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Instead of evaluating A/B tests against North Star metrics, such as user retention, customer churn, or revenue, use sensitive proxy metrics for more accurate and sensitive lift predictions.
Testing the right message matters far more than perfect execution.
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Count how many tools you used to launch your last campaign: CRM, email, funnel builder, booking app, SMS platform, AI assistant…are clients paying for your work, or your stack?
Clipping is where long-form video is broken into short 30-60 second segments for distribution on social platforms. It's driving massive reach, with some podcasts and creators gaining far more influence through clips than through their original full-length content. A growing ecosystem of paid “clippers” now distributes and amplifies these snippets, sometimes earning significant income based on performance. While it started as a way to promote longer content, clipping is increasingly becoming the main product itself.
A survey of 150 US CEOs found that the CEO-CMO relationship is stronger than ever, but performance expectations are outpacing delivery. 60% of CEOs now classify marketing as a cost center, nearly double last year's 35%, and top CMO ratings declined from the previous 2 years. The core tension is that CEOs want revenue impact and financial accountability while many CMOs still report in marketing terms rather than business outcomes. CMOs also face a unique pressure point around AI, being held 4x more accountable for AI ROI than any other C-suite executive.
Free and paid ChatGPT operate as different systems, so your brand can appear with conflicting answers depending on the user tier. In one test, the free version ignored real search results and fabricated a 90 to 91 degree forecast, while the paid version used a structured data tool to return an accurate 68 degree result. This creates a targeting problem since B2B buyers often use paid tools while consumers rely on free ones, meaning your effective AI presence depends on your audience mix. Audit both tiers by running identical prompts and comparing outputs to map the true exposure surface. Measurement needs to align with the tier your ICP uses, or reporting will reflect a version of reality your customers never see.
The Salvation Army ran a retail campaign that advertised recently sold, one-of-a-kind thrift items rather than available stock, using scarcity and FOMO to drive store visits. Gemini evaluated thousands of product photos across the nationwide inventory while image generator Nano Banana transformed basic stock images into editorial-quality creative. The hyperlocal campaign targeted specific ZIP codes near stores through Google's Demand Gen, serving custom imagery across YouTube, Discover, Gmail, and the Display Network. In its first 30 days, the campaign achieved an $11 cost per store visit, outperforming the industry benchmark by 138%, with over 58% of clicks leading to in-store searches.
Metricool's Social Media School is a free, self-paced online course with 6 modules that teach end-to-end social media management. It covers platform fundamentals, content strategy, and advanced topics like AI and influencer marketing. The focus is on practical, job-ready skills, including how to build a full social media strategy using real workflows and tools like Metricool.
Amanda Natividad and Matt Lerner are breaking down “zero-click content” and why it matters on April 30. The session will cover how to create content that builds awareness without relying on traffic, how to measure success, and what founders should prioritize right now.
Dude Perfect is positioning itself as a media company rather than a creator business, with its CEO noting that partnerships now resemble sports sponsorships and long-term brand affiliations rather than one-off sponsored posts. More than half of the company's content is now consumed on TV screens through YouTube, and 80% of viewing happens with kids and parents together, making it one of the few digital properties that reliably reaches family units. The company is expanding beyond its original five performers by launching new channels and developing owned IP and formats.
“Frictionmaxxing” is the trend of reintroducing intentional inconvenience into an overly smooth digital life. It pushes back on a frictionless internet where saving, scrolling, and consuming happen automatically. The concept highlights the impulse to collect online fragments, from memes to videos to aesthetic references, most of which are never revisited. This accumulation turns users into informal archivists shaped by algorithms and overload, raising questions about identity in a system built on saving without return.
Amazon's COSMO system tackles a fundamental limitation in product search by teaching recommendation engines why people buy things, not just what they buy. The team fed millions of purchase behavior pairs into large language models, then built a multi-stage pipeline to filter out the roughly 65%-91% of outputs that were circular, generic, or trivially obvious. A smaller instruction-tuned model called COSMO-LM now generates fresh commonsense knowledge on the fly at a fraction of the original inference cost. A/B tests showed a 0.7% lift in product sales and 8% increase in navigation engagement on just 10% of US traffic. Amazon projects billions in potential revenue if extended across all traffic.
Focus on power and validation for A/B tests, rather than significance alone, to maximize true results and minimize false ones.
11 reasons why tl;dv's homepage hero hits all the right notes.
A side-by-side comparison of how creative direction produces stronger AI visuals than generic prompts.
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When you crush a viral trend before 10am…? When one tiny tweak to a landing page sends click-through rates through the roof…? When personalization actually feels easy for once…?
