out of third-party cookies has made privacy adoption critical. Companies are investing heavily in server-side tracking and zero-party data strategies. These approaches allow brands to maintain personalized marketing experiences while staying compliant with data regulations, preserving performance and consumer trust.
3. Diversifying channel mixes has become important. Instead of relying solely on Google and Facebook, marketers are turning toward TikTok, LinkedIn, and connected TV (CTV). This broader reach supports more advanced, cross-channel attribution.

Ella Wills, WY Partners head of marketing, pointed to one of the largest performance marketing deals in Q1 2025 — the sale of PE-house LDC’s portfolio company Blis to T-Mobile, in a deal that valued the business at $175 million.

Wills described Blis as a provider of privacy-centric advertising solutions with omnichannel targeting capabilities to connect brands with audiences.

Publicis Groupe's acquisition of Captiv8, an AI-powered influencer platform, for around $150 million is another example. The acquisition was intended to expand its capabilities in creator-led, performance-driven content.

“Meanwhile, DoubleVerify acquired attribution startup Rockerbox for $85 million to strengthen multichannel measurement,” Wills wrote.

Ad-technology platform MNTN, which focused on performance-based connected TV (CTV) advertising, went public in early 2025 with a valuation of $1.62 billion.

MNTN’s performance marketing proposition focuses on driving measurable outcomes through CTV placements, offering advertisers granular reporting on conversions rather than just impressions or views.

“We expect continued M&A activity in performance-led agencies and technologies, driven by demand for scalable, accountable marketing solutions,” Wills wrote. “Businesses with strengths in AI-powered optimization, privacy-first data strategies, and cross-channel execution, particularly those offering advanced analytics, conversion rate optimization, and first-party data infrastructure, are likely to remain high on the radar of both strategic acquirers and PE investors.”

In a move that bridges the gap between social media and QSR, Snapchat has announced a partnership with McDonald's that will invite fast-food customers to exchange their MyMcDonald's Rewards points for a free month-long subscription to Snapchat+.

Snapchat+ subscribers doubled in 2024, from 7 million paying users to 14 million. Now, the company says that it has 15 million paying subscribers, making it one of the leading subscription offerings across the social media landscape, surpassing Facebook and X, and bringing in an additional $500 million in annual revenue.

By partnering with McDonald's, the company hopes that it will be able to persuade a wider swath of users with access to pre-release and exclusive Snapchat features and eventually purchase a subscription.

Since launching MyMcDonald’s Rewards in 2021, the fast-food retailer has also amassed a significant user base of loyal customers.

According to Business Insider, at the start of this year, McDonald's had over 175 million active users of the program globally, showing a 15% growth year-over-year. The company plans on reaching 250 million active users by the end of 2027.

Like Snapchat+, McDonald’s Rewards program offers loyal users the ability to access exclusive deals, such as earning points on free meals, saving time by ordering ahead and more.

The company says this is the first time it has ever offered its customers a digital subscription service as a redeemable reward, adding that it partnered with Snapchat to “evolve its rewards program and continue building customer loyalty.”

To redeem the Snapchat+ subscription, MyMcDonald's users in the U.S. will see a Snapchat+ icon under “Digital Rewards” in their Rewards & Deals section of their mobile app. Users will need 1500 points to receive a code for a free month of Snapchat+. The offer will end on July 7.

Before going forward to the streaming TV world, ESPN is taking a look back at its start in a new TV brand campaign, “Sports Forever.”

It focuses on September 7, 1979 -- the first “SportsCenter” broadcast hosted by Lee Leonard.

This ESPN promo is partly intended to gain major marketing spin, in alignment with the NBA Finals underway between the Oklahoma City Thunder and the Indiana Pacers.

The video running underneath Leonard’s intro mixes in all recent sports action -- teams, athletes, games -- ending with the iconic ESPN musical audio tag: “Dah-Dah-Dah.. Dah-Dah-Dah.”

That comes at the end of the spot with a sports fan picking up its mobile phone. Then a message appears onscreen: “Fall 2025: The Next Era Begins,” which teases the forthcoming, highly anticipated ESPN streamer.

That launch is sure to focus on a major marketing effort by Walt Disney to launch ESPN as a full-scale, premium streamer service, promised not just to recreate everything that exists on ESPN as a cable network, but much more -- including access to ESPN BET, and personalization attributes for subscribers.

Disney needs to amp this up well beyond the usual cable TV-based programming promotion.

ESPN is a major element of this diversified media company. In addition, much of ESPN's future with sports fans -- including younger sports fans -- comes via new digital-video platforms.

Some of Leonard's broadcast is a discussion of what the future will bring -- especially for those sports-hungry TV consumers. One of the creative agency executives used the words including “prophecy” and “oracle” in its branding intro.

What are the pitfalls that could be coming.

For many, it could be the eye opening $29.99 monthly price tag -- especially when compared to current pricing for other premium streamers, particularly ad-free plans: Netflix ($17.99), Disney+ ($15.99); Prime Video ($14.99 with Amazon Prime) and Max ($16.99).

The picture looks even more challenging when factoring in ad-supported plans for these services around -- $7.99 (Netflix, Disney+), $8.99 (Prime Video) and Max ($9.99).

The push then for Disney -- as it has been in the recent past -- comes with bundling savings.

For that, the ESPN-Hulu-Disney+ bundle will cost $35.99 a month.

And then it gets better for the first 12 months of ESPN’s streaming platform's existence -- that the three streamers will cost just $29.99 a month. That means, essentially -- perhaps in marketing parlance to come -- that ESPN will be essentially free for the first year.

What’s the overall target? Pretty much where the current legacy pay TV market sits now -- at 60 million subscribers. This came from ESPN Chairman Jimmy Pitaro during a media event: “Our priority is looking at the 60 million households on the sidelines.”

Expect a heavy marketing campaign blitz, starting in August and early September, to bat around those pricing numbers to lure in consumers.

For Disney, there will be no looking back after that.