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Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 30 jun 2026

Agentic AI is enhancing performance marketing capabilities and there is a visible shift from automation to autonomy, even though trust, transparency and governance continue to be essential. Recently experts got together in ADWEEK House Cannes Lions 2026 panel discussion to exchange views on how agentic AI is transforming performance marketing and how the future will evolve. Krishan Bhatia of Taboola, says, 'The autonomy is probably the most important aspect of delivering on the promise of AI. The whole point is that AI routinizes, or basically autonomizes, routinized tasks of RFPs and plan building and optimization in flight, and it's working...I think next year I want to be sitting here and having proved it to all of those, plus some, and be operating at scale throughout our entire platform.' Matt Groshong of NVIDIA, says, 'Where we go with that depends on how advanced your data is that sits behind it. It depends on how comfortable you are with that transaction. But more importantly, it has to be able to describe why it made a decision. Maybe you have the ability to undo that decision, and proper transparency, so that you can get to a point where you actually trust it.' Jarrod Martin of Acxiom and Omnicom Media, says, 'We think about traditional automation being very prescriptive about the steps we take in the hope that we get the outcome that we want. And an agent is where we're being very prescriptive about the outcome we want, and hoping that they can go through the right steps to get to that outcome.' Steve Ellis of Paramount Advertising, says, 'It is very helpful if you have your process documented as it exists today, and that your data is in great shape. Those things make all of this go much, much faster, but also end up much, much better.' Ami Palan of Accenture Song Americas, says, 'There are different roles that so many of these agents are playing, and so you're seeing naturally in the marketplace so many of these partners actually come together and launch something unique that hasn't existed in the past. It's very unique to the architecture of the particular client and what they're trying to accomplish, so very outcome-focused, and that oftentimes means multiple ecosystems...The way that is going to be successful is when these agents can build trust with the customer, and that's going to be the way the customer feels confident that what's being done - not just recommended - but transacted on their behalf, is something they actually want.' Imran Khan of Proem, says, 'All of the companies are investing pretty significantly in AI. We all see the promise of AI, and I think the next question is for that dollar that you are spending, are you getting the return that it promised?' Read on...

ADWEEK: A More Intelligent Advertising Ecosystem Is on the Horizon
Author: Dawn Papandrea

