Okara launches CMO v2

Welcome back. Marketers are drowning in AI tools that individually automate one tiny part of the job. Now, a dark horse startup is taking the opposite approach, with an innovative new tool that runs much of your daily workflow. Meanwhile, Instagram’s latest rebrand is getting roasted for its unusual new script — and now some major brands are taking shots at it.

In Today’s Edition:

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1. Okara’s new AI marketing tool blows up on social media: The startup’s new CMO v2 tool coordinates AI agents across SEO, social media, influencer outreach, content creation, GEO, and technical site fixes from a single website URL. It whips out daily drafts for marketers to review before publishing, while keeping agents aligned to the same brand strategy, offering marketers a way to automate much of the repetitive execution across channels without juggling a stack of separate tools. Try it out here.

2. Instagram’s new wordmark draws flak from users: Changing a well-known brand identity is always dangerous territory. Instagram has refreshed its wordmark for the first time in 10 years, replacing the old handwritten script with a bolder, cleaner version that mixes cursive and print lettering. The rebrand has drawn immense criticism from users, with many calling it a "sidegrade" at best. Other brands are also throwing shade at the branding fumble. Check out some of the reactions here.

3. CMOs are struggling to link AI visibility to sales: Brands are pouring money into tracking how they appear in AI search answers, but a new report claims that CMOs still can’t reliably prove that better visibility leads to business results. With attribution tools lagging behind the curve, teams are stitching together traffic, conversion, and custom modeling data to estimate the impact of AI visibility on sales. AI search is becoming strategically important before anyone has agreed on how to measure success.

📈 Growth Playbook: What does it actually take to scale a product to millions of users? Former Head of Growth at Wispr Flow, Matt Swulinski, breaks down the playbook in a podcast that’s making waves on social media.

👤 Human Touch: Sometimes the smallest changes to a landing page produce the biggest results. One company increased leads by a whopping 79% simply by showing a real team member on the page.

🛡️ Font Fight: AI companies scrape huge chunks of the web to feed their models. Now, two designers are fighting back with a clever defense: a font that looks normal to humans while feeding AI scrapers complete nonsense.

🎯 Human Edge: The AI boom might be about to make brand marketers considerably more valuable. Investor Nikunj Kothari argues that as products become increasingly commoditized, how a company presents itself could become its biggest differentiator. (150k views)

🚀 Growth Stack: Arcads just open-sourced what it claims can do the work of your first six marketing hires. Its new AI tool handles everything from positioning and copywriting to SEO, launches, and creative strategy, and it’s gaining a ton of traction online. (411k views)

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📰 Driving the news: Kalshi’s campaign at the World Cup is a live case study in what sports advertising can do.

🏈 Why it matters: eMarketer projects US sports TV ad spending will grow 27% by 2030 — from $19.5 billion to $24.8 billion, versus just 6.6% for the overall TV ad market. LA28 is already the most commercially successful Games in history two and a half years out, with brands like Visa, Coca-Cola, and Nike saying their World Cup playbooks will likely shape their Olympics strategy.

For years, sports advertising meant buying broad demographics and hoping the creative landed near an exciting moment. Newer tools are now flipping this model on its head.

The audience opportunity may be even more underpriced than the media.

Case in point: Unilever's Persil brand used an F1 Academy sponsorship aimed partly at this audience to lift awareness from 11% to 16% and raise purchase intent among a large majority of surveyed consumers. You can also find interesting case studies on high-performing sports marketing strategies here.

Sample prompt:
“Analyze these competitor ads. For each one, identify the hook, customer pain point, core promise, offer, CTA, target audience, funnel stage, and creative format. Then group similar messaging angles together and show which themes each competitor uses most often.”

Until next time — Zain, Faiq, & the Superhuman AI team.