Three and a half years ago, as the world fawned over the capabilities of ChatGPT, generative AI was viewed as an almost magical tool that could help companies achieve just about anything. In the time since then, AI has lost some of that magical sheen. It’s still a tool that can help companies accomplish many tasks, but it requires planning and expertise, data and the right infrastructure to actually get there. In short, it needs someone to put in some work.

Marketers are doing that work, but it’s not always easy. Boathouse, a marketing agency with a strong focus on data and analytics, seeks to help brands get the insights and action they want out of AI. To get there, they recently hired former Google and Salesforce exec Sonia Chung as their chief strategy officer. I talked with her about her perspective on marketing and technology. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.

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Does broadcast TV truly matter anymore? Forbes’ Mary Whitfill Roeloffs analyzed broadcast viewership data and found many longstanding news and entertainment shows lost about half of their viewers in the last 12 years. The largest viewership decrease was for NBC’s “Tonight Show” with Jimmy Fallon, which has seen its audience drop about 64% since 2015. The audiences for ABC’s “Good Morning America,” NBC’s “Today” and “CBS Mornings” were all down by just under 50%, while CBS’ “Evening News” and NBC’s “Nightly News” saw their audiences decrease by 41% and 30%, respectively.

While all broadcast TV has lost some viewership over the past 12 years, not every show has seen such a sharp decline. “ABC World News Tonight” has seen just a 9% drop in viewership, as has Stephen Colbert’s “Late Show” on CBS. However, Colbert’s “Late Show” is the only one of these broadcast stalwarts that’s been cancelled, with the last program scheduled to air on May 21. After that, writes Forbes contributor Rick Ellis, the time slot will be filled by Byron Allen’s “Comics Unleashed,” a program that currently airs after midnight.

Despite the decreasing number of viewers, broadcast TV is still federally regulated—and hotly contested. Last week, a federal judge in California blocked the $6.2 billion merger of local broadcast TV station owners Nexstar Media Group and Tegna until a pending antitrust lawsuit is resolved—despite the fact that it received (somewhat controversial) FCC clearance last month. The merger would give Nexstar control of 265 local stations in 44 states and Washington, D.C.—about 80% of the nation’s local TV market—which exceeds the FCC’s rule limiting a single station owner to reaching 39% of the nation’s local TV market. Prior to the FCC’s approval, DirecTV and attorneys general from eight states had filed the antitrust lawsuit to block the merger, arguing that consolidating ownership would drive up consumer costs and reduce competition.

On Tuesday, Nexstar CEO Perry Sook said the company would appeal, sounding off about the ruling in an interview on “Inside Edition.” Sook said that the lawsuit is a ploy from DirecTV to weaken a competitor, and for the state attorneys general to take up a populist cause to help them win re-election this fall, Deadline reported. Local broadcast TV is at a critical moment, Sook said, and he envisions just a couple of companies eventually controlling all local television.

With inflation stubbornly ticking upwards, consumer sentiment hitting all-time lows and geopolitical tensions rising throughout the world, it’s no surprise that the luxury goods sector is taking a beating. LVMH—which owns brands including Louis Vuitton, Christian Dior and Marc Jacobs—has seen its stock fall more than 26% this year. The luxury brands house reported a 6% drop in Q1 revenue compared to 2025, as well as declining sales in fashion and leather goods, which it attributed to currency exchange rates and the conflict in the Middle East. Alongside Gucci owner Kering, Hermès also reported slow earnings growth last week, and both companies have seen their stock value drop about 20% in 2026.

While luxury brands can do nothing about the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, they have been slowly leaning into AI as a marketing tool, writes Forbes senior contributor Yola Robert. Luxury brands are using the technology to leverage the reasons consumers buy their products in the first place. Brands are using AI for personally curated product recommendations, and may use it in the future to design and create limited-edition products. AI is also being used to improve and optimize personal interactions, since shopping in physical stores and in-person events are part of the draw of luxury brands. Still, Silvia Coleman, head of market intelligence and VP of strategic growth for luxury brand analyst CXG, told Roberts the key is keeping AI in the background. While AI can enhance personal service for luxury brands, the customer tends to only be interested in the personal service.

Online marketing is everywhere: spam email, pop-up ads, sponsored web search results, mobile device notifications. Forbes senior contributor John Hall writes about a surprising and old-school way to cut through the digital noise: direct mail. Yes, as in physical paper going into an actual mailbox.

Direct mail adds another channel to messaging, giving the people you’re targeting multiple ways to receive the information, and can include QR codes to bring them back to your site—or to a shopping cart that never made it to checkout. According to statistics from the National Association of Advertisers Hall cites, direct mail has an ROI of 112%—higher than 93% for email and 88% for paid search. The audiences who respond best to direct mail, according to direct mail platform Lob, are surprisingly Gen Z and Millennials, with 85% of them engaging with what they find in their mailboxes.