The SEO job market has quietly repriced around AI skills. Roles with AI in the title pay about 27% more at the median. Jobs that mention AI in the description still pay about 25% more, around $100K vs. $80K. Most of this demand is hidden. Only 15.5% of postings include AI in the title, but 59.5% require it in the description. That means 4 out of 5 higher-paying roles are missed if you filter by title alone. The premium shows up at mid-level and above. At senior levels, AI is expected, not optional.
Creator marketing is growing fast, with US ad spend rising 4X faster than the rest of media. People skip traditional ads but spend hours with creators they trust. That makes execution critical. Creators should be involved early to shape the idea, not added at the end. Brands should use their voice and storytelling, not treat them like ad space. Teams also need to fund both proven plays and real experiments, not just label things as tests. Podcasts are a key format, especially video, where 36% of listeners are more likely to trust ads than on social media.
Topical authority is a site-level signal that can outweigh page quality in rankings. Google uses signals like siteFocusScore and siteRadius to evaluate how tightly a site's content clusters around a topic. Off-topic pages can weaken performance even if core pages are strong. Sites that stay tightly focused outperform those with drift because they present a clearer authority signal to ranking systems. It's important to audit all pages, identify outliers, and prune or redirect low-relevance content to improve focus and reduce drift. More content is not better, since unfocused expansion can dilute authority and hurt visibility.
AEO content needs to be far more specific and structured than traditional SEO pages. Instead of broad guides, it should target precise queries with clear context. The answer should come first, followed by supporting details and examples. Structure matters throughout, with headers, bullets, and sections that can stand alone since answer engines pull small chunks of text. FAQs help capture conversational follow-ups. Original data or insights increase the chance of being cited. Every section should tie back to the product so that relevance is clear. Schema markup helps machines interpret the page. Each section must work independently because AI models may only surface fragments, not the full page.
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Use the most powerful AI image models within a visual flow that lets you draw & annotate directly on images, compare results side by side, and keep projects clearly separated. Curious? Watch tutorials [10] to
Agent skills are markdown files that give your AI assistant context about specific frameworks, APIs, and workflows. This website provides 110 usable skills to optimize workflows, marketing tasks, and more. The skills are compatible with major agentic tools, including Claude Code and Copilot.
Google and Kaggle are bringing back their free 5-Day AI Agents Intensive Course, updated with new content focused on "vibe coding" workflows that use natural language as the primary programming interface. The course runs from June 15-19 and covers building autonomous agents with memory, tool integration, multi-agent systems, and cloud deployment.
The idea of “data-driven decisions” is mostly a myth. People don't rely on data alone. They use it to justify choices already shaped by emotion and bias. Emotions are not a flaw. They're necessary to make decisions at all. Data still plays a role, but it needs interpretation. That process is never neutral. It's shaped by experience, assumptions, and what we want to be true. The real skill is not removing emotion. It's recognizing how it influences what we trust and decide.
Spotify is expanding into fitness by turning its platform from a place for workout music into a place for full workouts. It launched a new Fitness hub with video and audio classes from wellness creators and a partnership with Peloton, adding over 1,400 on-demand classes for Premium users. The move builds on existing behavior - nearly 70% of Premium users already work out monthly and there are over 150M fitness playlists on the platform.
Pinterest announced that advertisers can now use its audience data for connected TV ad targeting. This is the first time Pinterest users have been retargetable outside the platform itself. Initial performance tests were strong, with Pinterest audiences delivering 27% better outcomes per $100 of ad spend than other third-party segments.
The X Chat app is now available for iOS, providing a dedicated home for X DMs.
35% of new websites are AI-generated or AI-assisted.
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Begging a chatbot to fix weird image artifacts gets old fast. instead, Picture Instruments' desktop app gives you every important AI image model [4] in a visual-first workflow [5] that lets you:
OpenAI is scaling crawl activity, so brands need to treat AI bots as a discovery channel alongside search. Total crawl volume has tripled since August 2025, while direct user-triggered visits dropped 28%. This signals greater reliance on cached indexes and automated retrieval. Post GPT-5, OpenAI has leaned more on search than training, making real-time visibility more important than static training data inclusion. Crawl behavior varies by industry, requiring vertical-specific optimization. Google still dominates at 18.2B monthly crawl events versus OpenAI's 887M, but OpenAI has grown from 1.38% to 4% of Google's crawl share in a year.
Entry-level marketing roles focused on execution tasks like copywriting and landing page creation are declining as AI can now handle much of this work. Employment among workers aged 22-25 has fallen 16% relative. The broader job market is also cooling, with only 181K jobs added in 2025. Companies are hiring more cautiously and rely on AI to increase productivity instead of expanding teams.