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 26 jun 2026

When the design serves its purpose for which and whom it was intended, it works. There are many rules and principles from many fields, that have been experimented and refined, that make a good functional design. Following are the most durable and widely applied design principles - (1) The Golden Ratio: 'A proportion of approximately 1:1.618. It appears when a line is divided so that the ratio of the whole to the larger segment equals the ratio of the larger segment to the smaller one. The result is a specific relationship between parts that recurs throughout geometry and is closely related to the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two before it. The ratio's presence in natural structures - the arrangement of seeds in a sunflower, the spiral of a nautilus shell, the branching of veins - has made it attractive to designers seeking a rational basis for aesthetic choices...' (2) Visual Hierarchy: 'The principle that design elements should be organized to communicate their relative importance. It answers the question of where the eye goes first, second, and third - and why. Without hierarchy, every element competes for equal attention, and the result is visual noise with no clear entry point. The tools for creating hierarchy are straightforward - size, weight, color, contrast, position, and spacing...' (3) Fitts's Law: 'Formalized by psychologist Paul Fitts in 1954, describes the relationship between target size, target distance, and the time it takes to reach a target with a pointing device. The law holds that larger targets and closer targets are faster to acquire. This seems intuitive, but the specific, predictive nature of Fitts's formulation is what makes it useful...gave designers a mathematical model for predicting interaction speed from physical or screen layout decisions...' (4) Hick's Law: 'Describes the relationship between the number of choices available and the time it takes to make a decision. More options mean longer decision times, in a logarithmic relationship. The law is named after British psychologist William Edmund Hick...The practical implication is one that designers across disciplines have internalized even when they haven't named it - reducing options is often a service to the user...' (5) Gestalt Principles: 'A group of perceptual laws describing how the human visual system groups individual elements into unified wholes. Developed by German psychologists - primarily Max Wertheimer, Wolfgang Köhler, and Kurt Koffka - in the early 20th century, they formalized the observation that perception is not merely the sum of individual sensory inputs. The mind actively organizes visual information into patterns, and the Gestalt principles describe the rules it uses...' (6) The Rule of Thirds: 'A compositional guideline in which the frame is divided into nine equal rectangles by two horizontal and two vertical lines. The four points where these lines intersect are called power points or crash points, and placing key elements at or near these intersections is said to produce more dynamic and visually satisfying compositions than placing them at the center of the frame...It appears in 18th-century writing on painting and landscape design, and was described explicitly by the English painter John Thomas Smith in 1797. It has since become one of the most widely taught compositional rules in photography, cinematography, and graphic design...' (7) Negative Space: 'Also called white space, though it need not be white - is the empty or unoccupied area in a composition. It is not the absence of design. It is a design element with its own function, and managing it is one of the things that most distinguishes considered design from cluttered or amateur work...'(8) Color theory: 'It is the body of knowledge describing how colors are perceived, how they interact, and how they carry meaning. Its formal study in the West dates to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's 1810 Theory of Colors, though practical color knowledge long predates systematic theory. The field encompasses physical optics, perceptual psychology, and cultural semiotics — the same color can carry different information depending on which of these lenses applies...' (9) Typography Hierarchy: 'It is the system by which type at different sizes, weights, and styles signals information structure to the reader. It is distinct from visual hierarchy in general - it applies specifically to the arrangement of text, where the choice of typeface, weight, size, style, and spacing communicates what is a heading, what is a subhead, what is body copy, and what is a label or caption...' (10) Affordance and Signifiers: 'Affordance, as the term is used in design, describes the range of actions that an object makes possible for a user. A chair affords sitting. A button affords pressing. A handle affords pulling. The concept was introduced by perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson in 1977 and later adapted for design by cognitive scientist Donald Norman in his 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things...Signifiers are the perceptual cues that communicate affordances. They are what users actually perceive and act on. The difference matters because affordances exist whether or not a signifier is present, but users can only act on affordances they perceive...' (11) The Principle of Least Astonishment: 'It holds that systems - whether software interfaces, physical devices, or built environments — should behave in ways that match user expectations rather than surprise them. When a user takes an action and the system does something unexpected, cognitive load increases sharply. The user must now update their mental model of the system and decide what to do next, rather than continuing their primary task...' (12) Proximity and Grouping: 'It is one of the Gestalt principles, but it merits a separate examination for how broadly it applies beyond simple visual perception. Proximity creates meaning. Elements placed near each other are understood as related, regardless of whether there is an explicit visual connector between them - no line, bracket, or border is required...' (13) Contrast and Readability: 'Contrast is the degree of difference between adjacent elements — whether in value (light versus dark), hue, size, shape, or texture. It is a prerequisite for readability in any medium, and its absence is one of the most reliable causes of design that fails people with reduced visual acuity...' (14) Progressive Disclosure: 'It is the practice of presenting only the information, controls, or content that is immediately relevant to the user's current task, and revealing additional complexity only when the user seeks it. The principle addresses a fundamental tension in design: comprehensive systems are necessarily complex, but complexity creates barriers to entry and increases the chance of error. The concept applies directly to software interfaces but has analogs in many other design fields...' (15) Repetition and Consistency: 'Repetition is the recurrence of a visual element - a color, shape, texture, line weight, typeface, or spatial interval - across a composition or across a system. Consistency is what repetition creates at the level of a system over time. Both are foundational to how design communicates identity and builds user understanding...' (16) The 60-30-10 Rule: 'It is a color proportion guideline used primarily in interior design and graphic design. It holds that a color scheme tends to feel balanced when the dominant color occupies roughly 60% of a space, a secondary color occupies 30%, and an accent color occupies the remaining 10%. The numbers are not strict mathematical requirements but rather a framework for preventing any single color from overwhelming a composition...' (17) Symmetry and Balance: 'They are related but distinct properties in visual composition. Symmetry describes a formal, mathematical relationship in which one part of a composition mirrors another along an axis. Balance describes a more perceptual property - the sense that a composition feels stable and weighted correctly, regardless of whether it is formally symmetrical...Perfect bilateral symmetry - in which the left side of a composition is a mirror of the right - is the most common type. It produces an immediate sense of formality, stability, and authority...' (18) Gestalt Continuity and Flow: 'Flow in visual design refers to the directed movement of the eye through a composition. The eye is not passive; it moves constantly, and design can either control that movement or leave it to chance. When flow is designed deliberately, it guides the viewer through content in an order that matches the designer's communicative intention...' (19) Modularity and Grid Systems: 'Grid systems are frameworks of horizontal and vertical lines that divide a composition into columns, rows, and gutter spaces. They are invisible in the finished design but govern the placement of every element within it. Their purpose is to create structural coherence, simplify layout decisions, and enable the visual consistency that makes a publication or interface feel like a unified system rather than a collection of individual pages. The grid as a design tool was formalized in 20th-century Swiss typography, particularly in the work of Josef Müller-Brockmann, whose 1961 book on grid systems in graphic design became a foundational text for modernist layout practice...' (20) Hierarchy of Scale: 'Scale hierarchy refers to the deliberate use of size differences to communicate relative importance, emphasis, or distance. When elements in a composition differ significantly in size, the larger elements read as dominant and the smaller elements read as subordinate. This is one of the simplest and most reliable tools for creating visual order...' (21) Consistency Across Touchpoints: 'Brand and design consistency across touchpoints refers to the coherent application of a visual and experiential identity across every medium, channel, and context in which an organization, product, or service appears. A touchpoint is any point of contact between a user or customer and the entity in question: a website, a product package, a retail space, a piece of printed material, a customer service interaction...' (22) The Doherty Threshold: 'Introduced by IBM researchers Walter Doherty and Ahrvind Thadani in a 1982 paper, identifies 400 milliseconds as the upper bound for system response time before users' productivity and engagement begin to drop measurably. Below 400 milliseconds, users experience the system as responding in real time to their actions. Above that threshold, the delay is perceptible and begins to interrupt the user's cognitive flow...' (23) Gestalt Similarity and Differentiation: 'In design, similarity groups elements together while differentiation sets them apart. These are not merely aesthetic choices but perceptual tools that carry information: when elements look alike, the viewer infers they serve similar functions or belong to the same category. When an element looks different from its neighbors, the viewer infers a difference in function, importance, or type. This principle is the basis of the visual encoding used in data visualization...' (24) Feedback and System Status: 'This principle is the basis of the visual encoding used in data visualization...' (25) Wayfinding and Orientation: 'Wayfinding is the set of strategies people use to navigate unfamiliar environments, and wayfinding design is the practice of making environments easier to navigate through deliberate spatial and informational cues. The term was introduced by urban designer Kevin Lynch in his 1960 book The Image of the City, which studied how people develop cognitive maps of cities...' Read on...

