Your AI Doesn't Know Your Customer.

Here's the data to prove it.

May 26, 2026

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Hey friend,

We're in Calgary this week for SocialWest's 10th anniversary, so we're keeping it short. But we still wanted to bring you some marketing updates from across our community. This week we're looking at a blind spot most marketers don't know they have, what Google just announced that will change how you advertise, and a few reads worth bookmarking before the long weekend.

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Coming up

AI Has a Cultural Blind Spot. And It's Scaling.

Last year, a marketing team high-fived over their "multicultural" campaign. Diverse cast. Inclusive visuals. A perfect rainbow of faces. Nobody noticed that the copy defaulted to individualistic values, that the cultural references were surface-level at best, that the whole thing would land as tone-deaf to the communities it claimed to celebrate. They'd let AI write the brief and the copy. Nobody questioned it.

Not a technology failure. A mindset one.

Joycelyn David has been watching this play out in boardrooms for twenty years. She's the CEO of AVC Communications, founder of TULONG Technologies, and author of The Multicultural Mindset. Her argument is data-backed and a little uncomfortable: the tools most marketers are using to reach multicultural audiences were built on data that barely represents those audiences.

Harvard researchers compared today's leading AI models against data from 94,000 people across 65 countries. The finding: not a glitch, not an edge case, a strong and systemic divergence from non-Western cultural values. The original GPT-3 dataset was 93% English. Amharic, spoken by 57 million people, sits at 0.004%.

The fix isn't better prompting. It's a different model entirely. Brief for culture, not demographics, and put someone with genuine cultural authority in a real strategic role, not a final-pass sensitivity check.

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Across the Industry

Industry news, research, leadership perspectives, and campaign spotlights driving Canadian marketing forward.

Google's biggest ads event of the year made one thing clear: AI is no longer a feature you bolt on, it's the foundation everything else is built on. New formats, a Gemini-powered campaign advisor, and a Canadian win from RBC that's hard to argue with. We broke it down specifically for Canadian marketers.

The Whitecaps and War Room rebuilt their media strategy around how fans actually behave and saw ticket revenue grow 331%, ROAS hit 4.8x, and a single-game attendance record fall in November. War Room and the Whitecaps are presenting at SocialWest this week, but everyone can learn a thing or two from this case study.

Networking: Don't Do This. Instead, Do This. 

Wilson Wong has figured out networking in a way most people haven't. His advice for anyone heading to Calgary this week: talk less than you think you should, skip "what do you do," and show up asking how many people you can help rather than what you can get.

Watch & Learn

Upcoming live webinars, interviews and conversations in the SocialNext Marketing Alliance. Every Wednesday at 10 AM Mountain Time / 12 PM Eastern Time.

REWATCH: Why Cultural Intelligence Is Your Next Growth Lever 
Markets are evolving faster than most marketing strategies can keep up. Joycelyn David makes the case that the brands leaving the most growth on the table aren't the ones with the smallest budgets. They're the ones treating cultural intelligence as a checkbox rather than a competitive advantage. Trillion-dollar blind spots in multicultural buying power, the hidden risks of biased AI, and what leaders can actually do about it today.

Coast-to-Coast Job Opportunities

The marketing job market in Canada is more difficult than ever. To help those on the hunt, here's a snapshot of what's open right now across the country. 

Follow us on LinkedIn for job openings across every province and territory in Canada every Friday.

Thanks for reading! If not in Calgary, we hope to see you somewhere across Canada soon! 🍁

Marketing News Canada

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