This week, research from Intuit Mailchimp breaks down the impact of SMS messages and emails during the peak holiday shopping season. Take note: emails using AI had high order rates. In other news, Fashinnovation said it has joined the Apparel Industry Board Inc.’s (AIBI) Chicago Fashion Summit 2026 as a strategic partner to support the summit’s visibility. The event is in October.
Meanwhile, researchers at Senor Tower said in their latest report that digital ad spending is on track to surpass $110 billion globally during the fourth quarter. This is a 19 percent increase quarter-over-quarter. Lastly, Cafeteria, the market intelligence company, has announced the launch of S/NTH, which the company said is a platform that enables brands, agencies and financial institutions to access “a pipeline of [consumer] insights covering over 20,000 topics.”
How to drive order rates
New research from Intuit Mailchimp and Datalily analyzed data from over 44 billion emails and 83 million text messages sent in the space of Halloween to New Year’s. The data showed that targeted approach features such as abandoned cart automation delivered 36 percent higher open rates, while segmentation delivered 11 percent higher average order value during the Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) shopping event.
The report, titled “Breaking Through Peak Season Noise,” noted that emails created with the help of generative AI have a 50 percent higher order rate and a 33 percent higher conversion rate than emails created without AI. Emails drive steady revenue, while SMS engages high-intent shoppers, with order rates up to six times higher and revenue per message up to three times higher.
There is also huge potential for the lower volume of messages that brands send on weekends. Order rates on these days are twice as high as on weekdays, with brands sending 60 percent fewer messages.
Beyond short-term revenue during the holiday season, the period can also add long-term value to a retailer’s customer acquisition strategy. The report found that during the peak season period, Mailchimp customers added more than 500 million new contacts. Of the email orders placed during BFCM by first-time buyers, 59 percent of them were placed via email, while nearly 70 percent of SMS orders were placed by first-time buyers.
First-time buyers also spent more per order than repeat customers, averaging $145.62 per order via email and $247.08 per order via SMS. Of the first-time buyers from peak season, 16.6 percent returned as repeat buyers within the first quarter of the following year.
Save the date: Oct. 13
Fashinnovation said it has joined the Apparel Industry Board Inc. (AIBI)’s Chicago Fashion Summit 2026 as a strategic partner to support the summit’s visibility across fashion, business, technology and innovation. It takes place on Oct. 13 and convenes designers, entrepreneurs, retailers, executives, creatives and innovators “for a full day of conversations, networking and industry exchange,” organizers said, adding that the summit builds on AIBI’s mission “to strengthen Chicago’s fashion ecosystem by creating opportunities for education, connection, business development and collaboration across the industry.”
Elie Tahari, designer and entrepreneur, will be featured at the event. Aside from fashion business and entrepreneurship, the event will spotlight topics such as AI and technology, sustainability and innovation, brand building and growth, and the evolving future of fashion and retail.
“We’re excited to support the Chicago Fashion Summit and help amplify the conversations shaping the future of fashion, business and technology,” said Marcelo Guimarães, founder of Fashinnovation. “Chicago has a strong fashion community, and having Elie Tahari as part of this year’s program makes the collaboration particularly special.”
Nicole C. Ruiz, CEO of the Apparel Industry Board Inc., said, “We’re excited to welcome Fashinnovation as a strategic communications partner and continue expanding the reach of the Apparel Industry Board and Chicago Fashion Summit.”
Digital ad spend soars
According to Sensor Tower’s flagship report, the State of Digital Advertising 2026, digital ad spending is on fire. Researchers at the firm, which offers digital intelligence solutions, found that global digital ad spending reached an estimated $348 billion between August 2025 and July 2026, marking a 19 percent year-over-year increase. The digital ad impressions rose 13 percent in the same period to 70.7 trillion. The report’s authors said advertiser budgets have grown faster than the ad impressions themselves.
The researchers also found that digital ad spend is on track to surpass $110 billion globally in the fourth quarter, which is a 19 percent increase quarter-over-quarter. Ad spend in the U.S. is expected to reach $63.3 billion, a 20 percent gain, quarter-over-quarter.
The researchers said Procter & Gamble overtook Amazon as the world’s number one digital advertiser in 2026. “Instagram surpassed Facebook to become the top social ad channel for the first time ever in [in the first half of] 2026, with 53 percent of Instagram’s ad spend now coming from Reels, up from 37 percent a year earlier,” the report stated.
There were other surprises too. The report’s authors said despite the attention on AI advertising, “generative AI ad spend still accounts for only about 1 percent of total global digital ad spend.”
Other key findings revealed that within the U.S. in early 2026, online forum Reddit was the fastest-growing advertising channel of all, even faster than mobile apps, Instagram and TikTok, among others.
For the trailing 12-month period, the digital ad spend in the U.S. reached $200 billion. The report’s authors said mobile-ad dollars are increasingly being layered with AI-powered advertising within native mobile applications, as well as on AI platforms such as ChatGPT and on over-the-top (OTT) streaming services.
The report’s authors said amid an increasingly fragmenting digital landscape, brands must leverage the greatest amount of flexibility, layer the greatest amount of data and create the greatest amount of culturally relevant mobile-first creative in order to stand out in the very competitive digital advertising ecosystem.
A “cheat code” for marketers
Cafeteria, the market intelligence company that culls intel from Generation Z and Generation Alpha, has announced the launch of S/NTH, which the company said is “an exclusively human-trained AI with both paid and freemium tiers.” The platform enables brands, agencies and financial institutions to access “a pipeline of insights covering over 20,000 topics, including consumer brands, retailers, pop culture, food, health, wellness, lifestyle, behavior, spend and predictions.”
The platform is designed to deliver precise and real-time insights with context, citations and consumer attribution. “The company developed the platform alongside clients like Adidas, Hollister, H&M and numerous agencies,” Cafeteria said in a statement. “S/NTH is now available as an enterprise co-pilot on desktop and iOS or as a freemium AI [on the company’s website].”
Rishi Malhotra, CEO, founded the company in 2024 along with co-founders Leeann Sheely, chief design officer, and Mark Silverstein, chief business officer.
“Young consumers always shape culture and commerce—what we buy, listen to, watch, and how we talk,” Malhotra said. “This generation is digitally native, opinionated and drives consumer demand cycles faster than ever before.”
The CEO said the platform was built for young consumers to share honest conversation privately and earn for their time. “With the launch of our human-trained AI, we’re enabling companies to access culture in true real time. Just as lossless music is high fidelity without data gaps from compression, we’ve made the same thing possible with human behavior. It’s pure.”
Malhotra described S/NTH as a cheat code for retailers and brands. “Most AI is trained on the open Internet and pieces together web searches and text transcripts that deliver generic results from unverified sources and often makes up what you want to hear,” The CEO said. “S/NTH is a uniquely precise and honest AI with true user citations and real denominators.”
