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Delve ran 4 ads across 2 TLDR newsletters and brought in 66 leads, with a meaningful chunk from enterprise. The result: $1M in attributed pipeline and a 52x ROI.
Media consumption time has grown slowly over the past decade while the volume of available content has exploded, fragmenting consumer attention. As users toggle between platforms, devices, and formats, the traditional focus on total time spent or audience size fails to capture what truly drives monetization. Commercial factors like platform scale, pricing, and distribution explain some of the variance in revenue, but a significant portion depends on how engaged the audience is and why they are consuming the content. Formats that encourage focused and purposeful engagement, such as books, live events, and gaming, consistently outperform low-focus formats like social video or background audio.
Google's new AI tools are slashing traffic to news sites by replacing traditional search with chatbot answers. HuffPost and Business Insider have seen search traffic drop by over 50% in the past 3 years. The New York Times fell from 44% to 36.5%. In response, outlets such as The Atlantic and Washington Post are focusing on subscriptions, live events, and stronger reader relationships. Many were already battling low public trust and rising competition. Now they also face the challenge of protecting their content from being used to train AI without permission.
Marketing AI hackathons help teams quickly adopt AI through hands-on experimentation. The format involves setting a date, defining constraints, choosing a few tools, brainstorming ideas, building simple projects in a day, and sharing demos the next day. Tools like ChatGPT, Clay, Figma Make, Lovable, and Replit make it easy to build workflows, design assets, or internal utilities without heavy coding. During its internal hackathon, MKT1 built several practical tools in under an hour each, including a public hackathon idea generator using Lovable, a UTM link builder in Replit, and a screenshot formatter in Figma Make.
This post shows how to use Perplexity Labs to create an interactive quiz from any PDF, turn stats into a creator media kit, and build boardroom-ready slide decks. Prompts and examples are included.
Metrics evolve as platforms mature, from hits and registered users to more meaningful measures like daily active users and time spent. With AI, there's still little agreement on what counts as meaningful use, whether it's casual prompts, enterprise adoption, or token counts that vary by context. Companies like Google track detailed behavioral signals, but AI products don't have clear equivalents yet. Comparisons to smartphones or the early internet lack context since AI is more accessible and built on existing infrastructure. For now, measuring AI's true impact remains unclear.
Bain & Company's report spotlights 120 insurgent brands in the US consumer goods sector that drove 39% of the category's incremental growth. These high-growth brands include newcomers like Goodles and veterans like Chobani and Celsius. Defined by rapid growth and independence, insurgents are reshaping categories like food, beverages, and personal care by meeting unmet needs with founder-led authenticity and a disciplined playbook. With more incumbents seeking volume-led growth and improved capital conditions, M&A interest in insurgents is rising.
Jewellery is catching on with British men, especially younger ones. More men are buying jewellery for themselves and doing it on their own terms. In the past year, 17% bought it for themselves. Among Gen Z, that rose to 24%. Necklaces or chains were most popular at 33%, followed by watches at 32%. Nearly half of buyers, 47%, shopped mostly or entirely online. Price and discounts influenced 39%, far more than online ads or celebrity endorsements. Independent jewellers led at 39%, ahead of marketplaces at 30% and high street stores at 27%.
Zillow's early growth relied not on traditional marketing but on building features that stirred curiosity and emotional reactions, such as its controversial home value estimator.
88% of subscription brands expect direct acquisition costs to rise in 2025, prompting a major shift in budget toward bundling, partnerships, and aggregator platforms that deliver higher quality subscribers with lower upfront spend.