Betty and Rise bag Jay Chiat Award for CLR Brands work
The Brand Transformation Strategy honor recognizes how Quad’s creative and media agencies help clients build brand relevance and drive meaningful business outcomes.
Category: News
impossible Question Announced the Launch of iQ Brief to Fix the Broken Brief
impossible Question announced the launch of iQ Brief, a brief writing and scoring platform for in-house marketing teams.
Briefs start the work, and most go out weak – objectives are soft, context is missing, and teams rarely catch the flaws until budget is committed. iQ fixes this at the point of writing.
Teams draft their briefs inside iQ against a structured model. The platform scores the brief in real time, flags weak objectives or missing context, and shows the author how to lift quality before work moves forward.
“Most organisations don’t have a delivery problem. They have a definition problem,” said Matt Kennell, Founder and CEO of impossible Question. “The most expensive mistake a company can make is executing perfectly on a bad brief. iQ helps teams write a better brief and scores it as they go. The thinking stays with them. It’s the quiet discipline that makes sure what we said becomes what we did.”
Key features:
- Pillar-Based Frameworks: Seventeen question models covering strategy, creative and production, to enforce consistent standards across every brief.
- Live Scoring: Real-time feedback on clarity and completeness as the brief is written.
- Campaign Inheritance: The anchor brief sets a campaign’s overview and audience once. Every supporting brief inherits that context automatically, so teams never start from scratch.
- Organisational Memory: Captures patterns across historical briefs so quality compounds over time.
- Risk and Timeline Intelligence: Early flags on delivery dependencies to test feasibility before work starts.
For a demo or more information, visit www.impossible-question.com
Corvidae AI Drives 6% More Paid Search Revenue With 5% Less Spend
Four-month Italy pilot lifted return on ad spend by 12% and is now being rolled out worldwide, after Corvidae’s cookieless tracking captured £193m more revenue than Adobe Analytics across the group’s global properties
Authentic Brands Group Names Lark-Marie Antón as Chief Communications Officer
Authentic Brands Group (Authentic), a global brand and entertainment platform, today announced the appointment of Lark-Marie Antón as Chief Communications Officer. Antón will lead the company’s global communications and corporate brand strategy, bringing greater visibility to Authentic’s platform, its expanding entertainment business and the cultural influence of its portfolio. She will report to Matt Maddox, President and Chief Executive Officer, and serve as a member of Authentic’s Executive Committee.
“Lark has spent her career shaping the narratives and reputations of high-profile companies and individuals, with deep expertise in media and marketing,” said Maddox. “Her leadership and creativity will be important as we continue to grow and bring the full Authentic story to the world.”
Antón brings more than 20 years of experience across communications, corporate brand strategy, integrated marketing and reputation management. She joins Authentic from USA TODAY Co., formerly Gannett, where she served as Chief Communications and Brand Officer for one of the country’s largest media organizations. At USA TODAY Co., Antón led enterprise communications and corporate brand strategy across a portfolio of national and more than 200 local media properties across the USA TODAY Network and implemented the company’s rebrand from Gannett to USA TODAY Co. Earlier in her career, Antón held senior communications and marketing roles at Hertz, Verizon, Aura, Loews Hotels and served as a Deputy Press Secretary in the Bloomberg Administration.
“Authentic is an extraordinary global platform of the world’s most iconic brands and cultural assets,” said Antón. “I’m excited to join a company with an incredible portfolio spanning more than 16 years of innovation and a willingness to keep evolving. I look forward to partnering with Matt, Jamie and the entire leadership team to help shape Authentic’s next chapter of growth.”
Lark earned a Master of Arts in communication studies from West Virginia University and a Bachelor of Arts from Marist University. She serves on the Board of Trustees of Marist University, her alma mater, and the Board of Green-Wood, a national historic landmark.
Zeta Live 2026: Zeta Announced the Introduction of AthenaOS
- Built on the Zeta Data Cloud, AthenaOS combines enterprise knowledge with Zeta intelligence, dynamically builds around a business objective and learns from every outcome to drive smarter decisions, faster actions and measurable growth
- Athena MCP, Zeta’s headless solution, brings Zeta intelligence into the applications, agents and workflows where enterprise teams already work
- New Athena Inference Model (AIM), developed in collaboration with Fireworks using NVIDIA Nemotron, brings specialized AI to specific AthenaOS use cases
- Zeta has begun work on development of a specialized AIM chip with partners to deliver faster intelligence more efficiently through a capital-light approach
Today at Zeta Live 2026, Zeta Global (NYSE: ZETA), the intelligent AI infrastructure company, announced AthenaOS, its enterprise intelligence operating system. Built on the Zeta Data Cloud, AthenaOS combines enterprise knowledge with Zeta’s intelligence about who will buy, what they want and what they will do next. It connects that combined intelligence with Zeta’s intelligent AI infrastructure and then dynamically builds around an enterprise team’s objective, helping teams identify growth opportunities, take action and measure results.
Instead of asking teams to navigate disconnected applications, assemble workflows, and interpret data across separate systems, AthenaOS starts with what a user wants to achieve. Users tell Athena by Zeta™, the conversational interface, their objective, and AthenaOS assembles the intelligence, applications, and actions needed to achieve it. It then operates through a continuous loop, using each outcome to improve the next decision.
