KIMP’s Picks December 26th: Weekly Highlights In Design, Marketing, AI, & More

Does Friday bring FOMO with it? Let’s change that. We know that keeping up with the ever-buzzing social media feeds can feel like a never-ending job. New AI features roll out, algorithms quietly adjust, and one post suddenly becomes the reference point everyone’s sharing. Miss a few days and it feels like you’re already behind. Do you feel that way as the week comes to a close? Not anymore! The KIMP’s Picks is here to give you a quick weekly recap. 

We have a curated list of the shareworthy posts that will give you a glimpse of the week that flew by, so you do not have to spend all weekend doomscrolling to catch up. Without further ado, let’s get started with the KIMP’s Picks December 26th Edition. 

In the Marketing Realm

Digital marketing trends to look out for in 2026 

Search Engine Journal put together a list of the much-anticipated digital marketing trends of 2026. So, if you are wondering how to tweak your strategies and prepare for the year ahead, this is a great post. 

From the explosion of conversational search to the video commerce boom, the post delves into diverse aspects of digital marketing. It also highlights the trend of retail media networks going mainstream and highlights the need for marketers to prepare for the privacy-first data approach. 

In addition to this, the trends also talk about the evolving landscape in creator marketing and the need for brands to focus on community building. All these are key trends because AI is changing the way brands and marketers tackle marketing and the way consumers discover brands. 

Emerging trends in ad spending

In the age of AI search and the declining organic traffic via traditional search engines, paid ads have become much more important than ever. Amidst this, which are the platforms where marketers are parking their funds? According to an infographic shared by eMarketer, ad spending on Reddit has increased sharply. 

The graph shows that Reddit now supposedly leads the game with about 46.3% marketers in the US spending on ads on Reddit, in contrast with just 22% of them spending on Instagram ads. Ad spending on mobile apps has increased too. 

One of the key reasons for such shifts could come from the fact that online forums like Reddit are being considered as the top sources of answers by AI search engines and AI search is rapidly altering the search landscape.  

TV advertising is making a huge comeback 

Advertisers are now focusing on TV ads again but the approach to tackling TV ads is changing significantly. This is a crucial consideration for brands working on their media strategies for 2026. 

According to ADWEEK, new data shows that TV is no longer just a brand channel but part of an integrated, data-driven strategy that boosts digital performance too. 

Besides, streaming TV now represents a large share of total TV ad spend, and it’s expected to overtake traditional linear in the near future. 

Accordingly, most marketers plan to increase TV budgets next year. This indicates their confidence in its measurable impact, ability to extend reach, and role in strengthening search and social campaigns.

Emirates unveils a festive campaign 

Emirates has rolled out a creative Christmas campaign reimagining its Airbus A380 as Santa’s sleigh. Called the Sleigh380, the campaign features the aircraft decorated with antlers and a glowing red nose, taking off from Dubai loaded with gifts. 

The playful CGI video has been buzzing on social media, expanding the brand’s reach and mentions. A simple concept, but executed in the most fun and festive way by leaning into creativity enhanced by computer-generated visuals, has placed the brand in the spotlight. 

Creative storytelling and eye-grabbing visuals, when combined thoughtfully, can work wonders during the holiday season. 

In the Content Marketing Realm 

AI search and B2B brands 

LinkedIn shared a post discussing how B2B brand discovery is undergoing a radical shift as buyers move away from traditional Google results toward AI-driven conversational tools. 

In this new landscape, visibility isn’t just about ranking first on traditional search engines but about being “citable”. When AI systems like ChatGPT or Google’s AI Overviews summarize a market, they act as a digital gatekeeper, often deciding which brands make the shortlist before a user ever clicks a link. 

Accordingly, B2B marketers must shift from keyword stuffing to “answer-centric” authority. This means structuring content so it is easily extractable by machines by using clear definitions, data-backed conclusions, and a structured schema. 

Also, reliability is the new SEO. If your brand isn’t mentioned in the AI’s synthesized response, you effectively don’t exist in the awareness stage. Keep this in mind when working on your content strategy for 2026. 

From an SEO-focused approach to a GEO-focused strategy 

As discussed earlier, tackling AI search is crucial but not just for B2B brands but also for B2C brands. This means that your strategies should now shift from fully focusing on traditional SEO to accommodating GEO or generative engine optimization.

With AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews providing direct responses, brands are facing what is being called a “zero-click” reality, where even the best content is drawing zero clicks. This means that being cited within the summary is the only way to stay visible. 

To adapt, marketing leaders are shifting their focus from ranking for keywords to optimizing for “entities”, ensuring their brand, experts, and products are recognized as authoritative sources by AI models.

