AI & Marketing Research with Dr. Eva Wolf

Your vendor just told you their AI is approaching AGI-level performance. Your board wants to know if that means anything. And most marketing teams have no framework for answering either question. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI capability papers — none of which study marketing directly — that together provide a rigorous vocabulary for evaluating AI tools, cutting thr...

The people who build AI — nearly 2,800 researchers publishing at the field's top venues — just moved their own timeline for AI surpassing human performance at most tasks up by thirteen years. In a single year. This episode asks: should that change how you're planning right now? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews one AI marketing research paper that cleared the full-text b...

Your company bought an AI marketing tool. Leadership signed off. IT set it up. Six months later — nobody is using it. This episode, three research papers point at exactly that problem. And the fix is not what most teams are reaching for. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing research papers covering AI adoption in small and medium businesses, enterprise AI deploy...

Your attribution model is probably giving credit to the wrong touchpoints. Your AI chatbot might be one disclosure away from converting more customers. And your recommendation engine may only work if shoppers actually feel understood. This week's radar brief examines three recent AI marketing papers that each illuminate a different part of the same problem: how AI performs — or quietly fails...

What if the ad slot you're bidding on today becomes irrelevant — not because clicks drop, but because AI generates the answer before users ever see a search result? And what if your customers are already using ChatGPT to research your product before they talk to anyone on your team — and not telling a soul? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI and marketing research...

Are brands that openly explain how their AI works actually winning more trust from Gen Z consumers? Can your forecasting tools simulate what happens if you change your ad budget — or just tell you what already happened? And what might it look like to buy ads inside ChatGPT or Perplexity based on the meaning of a conversation rather than a keyword? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews...

If your AI tool can quote a key finding from a document word-for-word, does that mean it actually used that fact when making a recommendation? This week's radar brief surfaces three recent papers that all point to the same uncomfortable pattern: the gap between what AI can do and what it actually delivers in practice is almost always a workflow problem — not a model problem. In this Research...

When AI can write your ads, predict who's about to leave, and draft your strategy decks — what are humans still for, and when does it matter that you say so? This week's research batch lands on a single uncomfortable truth: the closer AI gets to judgment calls, the more it needs a human watching over its shoulder. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing r...

When does AI personalisation stop being helpful and start feeling like surveillance? And if AI chatbots are about to run native ads, will anyone even know they're being sold to? Those are the questions running through today's radar. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing research papers covering Gen Z consumer trust, sociodemographic variation in emotion...

Most marketing teams are already using AI every day — but are they using it to get better, or just to go faster? This week's research radar surfaces a pattern across three papers: AI genuinely levels the playing field for content volume and SEO, but the moment a client needs a real conversation, or an audience needs to feel something, full automation starts costing you. In this Research Radar...

What if the customer your marketing was built to reach isn't always a human anymore? Three recent papers converge on an uncomfortable idea: AI agents are already shopping, ad-tech is learning to reach them inside chatbot answers, and human trust in data practices remains the deciding factor in whether personalization converts at all. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent...

Your next customer might not be a person. It might be an AI agent — one that searches, compares, and completes purchases without asking a human. And while that shift is underway, researchers are already building the ad infrastructure for the AI chatbot era: auction systems that time ads to conversational intent, and plug-in layers that insert sponsored content into any AI response, even from close...

Your AI marketing tools are already making decisions — bidding on ads, recommending products, drafting strategy. This week's research keeps arriving at the same uncomfortable finding: pure automation creates measurable risk, while structured human-AI collaboration captures the upside. Three papers. One clear pattern. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing res...

If AI search engines are replacing Google as the place where customers discover, compare, and buy — and those same engines can now insert ads into their own answers — who exactly are you marketing to: the human, or the algorithm acting on their behalf? Today's three papers converge on one uncomfortable answer: both, and the playbook for each is different. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva...

AI search engines like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT are replacing traditional link lists with synthesized answers that cite some sources and ignore everyone else. The question for marketers: do you know what it actually takes to get cited — and does what vendors are selling you hold up under research scrutiny? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing research pap...

Most businesses don’t have an AI marketing tool problem. They have an AI process problem. In this episode of AI Marketing Research Radar, Dr. Eva Wolf breaks down why so much AI-generated marketing feels generic, empty, or like “AI slop” — and what the research suggests marketers, consultants, educators, and business owners should do instead. The big idea: better AI marketing depends on the 3C Fra...

When your AI says it's predicting the future, is it actually forecasting — or just remembering? And what happens to brand loyalty when an AI agent, not a human, is the one making the purchase? Three papers this week examine whether we are actually getting what we think we are getting from AI in marketing. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing research papers...

When your AI pricing tool receives more market data, does it actually compete harder — or does it quietly learn to charge more? And if the AI writing your content was trained to please the average user, who is that person, and is your audience actually in the room? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI and marketing research papers covering algorithmic pricing behavior, LL...

Are your marketing workflows actually keeping up with generative AI — or are you using powerful tools without the governance to back them up? This episode examines three recent research papers that each point to the same uncomfortable gap: most organisations are adopting AI for marketing faster than they are building the systems to use it well. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3...

The AI tools your team is racing to adopt — have they ever been tested on a real customer? This week's radar covers three genuinely interesting papers across AI creative production, sustainable tourism marketing, and retail analytics. The ideas are worth knowing. But the evidence behind the headlines is weaker than the numbers suggest. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 rece...

AI tools are being deployed across banking, education, and marketing workflows — but the research suggests the gap between a promising feature and a real business outcome is wider than most teams assume. In digital banking, AI features only convert to customer loyalty when they first produce genuine satisfaction. In training, even impressive short-term results deserve scrutiny. And sitting underne...

AI recommendation systems can now generate personalized ads, hold real shopping conversations, and show customers what a product looks like on them. So why are most marketing teams still running the same algorithm they had three years ago — and what does the research say about who's actually getting AI marketing right? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing r...

When AI writes your content, runs your CRM, and briefs your customers before they ever reach a human expert — are you building a smarter brand, or quietly eroding the trust that makes it work? That is the question connecting today's three papers, and the answers are more specific — and more actionable — than most AI marketing headlines suggest. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf revie...

When AI handles more of the creative work, who actually benefits — the brand, the consumer, or neither? Three recent peer-reviewed papers point to the same pattern: AI in marketing moves fast, but the failure modes are subtle. They show up in trust, in advocacy, and in your team's ability to do the work when it gets hard. In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketin...

Your brand might be producing AI content at scale — but are consumers quietly losing trust in it? And for businesses betting on AI to lift marketing numbers, what's actually standing between them and results? In this Research Radar Brief, Dr. Eva Wolf reviews 3 recent AI marketing research papers covering consumer perceptions of AI-generated brand content, AI-driven marketing performance in h...