Hermès

Marketers Misunderstand Luxury, Not Price

An opinion piece by Pum Lefebure published on Ad Age on July 13, 2026 argues that modern marketing confuses luxury with volume and trends. The article claims true luxury is about intentional, singular creation rather than price tags or algorithm-driven mass production, using the Hermès Birkin (credit: Sotheby’s) as an exemplar. The piece criticizes the industry’s focus on more content, impressions, and speed, suggesting luxury brands suffer when marketing chases quantity over craft and meaning.

xpln.ai launches Ideal Attention Time metric

xpln.ai, an attention intelligence platform, launched Ideal Attention Time (IAT), a predictive metric that estimates the minimum amount of attention a creative needs to achieve recognition, product identification, and message understanding before media investment. xpln.ai's analysis using the IAT framework found that 75% of impressions do not generate enough attention for audiences to associate the product with the brand. IAT evaluates every video frame for roughly fifty visual, audio and contextual signals calibrated against two years of human attention data from more than 20,000 panelists, and applies those results to media environments including YouTube, social platforms, connected TV (CTV) and the open web. The company says IAT delivers results in minutes and aims to align creative requirements with media planning and in-flight optimisation.

Open Engine: AI Agent Handoffs Without Humans

The author announces Open Engine, a practical framework and set of copy-paste templates to let AI agents hand off work across models and tools without requiring a human to carry the state. The project focuses on the integration layer — preserving sources, limits, and provenance as a task moves between agents (Claude, Codex, ChatGPT, browser agents) and collaboration tools (Slack, Linear, calendar). Open Engine includes a shared task list, a seven-part task record, a compact accountability “receipt,” and a nine-question one-loop audit designed to let an agent claim, pause, resume, and finish tasks with evidence. The release aims to solve the operational friction of multi-model, multi-tool workflows rather than kingmaking among models, and positions Open Engine alongside other orchestration projects such as OpenClaw, Hermes, and Symphony.