How Marketers Can Use AI To Turn Data Into Insights

Today, there is a wealth of data available about nearly every part of a consumer journey. And there is so much technology enabled by AI to come up with solid analysis, predictions, targeting and measurement. What there isn’t a lot of right now is expertise and a willingness to connect all of the information together.

Marketing and data veteran Sonia Chung, who previously held high-level positions at Google and Salesforce, joined data-driven marketing agency Boathouse earlier this year as the agency’s chief strategy officer. She sees her job as bridging the gaps that exist between data and turning it into valuable information for clients, bringing Boathouse to its potential as what she called a “disruptor agency.” I talked to her about her strategy and outlook. This conversation has been edited for length, clarity and continuity.

How do you become a disruptor agency?

Chung: We’re in this really interesting inflection point where there’s a plethora of data we’re working with. That’s exciting because I used to work at companies that were data poor or couldn’t collect it for whatever reason. Unfortunately, while there’s a ton of data and ability to collect signals or information about customers and marketing channels, it’s been very siloed.

It is not intentional. What happens is, I’m going through a large search company to collect search data. I’m going through a social company to collect social data. And I’m going through e-commerce platforms to collect e-commerce data. What’s happened to the industry is that we’re very platform-centric. We say we are customer-centric, but it’s really hard for a brand to be customer-centric unless they own those platforms or are connecting [them].

I have a philosophy I’ve been using for the last decade: With data you have to connect, collect and activate. We’ve got the collection part: There’s a ton of data. The connection: a little spotty. Part of it is because this platform collects it this way, this platform collects it another way. There’s duplication or double counting or missing data. It’s a lot of work for a brand to do that themselves.

And how do you go about breaking those silos?

We still have to work within the walls of marketing. Many of the platforms that exist, we still need them for execution. We’re not going to start from scratch, build something and do all these channels independently. We still are dependent on other things.

The inflection point is this AI movement, if you will. Martech and adtech have always been separate. What’s interesting is AI is going to be the disruptor because it allows you to potentially do some very complex and difficult connections of data that for a human being would be overwhelming, almost impossible.

AI is helping fill the gaps. If you’re data poor, it can give you synthesized audiences and data points. If you’re data rich, it helps synthesize the data, summarizing it more cleanly, versus having to do that manually.

If there’s one point in time that it’s going to happen, it’s now. I’ve been around long enough to have seen the social change, the mobile change, Web3. This one is different because the speed [means change] is happening almost daily. We said this was going to happen in social, in mobile. It did, but it was a little bit drawn out, and a lot of leaders were ahead of their time predicting what would happen because it just took so long to actually get there.

What advice would you give to marketers about taking advantage of data and AI?

Don’t be scared, embrace it.

Test it out yourself. Don’t let anyone else do it. As a leader, we have to be users of it. We have to understand it.

As marketers, we’re used to being like brand ambassadors and understanding the consumer. Those are still quite important, but you have to embrace the technology and analytic part of things, because that is where you can really seize the opportunity and go further.

Know the infrastructure side. So much of the opportunity is starting to connect the dots, but no one’s going to hand it to you because the platforms are not going to display all the AI that’s working toward it. But if you understand how the infrastructure and foundation work, you can actually start building out your own connections and figuring out the systems.

Financial planning firm First Command Financial Services hired Brent Korte as its new chief marketing officer, effective April 21. Korte joins the company from Ameritas, where he worked as senior vice president and chief marketing officer, and he succeeds Kellie Richter.

Value-based health care provider Aledade appointed Oraida Roman as its new chief commercial officer, effective April 15. Roman joins the company from Humana, where she most recently worked as senior vice president of national provider strategies and operations.

Outpatient imaging services provider Lumexa Imaging selected Kyle Lynch to be its new chief growth officer, effective April 20. Lynch joins the company from SCA Health, where he worked as senior vice president of strategy and development.

The world of work is changing, and tomorrow’s college graduates need to be prepared for it. Several Forbes C-suite newsletter readers responded to a survey for our third annual New Ivies list, naming 20 schools whose graduates do well in today’s entry-level jobs. One constant factor at these schools? An emphasis on AI:

60%: Percentage of executives who said AI will change their staffing needs

42%: Percentage of executives who are more likely to hire public university graduates today than five years ago

‘Prioritize intellectual rigor over inherited prestige’ A C-suite executive said of today’s successful institutions, as part of the survey

Coachella has been a place to be seen (and listen to music) since the festival debuted in 1999. This year, however, the actual celebrities kept it low key, while influencers were the people who made a splash. What drove that change, and what does it mean for marketing?

People are both living and working longer, and that longevity is changing the dynamics of the workplace. Here’s how to respond to this shift, both from a physical and cultural perspective.

At a Pentagon Christian worship service last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth quoted a prayer that was pulled from a not-exactly-holy source. What was it?

A. Lyrics from the musical “Les Misérables”

B. A passage from “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”

C. A monologue from “Pulp Fiction”

See if you got it right here.

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