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Your Competitors Are Using This AI Stack (Are You?)
6 AI tools for video, design & automation you need to try this week.
Aleric Heck
December 09, 2025
In partnership with
The final stretch of 2025 is delivering some genuinely exciting developments, and I couldn't wait to break them down for you. This week's news confirms what we've been watching unfold all year: AI isn't just changing marketing—it's becoming the operational backbone of every successful campaign.
What really caught my attention? A partnership that delivered a 35% increase in ROAS through AI-powered campaign optimization. Those aren't theoretical projections—that's real money in real marketers' pockets.
📍 Quick Preview:
The Cadent + Google Cloud collaboration that's rewriting the rules on AI-powered advertising
Uber's new Intelligence platform that reveals how consumers actually move through the world
8 AI tools dropping this month that deserve your attention (Runway Gen-4 Turbo is particularly impressive)
Why "conversational search" queries are up 70%—and what that means for your content strategy
Let's dive in.
📈 Today's Top AI Marketing Story
Cadent + Google Cloud Partnership Delivers Game-Changing Results
Here's a development that stopped me mid-scroll this morning.
Cadent, the predictive advertising company, just announced an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud that's producing results most marketers would consider aspirational. By deploying Gemini Enterprise and Vertex AI across their advertising operations, they've achieved:
35% increase in campaign ROAS
200% improvement in campaign resolution times
Platform issues resolved in under 12 minutes
But the internal adoption story is equally compelling. Within 90 days, Cadent hit a 75% adoption rate among their 600 employees, generating 90,000 AI interactions and saving over 3,000 employee hours.
What makes this significant? Cadent's custom AI agents are analyzing thousands of campaigns across billions of data points simultaneously. This isn't AI as a helper—it's AI as the central nervous system of advertising operations.
⚡ QUICK ACTION TIP
If you're running multi-channel campaigns, this is your cue to audit how AI is (or isn't) integrated into your workflow. The gap between AI-native operations and AI-as-afterthought is widening fast.
🚀 AI Marketing Quick Hits
Uber Launches Intelligence Platform for Consumer Insights
Uber Advertising unveiled Uber Intelligence, built in partnership with LiveRamp. The platform lets advertisers combine their customer data with Uber's consented signals from ride and delivery activities. Think about it: insights into how people move, dine, travel, and order—behavioral patterns traditional datasets simply can't capture. Uber's ad division is projected to hit $1.5 billion in revenue for 2025.
🎯 Why This Matters: Real-world behavioral data is becoming the new competitive moat. Brands that can access and act on movement patterns will out-target those stuck with demographic-only approaches.
Conversational Search Queries Surge 70%
Google's Year in Search 2025 data reveals searches starting with "Tell me about" jumped 70% year-over-year, while "How do I" queries hit all-time highs with a 25% increase. AI Overviews now appear in over 13% of all Google searches.
🎯 Why This Matters: Your content strategy needs to shift from keyword-stuffing to answering questions conversationally. Think FAQ sections, how-to content, and structured answers that AI can easily parse and present.
✅ Action Item: Audit your top 10 landing pages. Do they answer questions directly in the first paragraph? If not, restructure them with AI Overviews in mind.
Creator Marketing Hits $37 Billion
Influencer and creator marketing is growing 4x faster than other ad channels, with the industry projected to reach $37 billion in 2025. The sweet spot? Mid-tier creators (50k–500k followers) deliver the best authenticity-to-reach ratio.
🎯 Why This Matters: The era of mega-influencer dominance is fading. Performance-based partnerships with mid-tier creators offer better ROI and higher trust signals.
AI-Powered Holiday Shopping Sets Records
US Black Friday online spending hit $11.8 billion (up 9.1%), with Salesforce estimating AI and agents influenced $14.2 billion in global Black Friday sales. Consumers used AI to compare products, get personalized recommendations, and make faster decisions.
🎯 Why This Matters: If your product pages aren't optimized for AI scraping and comparison, you're invisible to a growing segment of AI-assisted shoppers.
Digital Brands Group Partners with Aha for AI Influencer Marketing
Digital Brands Group announced a partnership with Aha (formerly HeadAI), an AI-powered platform with access to 50+ million creators globally. The platform automates the entire influencer campaign lifecycle—from creator matching and negotiation to publishing and performance analytics.
