Good morning. Contra just launched Contra Labs, a new research division built to help AI tools understand creative quality the way real professionals do.
Also: Framer just shipped Auto Translate, a feature that automatically keeps your site content in sync across every language you publish in.
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TOP STORY
🧪 Contra launches "Contra Labs"
Contra just launched Contra Labs, a new frontier data and evaluation lab focused on making AI better for creative work.
The idea: most AI benchmarks measure things like accuracy or speed, but creative work is about taste.
What is Contra? Contra is a freelance marketplace where independent creatives and professionals find and manage client work, commission-free. Think of it like a portfolio, job board, and payments platform rolled into one.
Contra Labs is built to evaluate AI outputs the way professional creatives actually judge quality, using insights drawn from over 1.5 million creative experts and $250M+ in creative work completed on the platform.
The lab has four core pillars:
Creative Arena: A public evaluation space where AI models go head-to-head on creative outputs, all judged by professional creatives (not algorithms). Think of it as a taste test for AI, scored by people who actually do creative work for a living.
Human Creativity Benchmark: A new industry standard for measuring how well creative AI tools perform, built on judgments from Contra's network of 1.5M+ creatives. The goal is to establish the benchmark that all creative AI tools will eventually be measured against.
Creative Human Data: Private preference datasets created by vetted professionals who label, rank, and evaluate AI outputs. This is the training data that teaches models what "good" actually looks like.
Co-Agents: Creative AI agents designed to work alongside expert creatives in their workflows (currently in private beta).
WEB DESIGN
🔤 Framer ships "Auto Translate"
Framer just launched Auto Translate, a new addition to its Localization feature set that automatically keeps your content in sync across every language your site supports.
Once enabled, any new or updated content on the Canvas or in the CMS gets immediately translated across all your enabled locales. You can choose your preferred AI translation model or leave it on Auto, and Framer handles the rest in the background.
For teams that want more control, the Localization view now includes a "Translate All" action that updates every locale at once (or lets you pick a subset).
You can also translate specific layers or pages directly from the Canvas by right-clicking.
Framer also shipped its March Update this week, adding support for bento-style grid layouts, freeform Stack sorting, smoother drag-and-drop between Stacks, and a range of layout fixes.
MARKETING
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
🚀 Runway launches a $10M fund and "Builders" program
Runway just launched the Runway Fund, a $10 million venture fund dedicated to backing early-stage startups building across AI, media, and world simulation. Alongside it, the company introduced Runway Builders, a support program for Seed-to-Series C startups.
The fund will write checks of up to $500,000 into pre-seed and seed-stage companies. Runway has already been investing quietly for about 18 months, backing companies like Cartesia (real-time audio generation), LanceDB (AI databases), and Tamarind Bio (AI-powered drug discovery).
The Builders program gives startups 500,000 free API credits, access to Runway's highest rate limits, and early access to Characters (Runway's real-time video agent API).
The move signals Runway's shift from AI tool provider to platform builder.
Rather than chasing every use case itself (the company is around 150 people), it's seeding an ecosystem of startups that build on top of its models and APIs.
Runway has raised close to $860 million to date and is valued at approximately $5.3 billion.
A founding cohort is already live, including Cartesia, MSCHF, Spara, Subject, and Supersonik, building things like AI customer support agents, interactive brand characters, and synthetic media tools.
ADVERTISING
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.
LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.
The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.
Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
📰 Other news you might've missed:
Framer shipped its March Update with support for bento-style grid layouts, freeform Stack sorting, smoother drag-and-drop between Stacks, and a range of layout fixes.
Bolt introduced Design System Agents, a feature that turns your repos, npm packages, and docs into an AI agent that builds prototypes engineering can actually ship.
Replit launched AI Recruiter, a tool that finds targeted candidates in minutes, generates LinkedIn searches tailored to your role, and writes custom outreach copy designed to convert.
ElevenLabs announced Seedance 2.0 is coming soon to ElevenCreative, with native audio-video generation in a single pass, multi-shot consistency across scenes, and phoneme-level lip sync.
Notion updated its AI for iOS beta with custom agent editing, multi-account support, and the ability to mention Pages and people from your workspace.
Frame.io shipped March updates including a Workfront integration for unified review and approval, inline invites in Share Builder, and improved PDF handling
Runway brought Characters to its iOS app, letting you have AI conversations on the go (including ones that can see through your camera)
HeyGen partnered with Topaz Labs to bring Starlight Precise 2.5 upscaling into HeyGen, pushing any video to 4K with sharper detail and smoother motion
MagicPath added dark mode preview for themed designs, a website-from-empty-state creation flow, and text style selection
LTX Studio added Topaz Image Upscale for 2× image enhancement with better detail and clarity.