Strong location pages can rank in search, appear in AI answers, support ads, and convert leads. However, most fail due to thin, reusable content. Add real local value through neighborhood details, regional pain points, original photos, clear service areas, and locally specific FAQs that cannot be copied across markets. Testing 30 queries across three AI platforms showed Perplexity citing business sites 73%, ChatGPT using editorial “best of” lists 22%, and Google AI Mode relying heavily on Yelp and Reddit. The key is to combine SEO structure with unique local depth to improve visibility.
Snowflake removes onboarding friction so users can self-serve before sales involvement. Prospects sign up instantly, receive $400 in credits, and run queries in minutes instead of going through 6-9 month enterprise cycles and delayed POCs. Engineers adopt first, which pushes finance and IT to approve Snowflake while it is already in production. Usage expands through built-in scaling as customers add compute and workloads without new contracts.
In this webinar, Laura Beaulieu, founder of GrowthLoops.io, will cover what's possible with AI agents, why it matters for your role, and where to start. She'll walk through setting up the CLAUDE.md foundation and how to orchestrate agents together to hand off work like a team. The free webinar will take place on April 28 at 8 AM PT.
A signal-based lead system captures intent from website visitors, demo viewers, form fills, ROI tools, downloads, and newsletter signups using RB2B, Navattic, and Surface Labs. All signals flow into Freckle, where they are automatically enriched with firmographic data. ChatGPT then scores each lead against an ICP using this data and website context to filter for fit. Only qualified leads receive phone enrichment to avoid wasted spend, and those leads are routed to sales via Slack with full engagement history. Optional tools like Claude and ElevenLabs can generate personalized microsites or outreach.
Growth slows when teams recreate answers instead of reusing existing knowledge. Repeated questions show where to build templates that combine FAQs and past materials, with AI drafting and teams refining for reuse. This cuts response time from hours to minutes and builds a system that gets stronger with each use.
Modern music marketing is heavily engineered, with teams running fan pages, seeding content, and using algorithm tactics to simulate organic buzz. TikTok and Meta now control distribution more than traditional media, amplifying only select artists. Labels use streaming and engagement data to spot talent, so existing momentum is required before signing. Awareness can be manufactured through these systems, but fandom still depends on an authentic connection with audiences.
Use SparkToro's “Identify Media Outlets” to get links, mentions, and reach.
Faster growth comes from fixing the bottleneck in your testing workflow, not from generating more ideas.
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☀️ Spring is here, the sun is out, and campaign volume is ramping up. Make sure your team is set up for success with the right tools for getting more done.
The “bland tax” is the invisible penalty AI systems apply to generic, repetitive content. When content lacks originality or distinct perspective, it gets filtered out or absorbed into a single summarized answer, often without attribution. As a result, brand identity disappears, content is treated as low value, and the work may still inform AI outputs without driving visibility or traffic.
As AI makes software creation fast and cheap, differentiation shifts to design, which becomes the main driver of attention and product success. Tools like Canva and Figma show this shift, as non-designers now make up about 66% of Figma users and Canva reaches 265M monthly users with about $4B in ARR. AI design tools can generate usable outputs in under 60 seconds, but results often look generic and lack personality. This creates a strategic need for more opinionated design that reflects a clear identity and appeals to a specific audience. Marketing advantage now comes from building products that feel distinct and memorable rather than broadly functional.
This campaign targeted high-intent ABM marketers using contact-level engagement signals, then led them through a multi-step gifting experience built around the Oura Ring. First, selected prospects received an invite email framing the offer. After opting in, they were sent a sizing kit along with a brochure containing a QR code. Scanning the code led to a short, self-guided walkthrough that connected biometric signals to buyer intent, reinforcing the product narrative. At the end, recipients could request the ring and optionally book time, but no meeting was required.
Upload first-party customer data to build customer match lists and define high-value customers. Use those lists in Google Ads to set higher bid adjustments for acquisition, and review Google's suggested values before applying them. Ensure lists are large enough and enriched with identifiers like email, phone, and address to improve match rates. Separate campaigns by lifecycle stage because bidding rules and messaging differ for new, returning, and lapsed customers. For retention, build lists of lapsed or high-value past customers and use Performance Max to apply higher bids and re-engagement targeting. Check reporting carefully since Google may add conversion value uplift that can inflate ROAS figures.
Most B2B brands struggle with content because they depend on founders to write consistently. A podcast-first strategy removes that bottleneck by letting founders speak instead, then feeding that single recording into a repurposing system that produces short-form video, newsletters, infographics, and social posts. This playbook outlines 3 podcast formats suited to different funnel stages, from expert interviews that borrow guest credibility to customer case studies that build trust. It also lays out 6 operational rules and 3 specific workflows for turning episodes into a full content calendar.
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AirOps [10] studied 16,851 ChatGPT queries across 10 industries.