🎯 Why This Matters: AI-automated influencer management is moving from enterprise-only to accessible. Smaller brands can now compete on creator marketing efficiency.
🔍 Featured AI Tool Spotlight
If you've ever stared at a blank Canva canvas trying to create a banner for your latest blog post, this tool is about to become your new best friend.
BannerGPT is an AI-powered tool that reads and understands your blog content, then automatically generates relevant, visually appealing banner images that complement your writing. No design skills required.
What You Can Do With It:
Simply paste your blog post text into BannerGPT, and the AI analyzes your content—themes, key ideas, tone—and generates banner illustrations that actually match what you've written. It's not just slapping stock imagery on your posts; it's creating contextually relevant visuals that enhance your storytelling.
Key Capabilities:
Content-aware image generation — AI reads your text and creates relevant illustrations
No design skills needed — Perfect for bloggers and marketers without graphic design backgrounds
One-click generation — Paste your text, get your banner
Multiple platform support — Works with WordPress, Blogger, Medium, and standard image exports
No-code customization — Build your own Banner GPT-like apps using their ML Blocks technology
Who This Is Perfect For:
Bloggers who publish frequently and need consistent visual content
Content marketers managing multiple blogs or client accounts
Social media managers creating shareable blog graphics
Writers and authors promoting their work visually
Why This Is Noteworthy:
The tool solves a real pain point for content creators. Creating custom banner images for every blog post is time-consuming, and generic stock photos often feel disconnected from your actual content. BannerGPT bridges that gap by ensuring your visuals actually reflect what you've written.
Pricing: Free to get started
💡 PRO INSIGHT
Here's how to maximize BannerGPT: write your blog post first, then feed the complete text into the tool. The more context the AI has, the more relevant your banner will be. This is especially powerful for content teams publishing at scale—consistent, on-brand visuals without the design bottleneck.
Here's an email for KeywordSearch.com's 5-day free trial:
Get 5 Days of Unlimited AI Audience Research
KeywordSearch.com is Your Complete AI Marketing Command Center & you can get 5 Days of Unlimited AI Audience Research for Free!
If you've been following the digital marketing landscape, you know that precise audience targeting is the difference between burning ad spend and printing money. And you know we're obsessed with using AI to turn hours of research into seconds of automation!
Now imagine having AI that analyzes millions of data points to build your perfect ad audiences instantly – transforming your Google & YouTube campaigns from expensive experiments to predictable profit machines.
By Popular Demand, you can now get…
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What You'll Get During Your 5-Day Trial:
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✅ Complete YouTube Ad Spy Access - Analyze 100,000+ competitor ads and their targeting
✅ Keyword Expansion Tools - Turn single keywords into comprehensive campaigns
✅ Zero Restrictions - Full platform access, no feature limitations
Why This Trial Changes Everything:
In just 5 days, you could:
Build and test dozens of high-converting audiences
Spy on your top competitors' entire YouTube ad strategies
Save weeks of manual research time
Finally crack the code on profitable ad targeting
Average time from idea to synced audience: Just 2.6 minutes!
🛠️ More AI Tools Worth Exploring
Video & Creative Tools
Seedance 1.0 — ByteDance's Cinematic AI Video Generator
Native multi-shot storytelling with consistent characters across scenes
Exceptional motion fluidity and temporal stability (no jitter or ghosting)
Text-to-video and image-to-video generation in 1080p HD
Advanced semantic understanding for complex prompts with multiple subjects
Diverse style support: photorealism, cyberpunk, illustration, and more
Built by the team behind TikTok and CapCut
FireCut — AI Video Editing for Adobe Premiere Pro
Automatic silence removal — clean up hours of footage in one click
Multi-language caption generation (50+ languages)
Podcast editing suite with automatic camera switching
AI-powered zoom cuts at optimal moments
Chapter detection with auto-generated intro slides
Removes filler words ("umms" and "ahhs") automatically
HitPaw VikPea — AI Video Enhancement & Upscaling
Upscale videos from 480p to 4K or even 8K resolution
Multiple AI models: Portrait, Animation, Low-light, Colorize
AI noise reduction for cleaner footage
Black & white video colorization
Face enhancement for restoring detail in old videos
Batch processing support for multiple files
Design & Visualization Tools
Visualizee.ai — AI Rendering for Architects & Designers
Transform sketches, 3D models, or text prompts into photorealistic renders
Supports resolutions up to 8K
Inpainting tools for fixing specific areas
Works with FBX, OBJ, GLTF 3D formats plus JPG/PNG images
Perfect for architecture, interior design, and product visualization
AI-powered motion feature creates HD videos from renders
Free tier available (10 renders to start)
Automation & Productivity Tools
Runable — AI General Automation Agent
Execute any digital task through natural language commands
Build websites, slides, reports, documents, videos, and podcasts
Integrates with 2,500+ apps (calendars, CRMs, email, and more)
Customizable runbooks for repeatable workflows
Auto-prepare meeting briefs, analyze data, generate campaign content
No coding required — describe what you want in plain English
Cross-platform: desktop, browser, and mobile
E-Commerce Tools
Tagshop.ai — Shoppable UGC & Social Commerce
Turn user-generated content into shoppable galleries
Instant product import from your store
Auto-generated UGC videos for product pages
Storefront creation with built-in performance tracking
Collect and curate social proof from Instagram, TikTok, and more
Critical for eCommerce brands and affiliate sellers
Marketing That Moves Itself
Most measurement tools stop at telling you what happened. BlueAlpha tells you what to do next.
