Good morning. Today, ad sellers pitch marketers on upgraded automation; shoppable hotel rooms beckon to guests; Goldman Sachs sells its outstanding Apple Card balances at a $1 billion discount; and a storied newspaper looks headed for its final edition.

AI-driven ad-tech announcements are flying at CES in Las Vegas, The WSJ Leadership Institute’s Patrick Coffee writes for the newsletter:

This week’s annual Consumer Electronics Show again features a blizzard of tech actually designed for businesses, especially marketers.

• Reddit and Yahoo rolled out offerings that will automate key elements of the ad process such as planning and measuring campaigns.
• PayPal and Samsung Ads introduced data services that they say can help marketers better track the actions of consumers who see their ads.
• And multiple advertising technology firms released systems that will give AI agents greater autonomy to converse with one another as they shape programmatic campaigns.

To better reach consumers, the suggestion seems to be, have your robots talk to my robots.

The products will have minimal at best impact on the overall ad market, where Meta, Google and Amazon will keep gaining share, according to Luke Stillman, managing director of consultancy Madison and Wall.

(For a quick reminder of the landscape: Third-quarter ad revenue totaled $549 million at Reddit and $74.18 billion at Google.) 

Advertisers change more slowly than consumers, and most people aren’t yet comfortable letting AI agents fill their online shopping carts, Stillman said.

“Look, we all know where it’s going,” he said. “But we think within that, when we're looking at where people actually spent money at the end of the year, it's going to look a whole lot like where people spent money in 2025.”

“Agentic AI,” the most recent buzzword in AI and advertising, has simultaneously lost its power as a differentiator because so many companies already promise it, said Adam Roodman, senior vice president and general manager of Yahoo’s demand-side ad sales platform.

Yahoo plans to minimize the risk of AI hallucinations by using a single agent for each function so the underlying LLMs don’t get overwhelmed, he said.

The tools could give marketers reasons to move players like Reddit and Samsung up their priority lists, even if the biggest powers keep position.

“If Samsung books an extra $40 million this year, that's probably a big deal to them,” said Jay Friedman, former agency executive and co-founder of consultancy Cartograph AI. “But if Google books an extra 40 million, no one will know.”

More furniture marketers are getting involved with hospitality. Call it product placement you can touch.

Anthropologie Home designed a two-bedroom suite that opened last April in Philadelphia’s 50-room Hotel Anna & Bel, Nora Walsh writes for The Journal. The brand outfitted the space entirely with decor from its Spring 2025 collection, all available to purchase, including a jacquard woven sofa ($3,298) and a pedestal dining table ($1,198).

Guests at Piaule, a 50-acre retreat in New York’s Catskills, can buy some of its furnishings from Design Within Reach through a dedicated page on DWR’s website.

And the Newport Harbor Island Resort in Rhode Island last November debuted a seasonal suite in collaboration with the brand Cozy Earth, with all the bedding, robes and candles available for 20% off.

But what’s good for a home brand may not work as well for the hotel.

Anne-Cecile Blanchot, a New York-based PR professional, said she chooses hotels to escape from home life: “I don’t necessarily want what’s in my hotel room to be items I can have at home.”

JPMorgan Chase has reached a deal to take over the Apple credit-card program from Goldman Sachs, further cementing JPMorgan’s status as a behemoth in the credit-card sector and marking the final chapter of Goldman’s failed experiment in consumer lending,  AnnaMaria Andriotis and Gina Heeb report.

The new deal is expected to bring two of the country’s most influential companies closer together at a time when payments are increasingly playing out on people’s phones, watches and other gadgets.

The bank gets a loyal base of Apple customers to whom it can pitch more financial products, and Apple gets a partner with a sprawling, well-established consumer franchise to help it sell and finance more gadgets.

Apple fans have an image of relative affluence, but negotiations with JPMorgan slowed down over an interesting wrinkle:

Goldman Sachs is offloading the roughly $20 billion of outstanding card balances at a discount of more than $1 billion, according to people familiar with the matter. With most co-brands, balances sell at premiums.

The discount here reflects a high exposure to subprime borrowers and what has been a higher-than-industry-average delinquency rate, creating the potential for significant losses on the outstanding balances.

Yesterday we told you that Semafor, the news startup that targets “decision makers,” had landed $30 million in funding on the heels of its first profitable year. Today we have a sadder story in the news business:

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette will cease operations in May, its parent company said, citing significant financial losses and a recent court decision in its yearslong battle with unionized staff, Alexandra Bruell and Kris Maher report for The Journal.

“Over the past 20 years, Block Communications has lost more than $350 million in cash operating the Post-Gazette,” the company said. “The realities facing local journalism make continued cash losses at this scale no longer sustainable.”

The paper, which dates back to 1786, has been owned by Block Communications for nearly a century.

Unionized Post-Gazette editorial staff have been on strike since October 2022, seeking better wages and healthcare benefits and accusing Block of years of bargaining in bad faith. Their last contract expired in 2017.

Not the last word?

Andrew Goldstein, a Post-Gazette reporter and president of the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, said the union would “pursue all options to make sure that Pittsburgh continues to have the caliber of journalism it deserves.”

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A former Saks stylist accused of stealing thousands of dollars in fraudulent returns is suing the luxury retailer, alleging that Saks retaliated against him for getting a job offer from a rival department-store chain. [WSJ] 

Trump administration officials made sweeping changes to U.S. federal dietary guidelines, recommending that people avoid highly processed foods and dramatically increase protein intake. [WSJ] 

The FDA says the animated “Lipid Lurkers” characters in Esperion Therapeutics ads for a cholesterol treatment are a little too distracting. [Fierce Pharma] 

Google is introducing an AI Inbox and AI Overviews to Gmail. [Android Central]

Macs’ latest menu icons have critics accusing Apple of ignoring its own design guidelines. [Creative Bloq] 

Nike sold off RTFKT, pronounced “artifact,” the digital collectibles company it bought in 2021 and shut down last year after the NFT craze collapsed. [Oregonian]

Andréa Mallard is leaving Pinterest after eight years as CMO, the company’s first. [Ad Age] 

White Castle promoted Jamie Richardson to CMO from vice president of marketing and public relations. [Nation’s Restaurant News]