“For decades, software forced people to work the way applications were designed, but AthenaOS changes that,” said David A. Steinberg, Co-Founder, Chairman and CEO of Zeta Global. “AthenaOS marks an expansion of Zeta’s intelligent AI infrastructure beyond marketing. It starts with what you want to achieve, brings together what your business knows with Zeta’s intelligence about the customer, and organizes the work around the outcome. That’s the shift from navigating software to directing outcomes and how intelligence becomes growth.”
AthenaOS introduces new capabilities, including:
- Intelligence organized around an objective: AthenaOS dynamically brings together the enterprise context, Zeta intelligence and actions needed to help users achieve a specific business outcome.
- A continuous know, decide, act and learn loop: Every decision, action, and result that AthenaOS delivers strengthens the next one, helping improve the quality and speed of future decisions.
- Shared enterprise context: AthenaOS creates a shared context framework across enterprise knowledge, customer and market signals, and partner technologies such as Palantir Foundry and OpenAI, allowing context, memory, and intelligence to move with the work rather than remain trapped inside individual systems. This preserves each enterprise’s data sovereignty and control over how its information is used.
Athena MCP Brings Zeta Intelligence Wherever Enterprises Work
Zeta also introduced Athena MCP, its headless solution, which enables enterprises to bring Zeta’s intelligence into their own applications, agents and workflows. Teams can work directly with Athena, or apply its intelligence within the systems where work happens, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other compatible enterprise AI environments.
“Disconnected tools cannot create connected outcomes, and adding more AI does not solve that problem on its own,” said Christian Monberg, Chief Technology Officer at Zeta Global. “AthenaOS connects business context, people, applications and AI agents around an objective. With Athena MCP, that intelligence can operate within the systems where teams already work and help them create the applications and workflows they need on demand, tailored to their business. The result is software that adapts to the work, with the shared context and controls enterprises need to operate at scale.”
Underpinning AthenaOS is an enterprise-grade foundation of identity, governance, permissions, security and transparency. This foundation is designed to give enterprises greater control over how intelligence is applied across their data, applications and workflows.
“Athena has already helped our teams work more efficiently through agents we’ve deployed for quality assurance, link validation and translation tasks, generating speed, efficiency, and safety in support of our brands and clients,” said Jeff Brousseau, Senior Vice President of Marketing Strategy and Operations at Synchrony Financial. “We anticipate AthenaOS to continue to build on that work by bringing more of our business context into decisions. We’re especially interested in insights that could help us drive card usage and adoption, particularly in our Health & Wellness Business platform.”
New Athena Inference Model for Enterprise Intelligence
Zeta also unveiled the Athena Inference Model (AIM), a collection of proprietary models being developed in collaboration with Fireworks using NVIDIA Nemotron for specific AthenaOS use cases. These models are fine-tuned to understand specialized skills like domain language and follow defined brand voice, formatting and output requirements. The result is more relevant intelligence, more consistent execution and faster decisions at scale for AthenaOS customers.
The Next Horizon for Athena Intelligence
Zeta also announced that it has begun work on the development of a specialized chip and supporting data center infrastructure with a leading semiconductor partner.
AIM gives Zeta unique insight into the intelligence workloads businesses need to run, creating the potential to optimize both the models and the computing beneath them.
Together, this work has the potential to deliver faster intelligence, greater efficiency and more control over where enterprise data and intelligence run.
Zeta contributes proprietary intelligence and an understanding of business workloads, while its partners contribute chip development and data center infrastructure expertise. This capital-light approach allows Zeta to explore specialized infrastructure while keeping its investment focused on the capabilities that differentiate the company.
Availability
AthenaOS is currently in limited internal beta, and expected to enter public beta later this year, with general availability planned for the first quarter of 2027. Additional capabilities will roll out over time.
The development of the chip is in the early stages, and the architecture and development paths are still taking shape. Zeta will share additional details as it progresses.
ZoomInfo Achieves the ISO/IEC 42001 Certification
Independent assessment by Schellman recognizes ZoomInfo’s disciplined approach to governing AI, managing risk and impact, and continually improving its AI management system.
Gong, Agentforce Sales and Avoma Lead 2026 Conversation Intelligence
Drawing on verified end-user feedback collected through Info-Tech Research Group’s SoftwareReviews platform, the 2026 Conversation Intelligence Data Quadrant Report evaluates solutions that help organizations capture and analyze customer interactions, reduce manual effort, and improve visibility across teams. Champion recognition reflects strong product capabilities and overall user satisfaction.
AlphaGraphics earns spot in Franchise Times Top 400 for 2026
Leading print and marketing solutions provider earns recognition among largest U.S.-based franchise systems
Kantiv Announced the Launch of AI Agents
Data, Brand, and Insights Agents Turn Decades of Firm Knowledge into Pursuit Strategy
Nectar MCP Brings Consumer and Creator Data to AI Platforms
Nectar puts social, community, creator, customer care and insights teams on one platform. Now its answers come to the AI assistant businesses already use.