Welcome back. Today, brands call “No slop!”

Consumers’ growing suspicion that everything is AI has some marketers going out of their way to proclaim their ads slop-free, Patrick Coffee writes for the WSJ Leadership Institute. A few examples:

• “We commit: No AI generated bodies or people,” the intimate apparel brand Aerie promised last month in a new campaign.
• A recent Instagram video was “created entirely by hand using digital art and real video footage, not AI,” Le Creuset said in a pinned comment on its post.
• “AI can’t change a diaper,” the baby products marketer Coterie declared to social-media followers. “Parenting is as real as it gets. We believe our content should be, too.”

That’s not to say they’re puritans on the technology. Aerie is open to using AI for small changes like lighting adjustments after the fact, while Coterie says it helps improve its customer experience.

But right now they figure AI-generated marketing is more likely to get in the way of connecting with consumers than to help.

Plenty of other brands are still in the mix with AI, in their own ways. Unilever’s Dollar Shave Club is promoting a new women’s line with two ads, Adweek reports this morning—one made the traditional way, the other with AI.

Dollar Shave Club CEO Larry Bodner said he expects the AI execution to land with Gen Z on TikTok and the other to do better on properties owned by Meta and Google. “We can make changes on the fly based on how we see what consumers are reacting to,” Bodner told Adweek.

But everybody’s got something to say. Dollar Shave Club’s AI ad isn’t remotely about AI. But it ends with a rival razor getting tossed in the trash on top of a box labeled “AI videos with Sora,” a nod to OpenAI’s suddenly abandoned video generator.

Here’s Bodner’s explanation to Adweek:

PepsiCo and Diageo have canceled their sponsorships of a London music festival that booked Kanye West as the headline performer, Dan Gallagher and Jacob Bunge report for the Journal.

West, who now goes by Ye, was announced last week to perform all three days of this July’s Wireless Festival, which had been marketed as “Pepsi Max Presents Wireless.”

The rapper has been promoting a new album as he tries to move past years of controversies that have included praising Adolf Hitler, denying the Holocaust and calling slavery a “choice.”

But his recent apology, saying he was “deeply mortified” by actions that he blamed on bipolar disorder, hasn’t convinced everyone.

A new spin on headline risk: Marketers have been increasingly baking their brands into the names of festivals, Katie Deighton wrote last year for CMO Today, from Coca-Cola Flow Fest to When We Were Young Presented by 7-Eleven.

“It’s our equivalent to naming an arena or a stadium,” a Live Nation executive told Katie then as he talked up a new top-tier sponsorship option for advertisers.

Today we see the downside.

Title sponsors are going to be more invested in a festival’s lineup, as made plain by Live Nation’s own Wireless Festival, no longer presented by Pepsi Max. And then Diageo, whose Captain Morgan and Johnnie Walker brands were listed as festival partners, followed Pepsi out the door.

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OpenAI released new policy proposals for a world with superintelligence, or AI that far surpasses human capabilities, including taxes on businesses that replace human workers with automated systems. The company is also opening a new office in Washington to have policy conversations on the topics. [WSJ] 

OpenAI is seeking a new chief marketing officer after Kate Rouch stepped down for health reasons. [Ad Age] 

Boll & Branch is using OpenClaw agents with systems like Shopify and the marketing platform Iterable to pull reports on the bedding brand’s customers. Next up: social trend analysis. [Glossy] 

United Airlines will start selling no-frills “basic” versions of seats in premium sections of its planes. [The Points Guy]

Chrysler, the one-time American icon, was at the New York International Auto Show promoting a marginal refresh of the only model it still sells. For its fans and advocates, that was a welcome sign of life. [WSJ] 

A group of Grubhub veterans have found their next act: an app that lets drivers get help with flat tires and stalled engines. [WSJ] 

How Revolve has learned to live with a return rate nearly triple the typical online retail average, all while posting significant earnings gains. [WSJ]

Savannah Guthrie returned to co-hosting NBC’s “Today.” [NPR]