It’s a spritz summer, according to Aperol—and, most likely, your Instagram feed.

Fresh off a bottle redesign and a canned-beverage release earlier this spring, the Italian liqueur brand is looking to make its presence more widely known this summer. The brand is sponsoring actor and singer Hilary Duff on her lucky me tour, popping up at local bars and restaurants to serve Aperol spritzes ahead of her performances in key markets, and offering fans the opportunity to win prizes and tickets to upcoming shows.

Alison Varone, head of marketing at Aperol parent company Campari America, told us it’s the first time the brand has gone on tour, but the strategy is based on the success of Aperol’s recent activations at events like Coachella and the US Open. It’s all a part of Aperol’s push in the last couple of years to drive visibility and boost Aperol’s presence online and in venues across the US—especially in the summer, she said.

“As soon as the weather gets remotely warm, people start talking about spritzes, which has been such a phenomenon for us that we’ve created,” Varone said.

While the brand has been popular in Europe for a long time, Aperol’s marketing team is working hard to bring “aperitivo culture” to the states, one city at a time.

Continue reading here.—KH

First there was Ask Jeeves. Then there was Google Search. Could Pinterest be next?

Julie Towns, Pinterest’s VP of product marketing and product operations, thinks so.

“Search as a product offering for consumers is more up for grabs today than it has been in the last 25 years or so,” she told us.

At the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, Towns sat down with Marketing Brew to share more about the company’s newest experiment, the AI-powered conversational search tool, Ask Pinterest, and about why the company is positioning itself as an antidote to the endless scroll. Here are a few highlights.

See more from our conversation here.—KS

’Til governance do us part…

Companies are calling it quits on deployed, AI-powered customer communication agents, often due to governance issues around data leakage and hallucinations.

According to early findings from AI cloud communication provider Sinch’s AI Production Paradox report, 74% of companies rolled back or cancelled customer communication agents due to a governance failure. Those companies that self-described their guardrails as “fully mature” had an 81% rollback rate; the report’s authors suspect this may be due to increased internal monitoring that allows for better detection of vulnerabilities.

The findings are based on a January survey of 2,527 executives across six industries who are “directly responsible for their organization’s AI communications strategy.”

Root cause. About one-third (31%) of surveyed leaders said personal identifiable information (PII) exposure or data leakage was the reason for their derailed customer communications agent. Another 22% blamed their rollbacks on hallucinations that occurred with real customers.

Sophie Cheng, chief marketing officer at Sinch, told IT Brew governance failures are occurring because organizations are “underestimating how complex it is to actually deploy AI agents in communications.” For example, she said cross-channel orchestration (e.g., switching a customer from speaking with a chatbot to a voice call with a human rep) is an area where companies are still struggling.

Read more from IT Brew.—BM

Stories we’re jealous of.

• The Hollywood Reporter looked into the increasing tensions between Hollywood and Big Tech.
• Bloomberg wrote about the billions of dollars being funneled into the peptide industry.
• The Wall Street Journal wrote about how the World Cup’s new hydration breaks have provided spectators the ability to go on “high-speed beer runs” in the stadiums.