BlueAlpha unifies MMM, incrementality testing, and AI-driven optimization into a single continuous feedback loop. Models feed actions, actions feed models, and growth compounds.
No dashboards to decipher. No manual analysis. Just weekly, campaign-level recommendations you can trust.
Brands using BlueAlpha have cut CAC, saved millions in wasted spend, and unlocked double-digit growth within weeks, powered by the same team that scaled Tesla’s marketing systems.
💡 Pro Tip of the Day
Optimize Your Content for AI Overviews (Not Just Keywords)
With AI Overviews appearing in 13%+ of Google searches and conversational queries surging, here's how to adapt:
Step 1: Restructure Your Headers as Questions Transform "Benefits of Email Marketing" into "What Are the Benefits of Email Marketing?" AI systems are trained to match questions with answers.
Step 2: Lead With Direct Answers Put your clearest, most concise answer in the first 40-60 words after each header. AI Overviews pull from content that immediately addresses the query.
Step 3: Add Schema Markup for FAQs Implement FAQ schema on your key pages. This signals to AI systems that your content is structured for question-and-answer retrieval.
Step 4: Create "Best Of" and Comparison Content AI systems love synthesizing comparison data. Content structured as "Best X for Y" or "X vs Y" has higher AI visibility.
Success Metric: Track your impressions and clicks from queries starting with "how," "what," "why," and "tell me about" in Search Console. Aim for 15%+ growth quarter-over-quarter.
⚡ KeywordSearch.com Feature Spotlight
Turn AI Insights Into Targeted Audiences in Minutes
All this AI news is exciting, but here's the practical challenge: how do you translate these trends into actual campaign performance?
That's exactly what KeywordSearch.com's AI Audience Builder is designed for.
While Jellyfish helps you understand how AI perceives your brand, and Runway helps you create stunning video content, KeywordSearch bridges the gap between insight and execution. Our AI analyzes your niche, identifies high-intent audience segments, and generates targeting lists you can sync to Google and YouTube Ads with one click.
✨ What Makes It Different:
Generate laser-focused audiences in under 3 minutes
One-click sync to Google & YouTube Ads
Access 100k+ competitor ad examples for inspiration
Pre-built targeting templates for every niche
The marketers seeing the best results right now? They're the ones who've stopped treating AI as a novelty and started treating it as infrastructure. KeywordSearch is that infrastructure for your ad targeting.
🔮 Looking Ahead
The December 2025 landscape confirms something I've been saying all year: AI has transitioned from novelty to operational necessity. The Cadent results (35% ROAS improvement) aren't outliers—they're previews of what AI-native marketing operations can achieve.
Three things to watch:
Conversational search optimization will become as important as traditional SEO by mid-2026
AI perception monitoring (like Jellyfish's platform) will become standard in brand management
Real-world behavioral data (like Uber Intelligence) will reshape audience targeting strategies
The brands winning right now aren't just using AI tools—they've rebuilt their entire systems around AI.
Until next time, keep experimenting.
Aleric & Greg KeywordSearch.com
P.S. Curious how AI can supercharge your ad targeting? Take KeywordSearch for a test drive with our unlimited 5-day free trial and see for yourself. Start Free →
This AI Marketing Newsletter is Also Sponsored by:
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