Canva

Seven career lessons for marketers in the AI era

At a Canva-hosted happy hour in Cannes co-hosted with The Drum, marketing professor Mark Ritson, Meghan Gendelman (B2B CMO, Canva) and Duncan Avis (Americas Leader, EY Studio) shared seven pieces of career advice for marketers navigating the AI era. Key points: broaden expertise beyond advertising into pricing, product, distribution and strategy; separate strategy from tactics; use AI to amplify creativity without replacing human thinking; begin decisions with the customer; recognise B2B as a valuable career path; focus on building lasting work; and see your role as serving the brand or organisation. The piece frames these lessons as practical reminders that strategic thinking, customer focus and originality remain central despite rapid technological change.

Marketers Are Overtrusting AI Collaborators, Warns John McCarthy

John McCarthy, The Drum’s opinion editor, argues that many marketers treat generative AI and LLMs as unquestioned 'collaborators', which risks eroding human critique, editorial friction and creative rigor. The column—published 2026-07-06—uses anecdote and industry survey citations (Adobe, HubSpot, Canva) to show widespread AI use for ideation and creative starting points, and points to real-world harms where chatbots reinforced false beliefs. McCarthy warns that overreliance on AI for brainstorming, critique and strategy will produce lower-quality, homogenised work and that organisations need dissenting human roles (editors, curmudgeons) to push back. The piece is an opinion critique of current marketing practice rather than a technical announcement or policy change.

Threads turns 3, tests save button and party hat

Threads marked its third birthday with several user-facing surprises: an unofficial in-feed save/bookmark button seen by some users, the return of the birthday "party hat" profile badge, and small Easter eggs such as a confetti animation tied to certain Topics. The save button (reported by a Threads user) appears beside like, comment, repost and share icons and is rolling out to a subset of users; Threads has not officially confirmed the test. The party-hat badge is being enabled server-side and can be toggled in profile settings until July 8, 2026. The article notes Threads hit 500 million monthly active users in June and is evolving into a community-focused network, a trend also observed by the New York Times.