QUARTZ: 25 design principles that show up everywhere once you notice them
Author: Cris Tolomia

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 31 may 2026

The online education frenzy is dissipating and the sector is normalizing in post-COVID scenario. According to Traxn, that tracks startup funding, global education technology funding rose to US$ 16.7 billion in 2021, while in 2025 venture capital to the sector reduced to less than US$ 3 billion. US has been the main source of this funding and it was mostly directed towards K-12 (US$ 12.3 billion in 2020 out of US$ 15.9 billion total & US$ 9 billion in 2021) with some investments going into pre-K, test prep, higher education, language learning, gamification etc. Writing about 2025 situation, HolonIQ (education consultancy firm), says, 'Venture capital flows reflected a shift from volume to intention. Investors concentrated capital in AI-enabled products, workforce-aligned platforms, and K-12 operations solutions that address cost or operational pressures, staffing challenges, and learning support at scale.' Moreover, the number of startups founded has also reduced substantially, from 10500 (2020) to 645 (2025). Nonprofits such as Khan Academy and other local innovators, instead of for-profit venture-backed firms, are filling the gap in places where there is scarcity of educational infrastructure. Loot Drop, a curated database of 1700+ closed startups, finds the following reasons for this disaster - lack of differentiation among competitors, inability to fix unit economics, high customer acquisision costs, long institutional sales cycles and low retention rates. Loot Drop explains the future scenario - 'The winners will likely be vertical-specific tools that integrate into existing workflows rather than platforms trying to replace entire educational institutions.' Read on...

Rest of World: The global edtech boom is fading as investors look elsewhere
Author: Ananya Bhattacharya

