Good morning. This is Patrick Coffee filling in for Nat Ives. Today, more brands are falling back on man-on-the-street style content; A merger between Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery would be bigger than you think; and Salesforce is investing in the Bay Area.

More marketers desperate to break through the slop are turning to street interview ads, or clips of real people reacting to a product or service that they pay to insert into social media feeds, Katie Deighton reports.

For the people handling the grunt work behind these campaigns, that means a lot of sweat and persistence.

Josh Suggs, the 22-year-old founder and chief executive of 203 Media, spends many of his working hours approaching strangers in Manhattan with lines like, “Hi, can I ask you a quick question—what would you do if your boyfriend smelled like this?”

Enough successful encounters will make for a social media ad.

Suggs’s best customers to date are direct-to-consumer brands looking to grow their consumer awareness. He, and other agencies and content companies, are betting that demand for real, unscripted videos will increase as ads made with generative AI proliferate, and consumers grow weary of influencers’ typical paid-for posts.

Skydance seems intent on trying to buy Warner Bros. Discovery in a deal that would create a new media behemoth, Nate Rattner reports.

How big would it be?

• It would marry the first and fifth largest movie studios when ranked by domestic box office so far this year.
• It would combine the fourth, seventh and ninth-largest paid streaming services.
• It would include 9 of the top 20 cable networks.

The combined entity would have rights to three of the four major professional sports leagues. For action fans, it would join DC Comics with Paramount franchises such as Mission: Impossible.

But it would still lag well behind Disney and Netflix in terms of paid streaming subscribers, which may be the reason Skydance is so interested.

Salesforce will create an AI Incubator Hub as part of its newly announced $15 billion investment in the city of San Francisco, Connor Hart reports.

The investment will also expand workforce-development programs and help companies transform into “agentic enterprises,” according to the software giant whose Dreamforce festival happens every year in the Bay Area.

Many in San Francisco's tech scene are betting on the AI boom to keep growing.

So is Salesforce. But the company's stock is down more than 25% this year as its has yet to demonstrate that its AI offerings measure up, according to analysts.

More: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff angered a number of San Francisco officials last week by stating in an interview that President Trump should send National Guard troops into the city. [NYT]

More: Benioff later appeared to walk back his comments by referring to the additional police officers needed during Dreamforce each year. [NBC]

This Nov. 18 and 19, CMOs will gather in New York for The WSJ CMO Summit, featuring marketing leaders such as Vanessa Broadhurst of Johnson & Johnson, Cheryl Krauss of Chubb, Alicia Tillman of Delta Air Lines, Laura Jones of Instacart and Taylor Montgomery of Taco Bell. Together, they’ll explore fan-fueled growth, AI in marketing and the evolving CMO-CEO partnership. Join the CMO Council and be part of the conversation shaping the future of marketing leadership.

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Trump allies appeared to market sponsorships for a Treasury event that was not in fact affiliated with the government. [WSJ]

Did anyone notice that Apple TV dropped the plus sign? [NYT]

Major news organizations rejected a Pentagon policy that would restrict media access to military leaders. [WSJ]

Amazon fired an employee who protested the company's work for the Israeli government and military. [Bloomberg]

A Canadian beer competition introduced an AI judging tool for the first time, and things did not go well. [404 Media]

Yes, there really were more ads targeting ad industry professionals during New York's Advertising Week this year. [AdExchanger]