Marketing leaders are also rethinking their KPIs, moving away from raw traffic toward “share of model” and citation frequency. Here is a post from Search Engine Land that delves further into this discussion. 

In the Design Realm 

Vintage-inspired brand identity 

The Brand Identity recently shared a post exploring the brand identity designed for Brisca, a premium olive oil brand. The brand identity steers away from the stereotypical rustic labels found on most olive oil brands and adopts the vibrant energy of Spanish card games. 

Named after a classic Mediterranean game, the brand avoids folkloric clichés in favor of a modern, editorial aesthetic. Moreover, the design features bold geometric blocks and a primary color palette inspired by the “Baraja Española” deck. This creates a sophisticated look that stands out in a crowded market.

The packaging cleverly adapts card iconography, replacing traditional symbols with olive branches to connect the product to its cultural roots. Every detail, from the vintage-inspired tins to the intimate photography, balances emotional warmth with contemporary clarity.

A creative font idea 

With variable fonts gaining a lot of popularity, Google shared a post throwing the spotlight on a sleek and easy-to-use variable font, Google Sans Flex. 

This version of the font evolves the familiar geometric style into a highly adaptable variable system, designed to work smoothly across screens, devices, and use cases. It supports multiple scripts, offers greater control over weight and expression, and adapts easily to different layouts without losing its core identity.

If you are looking for a flexible, contemporary font to use for your next project, this is a good one to add to your list. Besides, since hyper-personalization is the way forward, according to popular design trends, you need variable fonts like these to create scalable and versatile designs.

In the AI Realm 

ElevenLabs is introducing a bunch of music updates 

Since launch, the Eleven Music community has generated over 8 million songs, shaping how the platform continues to evolve. Now, Eleven Music is rolling out a major set of updates designed to give creators and developers more flexibility across music generation, editing, and production.

A new Explore feature makes it easier to discover and reuse music. Users can browse commercially licensed tracks, remix existing compositions, fork songs in the studio, and search by genre, mood, or performance signals like Trending and Newest. 

On the other hand, for developers, the new Music Inpainting API enables precise control over songs, from editing specific sections and lyrics to looping, extending, or transforming entire tracks programmatically.

ElevenLabs launches Versioning 

ElevenLabs has introduced Versioning, a new control layer for its conversational agents that tracks every configuration change and enables safer rollouts. 

As agents handle more customer-facing and operational tasks, even small updates can have a real business impact. Versioning is designed to make those changes visible, reviewable, and accountable.

Additionally, Versioning provides an audit-ready record, so compliance and legal teams can trace which configuration powered each interaction. This makes audits, reviews, and investigations straightforward and reliable.

Anthropic introduces Bloom, an open-source tool for automated AI behavioral evaluation 

Anthropic has launched “Bloom”, an open-source framework designed to automate the behavioral testing of frontier AI models. 

Traditionally, evaluating a model for risks like sycophancy, bias, or self-preservation has been a slow, manual process that struggles to keep pace with rapid development. Bloom solves this by using AI agents to “red-team” other AI systems. It then automatically generates thousands of diverse, real-world scenarios to see where a model’s safeguards might fail or where it might be “faking” alignment.

Early benchmarks from Anthropic show Bloom can reliably differentiate between baseline models and models engineered to exhibit certain behaviors, and results align closely with expert judgments.

Qwen3-TTS launches VoiceDesign and VoiceClone for next-level speech generation 

Alibaba’s Qwen has launched two new models as a part of Qwen3-TTS. The models, VoiceDesign (VD-Flash) and VoiceClone (VC-Flash), give users unprecedented control over AI-generated speech. 

VoiceDesign lets creators craft fully customized voices using free-form text instructions, adjusting tone, rhythm, emotion, and persona without relying on preset options. It outperforms previous models in role-play and instruction-following benchmarks, delivering expressive and human-like speech.

VoiceClone enables rapid voice replication from just three seconds of audio. It also supports speech generation in ten languages, including English, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and more. Its context-aware cadence produces natural delivery, and multilingual testing shows a lower word error rate than competitors like ElevenLabs and GPT-4o-Audio.

Qwen’s new model reimagines image editing 

Alibaba has unveiled Qwen-Image-Edit-2511, a major 20B parameter upgrade designed to solve the “image drift” that often plagues AI edits. 

While previous models struggled with maintaining identities in complex scenes, this version introduces industry-leading consistency for group photos. This means that combining multiple subjects and creating a single shot or even modifying individual faces in a photo with crowds without losing their unique characteristics is now easier. 