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 29 may 2026

Rise of the AI-driven content is bringing catastrophic consequences to human-developed content. Human creativity may be at stake in such a scenario, but it will find ways to take the challenge and mitigate the risk and overcome severity of the disaster. Joe Pulizzi, founder of The Tilt and author of books such as 'Content Inc.' & 'Epic Content Marketing', explore ways in which human-created content will stand side-by-side of the synthetic AI-generated content and will continue to stay relevant, if not in scale or quantity but in quality. Mr. Pulizzi says, 'Human content is becoming scarce. Everyone is worried about this, and no one knows quite what to do...human-created content is about to become the minority...Synthetic content can be created faster than human content. It can be personalized. It can be translated. It can be remixed. It can be changed in a second. It can be produced at a scale that human beings cannot match...Humans and companies created content. Google, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok and the rest organized or distributed that content. We got attention. They got data, advertising, and a business model...Every major platform has historically needed our content. They needed creators. They needed publishers. They needed all of us posting, sharing, recording, writing, and reacting.' Describing the changing scenario and recommending ways for human content creators to survive the AI challenge, he says, 'We have a limited window to build something that lives outside the algorithm...in a world where synthetic content is everywhere, another person trusting you becomes the moat...If you are a marketer inside a company, this means identifying the trusted humans in your organization...If you are an independent creator, this means you cannot keep renting all your attention from platforms. Build the direct connection...If you are a writer, speaker, consultant, coach, teacher, or leader, stop waiting until your idea is perfect. Pick the thing you want to be known for and start repeating it...The goal is to become known, trusted, and needed by a specific group of people. Now.' Read on...

The Tilt: How Human Content Can Beat Synthetic
Author: Joe Pulizzi

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 27 may 2026

Fashion industry is looking for sustainability and seeks circular business models to support environmental concerns. In this regard, 69 major fashion and textile businesses & organizations, headed by nonprofit Ellen MacArthur Foundation, in signed statement urged governments to bring a policy change that would support and boost competitiveness of resale and repair activities in the apparel industry. Ellen MacArthus Foundation launched a 'Fashion ReModel' project in 2024 that works with thirteen brands to increase the percentage of their revenue derived from circular business models over three years. Miranda Beckett of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, says, 'We consistently heard from the very beginning [from brands] that circular business models are currently disincentivized under today's economic system...Your customers are demanding this, they’re shopping in the circular economy anyway, and they've got a sort of expectation on brands and businesses to have these services.' According to ThredUp's 2026 resale report, global second hand market grew 13% in 2025, capturing 10% of global apparel spend. A 2025 report by the Circular Fashion Federation, a French nonprofit, valued the clothing repair market in Europe at 2.7 billion euros in 2024, projected to reach 3.7 billion euros in 2030. The challenges faced by apparel repair & resale market are more than traditional production - Higher labor cost; Inconsistent or insufficient inflows of used goods. The statement suggests - Reduce the value added tax across the European Union and eliminating sales tax in the United States and Canada on resold products and repair services; Reduce labor costs for jobs involved in resale and repair operations by lowering labor taxes (EU) and providing labor tax credits (U.S. & Canada). The statement & accompanied report, also recommends Extended Producer Responsibility policies, which encourage resale and repair by introducing additional costs for primary production. Read on...

ESG Dive: Nearly 70 fashion and textile orgs ask governments to support resale and repair
Author: Lauren Schenkman

Mohammad Anas Wahaj | 30 apr 2026

According to the 2024 Nonprofit Standards Benchmarking Survey, 82% of nonprofits are already leveraging the artificial intelligence (AI) technology in at least one use case. But, rushing to the AI's implementation without sufficient research and determined goals can be costly for nonprofits that are generally struggling for funds. Experts suggest the following best practices for effective AI integrations - (1) Invest in Training and Education: AI complements human workers and this can be explained to nonprofit employees through training and education. (2) Stay Human-Centered: Beth Kanter, Allison Fine and Phillip Deng in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, say, 'Before adopting AI, nonprofits should create a written pledge explaining that AI will be used only in human-centered ways.' Moreover, Amy Sample Ward, CEO of the Nonprofit Technology Enterprise Network, says it's important to clarify that AI 'should not make decisions.' Allison Fine, President of Every.org, says, '...If we use AI badly and we make people feel less connected to other human beings, it will be a tragedy.' (3) Avoid Unfair Risks and Bias: Joe Carcedo, philanthropy leader and consultant, says, 'If AI is to be adopted widely in the nonprofit sector, the problem of AI bias must be addressed, as it is of paramount importance given that nonprofits enjoy a greater level of trust from their constituents than most other sectors - trust that can easily erode if their decisions are premised on skewed or biased data. (4) Prioritize Data Privacy and Security: Use sufficient guardrails to ensure that compliance and security protecions are in place and follow general data protection regulations. (5) Seek the Help of a Tech Partner: About 70% of nonprofit leaders report difficulty in filling staff vacancies with lack of technological skills as one of the main challenge. Tech partner can help overcome this challenge for effective AI use. Read on...

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