Good morning. Today, marketing moves around AI heat up; a jury weighs in on a dispute between ad measurement companies; and a luxury resale platform uses AI to get listings up faster.

The battle to brand AI is just getting going, the WSJ Leadership Institute’s Patrick Coffee writes for the newsletter:

Microsoft has hired Andrea Mallard as the first chief marketing officer to oversee its consumer-facing AI business.

Mallard, who had been global CMO at Pinterest, will oversee consumer marketing for Microsoft’s AI Copilot product suite, including the titular chatbot as well as AI browser Edge, search engine Bing and content portal MSN, which now includes daily AI-curated summaries of news and weather.

Her key focus will be building Copilot as a consumer brand, reporting to Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, a company spokesman said.

The biggest names in AI have been investing more heavily in making their brands more attractive (or sympathetic) to consumers and regulators.

Top AI chip maker Nvidia this month said it had hired a former Google veteran as its own first CMO, and ChatGPT maker OpenAI will run its second consecutive Super Bowl ad in February.

More AI: Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis says he’s “a little bit surprised” that OpenAI is going to test ads in ChatGPT already. [Axios]

A jury has ordered EDO—the data, measurement and analytics software company co-founded by actor Edward Norton—to pay $18.3 million to ad-measurement firm iSpot over breach-of-contract allegations, The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Megan Graham reports.

iSpot had claimed in a lawsuit that EDO misused iSpot intellectual property, data and designs to build a competing service while it was a customer.

EDO said it would appeal the breach-of-contract decision and called the lawsuit a “desperate attempt to slow down a smaller, smarter competitor.”

The jury decided EDO wasn’t liable for claims of trade secret violations between 2019 to 2021.

The competition to provide marketers with data on ad campaigns has been steadily intensifying in the digital era, which both changed consumers’ media consumption habits and improved companies’ ability to track ad reach and results.

Businesses are implementing AI far beyond chatbots to make their products and services stickier for consumers.

Luxury resale platform The RealReal is using AI to list sellers’ clothes more quickly, hoping that the quicker turnaround will keep them coming back to do yet more business, Jennifer Williams writes for The WSJ Leadership Institute.

A system it calls Athena proposes item descriptions, suggests pricing and, crucially for a company that receives millions of goods a year to sell on consignment, helps discern authentic products from fakes.

That can cut the time it takes to list an item for sale by as much as 50%, which executives see as critical to keeping sellers happy and moving through inventory at a faster clip.

“So much of our lifetime value in a customer is tied to them thinking about this as a habit,” Chief Financial Officer Ajay Gopal said. “Athena helps us incentivize them to consign again and we can move things quicker and do it more accurately.”

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