Wednesday, June 18

🌟 Today’s Highlights:

• Adobe launched a mobile app for Firefly AI

• Meta added AI tools for advertisers & agencies to Advantage+

• Here’s what a connected strategy looks like in action

• 📊 Stat of the Day: 91% of creators are already integrating AI into their content creation process. (Source: Epidemic Sound)

• 💡 Today’s Insight: Social media is Americans’ top news source

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⚡️ Today’s Headlines ⚡️

📱 Adobe launched a mobile app for its Firefly AI tools. The new iPhone and Android apps allow users to access Adobe’s all-in-one Firefly generative AI models on mobile, generating images and videos using text descriptions.

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✨ Meta added Gen AI tools for advertisers & agencies to Advantage+. The new features include consistent branding at scale, image-to-video generation capabilities, video highlights, and Business AI’s voice features.

👮🏻‍♂️ How To EASILY Protect Yourself (& Clients) From Privacy Lawsuits - is the topic of my newest podcast episode with the Founder of Captain Compliance - Now Streaming on Spotify, Apple, & YouTube →

🎥 YouTube unveiled its Open Call tool for UGC at Cannes. The new tool, part of YouTube BrandConnect, allows brands to request sponsored content from creators and receive videos to be integrated into their campaign.

💡 Today’s Insight 💡

Social media is Americans’ top news source

🗞 TL;DR - For the first time in history, social media is now Americans’ most-used source for news over old fashioned television. Oxford’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism just released its 2025 Digital News Report, a survey of nearly 100k people in 48 countries, detailing news consumption habits and the results are… pretty interesting.

💡 Insight - Some of the top takeaways from the report:

• While social media news is on the rise in other countries, the changes are happening “faster and with more impact” in the United States, Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia where heavy social media polarization has been prominent.

• Preferences for text over video news vary significantly by country, seemingly tied to a country’s wealth. Norway, Germany, and the U.K. are more pro-reading, while India, Mexico, and the Philippines are more pro-watching.

• Younger groups, especially those age 18-24, are more likely than older ones to prefer watching or listening to the news.

• Across the 20 countries with the strongest digital subscription markets for news, about 18% of people report having paid for any online news source in the past year.

• 79% of survey respondents say they didn’t get any news alerts at all during the average week, signifying a growing overwhelm with the use of notifications over the past decade.

• Attitudes toward AI in article creation varies greatly by region with Croatia, Finland, Denmark, and Belgium as the most skeptical countries toward stories “produced mostly by AI with some human oversight” while 44% of Indian readers and 38% of Thai readers saying they were comfortable with it.

• In the U.S., 39% of people said their smartphone is the first way they come across news in the morning (but 57% of Americans under 35).

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