The model effectively eliminates the “plastic” look of earlier AI generations, delivering professional, high-fidelity results that respect the original’s lighting and style.

Beyond portraits, 2511 strengthens industrial and product design generation, supporting precise geometric edits, construction lines, and structural adjustments.

Verify AI-generated videos with Gemini 

Google’s Gemini app now lets users verify if videos were created or edited using Google AI. This update expands the app’s content transparency tools, making it easier to identify AI-generated media.

To use the feature, upload a video and ask whether it was produced with Google AI. Gemini scans both audio and visuals for the imperceptible SynthID watermark, then provides a detailed response highlighting which segments contain AI-generated elements. 

Videos up to 100 MB and 90 seconds are supported, and verification is available in all languages and countries where the Gemini app operates. The tool goes beyond a simple “yes” or “no” by using its internal reasoning to provide context.

Google announces a new set of open tools to dig deeper into LLMs 

After launching the Gemini 3 Flash models about a week ago, Google has now unveiled the Gemma Scope 2 model. AI interpretability just took a big leap forward with the release of Gemma Scope 2, an open suite of tools for analyzing Gemma 3 language models, ranging from 270M to 27B parameters. 

These tools give researchers visibility into how models reason, make decisions, and generate outputs essential for diagnosing unexpected behaviors and improving safety. 

By analyzing over 1 trillion parameters and 110 petabytes of data, Google is giving researchers unprecedented access to the “internal brain” of its AI, allowing them to see exactly how thoughts are formed and how they trigger specific behaviors.

OpenAI unveils GPT‑5.2‑Codex

OpenAI has officially launched GPT‑5.2‑Codex, a specialized version of its GPT‑5.2 model tuned for advanced coding and cybersecurity tasks. This iteration builds on the core GPT‑5.2 architecture but adds deeper capabilities for agentic coding. This means that it can tackle long, complex software jobs and navigate large codebases more reliably. 

The model handles big refactors, migrations, and extended development sessions without losing context, making it far more dependable for real‑world engineering work.

Moreover, cybersecurity is a major pillar of this update. GPT-5.2-Codex demonstrates a “sharp jump” in defensive capabilities, proving highly effective at identifying subtle bugs and mitigating vulnerabilities in popular frameworks.

MiniMax launches its new coding model 

MiniMax has released M2.1, an upgraded AI model focused on real-world performance and broader usability. Building on previous versions, M2.1 enhances multi-language coding, office productivity, and app development, aiming to make AI-native workflows more practical for enterprises and individuals.

A major highlight is multi-language support. Beyond Python, M2.1 excels in Rust, Java, Golang, C++, Kotlin, Objective-C, TypeScript, and JavaScript, covering everything from low-level system development to application layers.

Social Media Feature Updates and Algorithm Changes

The new Hashtag rules on Instagram 

Hashtags are changing on Instagram. To begin with, Instagram will soon restrict the maximum number of hashtags permitted per post or Reel to 5. Instagram recommends using fewer and more relevant hashtags based on who you are targeting in order to improve the performance of your content on the platform. 

Accordingly, your hashtags should be more intentional and not spammy. Generic hashtags, as well as hashtags that are irrelevant to the content, hurt your content’s performance according to Instagram. 

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A post shared by Instagram’s @Creators (@creators)

Snapchat introduces a new AI video lens 

Just in time for the holiday season, Snap has rolled out a new AI-powered video creation feature on Snapchat called Animate It. This Lens lets users turn text prompts into short, animated video clips. 

The tool taps into Snapchat’s own generative AI model and is available to Lens+ subscribers during the holiday season.

Unlike earlier static or preset graphic effects, Animate It generates custom motion based on what users type, making it easier to bring ideas to life without manual editing.

X rolls out Creator Studio on mobile 

X has introduced a Creator Studio hub directly inside its mobile app. This new section brings key creator features into one place, making it easier for content creators to manage their presence without switching to a desktop. 

The hub includes links to earnings and revenue sharing status, subscription eligibility, performance analytics like impressions and follower growth, and payment settings. All these are instantly accessible from the menu on the left side. Premium subscribers can also access dedicated support through the hub.

Alongside these business tools, X has added an Inspiration tab that highlights top-performing posts from around the platform. This can help spark content ideas, though some of the most engaging posts come from large accounts rather than smaller creators.

Let’s Wrap Up…

That brings us to the end of KIMP’s Picks, December 26th edition. We hope these highlights sparked ideas and kept you in the loop. With social media updates moving fast, staying informed can feel overwhelming. That’s why we bring everything that matters together in one quick, easy recap. Stay tuned, and we’ll be back soon with the next round of updates curated just for you.