Brands can strengthen PR pitches by pairing their data or news angle with a real customer or person who has experienced the issue firsthand. A strong human story gives journalists an interviewee who can provide specific details and memorable quotes that make the story more relatable. Brands can find these people through targeted social media searches and OSINT techniques, then offer the verified source to journalists as part of the pitch. Only 5% to 10% of people contacted cold on social media may respond, so you may need to contact many potential sources and verify each person carefully.
SaaStr's inbound AI agent held 17,000 conversations with prospects and booked about 600 meetings in a year. Together with a newer self-serve agent, it drove a 60% jump in new business, and three people created the whole setup. The on-site agent sits on the sponsor page, qualifies visitors on budget and goals, then books the meeting itself. For buyers who skip the chat, a second agent swaps the PDF prospectus for a page unique to each company. It checks first-party signals, then drafts a pitch that a human approves and that updates the same link in place.
Use AI to research prospects, but write the outreach yourself. Find a genuine connection on LinkedIn, tie it to a specific buyer problem, and address likely objections before they come up. Write 50 emails Monday through Wednesday, send them Thursday and Friday, then follow up within 48 hours over the weekend. On intro calls, skip generic discovery questions and let the buyer talk. If someone asks to reconnect later, respect the timing and nurture them with useful insights instead of “just checking in” messages.
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Global campaigns stall when translation misses the cultural context. Nativ [12], backed by a16z Speedrun, keeps your brand voice intact in text, image, audio, and video across 100+ languages. Works in Figma, Canva, Office, Adobe, and via MCP. Early access for TLDR readers: Nativ Video [13], with free launch credits for the first 20 teams
Google Veo lets you turn existing static assets into 5 or 10 second video ads for Performance Max and Demand Gen campaigns. Strong, high resolution product images matter because the tool animates two images into sequential scenes and supports 16:9, 9:16, and 1:1 formats. The two 30 character headlines should focus on the ad message rather than branding since the business name already appears first. Advertisers should test Veo as a low cost way to refresh creative and evaluate clicks and website engagement alongside conversions.
CogSend is a free, open-source social media scheduler that lets you manage posts across Mastodon, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Threads, and X from one place. You can write a post once, customize it for each platform, then publish or schedule it. It runs on your own Cloudflare account, so you keep control of your accounts and data without a monthly fee. The setup takes a few steps, with a demo video showing how to get it up and running.
AI answers lean on third-party voices, so less than 10% of what they say about a brand comes from the brand's own content. 1 in 3 answers cite creators directly. Follower count barely matters, since 57% of cited YouTube videos come from channels under 100K. This playbook recommends combining SEO keyword data with real customer questions to build a shared prompt list, picking creators for authority and specificity, and reposting content stuck behind Instagram and TikTok login walls to YouTube as transcripts that AI crawlers can reach.
2026.09.25·later-com.s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com·6 min read·TLDR Marketing Major marketing investments that can't be randomized still need causal measurement, rather than post-hoc narratives. Google's CausalImpact and Uber's synthetic control methods show how you can estimate the effect of national launches, sponsorships, and other whole market interventions by building counterfactuals from historical data or comparable markets. These methods are weaker than randomized tests, so you should preregister the analysis, establish a strong pre period, run placebo tests, and report uncertainty intervals. Synthetic control should be a last resort for spending that cannot support randomization.
The modern marketing team is built around three principles. 0-1 marketers use AI systems to take work from idea to shipped output with fewer handoffs. Pods replace traditional team hierarchies with small groups that share context, own a specific outcome, and ship and learn weekly. Depth of craft becomes more valuable as AI handles production, giving specialists more time to apply the judgment and expertise needed to make standout work.
Test sending your demo ads straight to a calendar, which raises CPL but drops cost per meeting booked.
Users will be able to create custom feeds around specific interests, while AI will play a bigger role in search and recommendations.
In Gallup's survey of 37 countries, the US was the most anxious, with 74% worried and only 36% expecting AI to mostly help the country.
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By 2030, 27% of ad revenue could flow through AI-powered platforms. TV is moving slower. North American TV ad revenue is expected to grow just 3% in 2026, excluding political spending. Complex buying workflows and fragmented inventory make automation harder. AI could simplify TV buying, but it needs strong first-party data to work well.
Financially vulnerable US households rose from 15% to 17% in 2026, while fewer than 70% said they paid all bills on time over the past year. Low-income consumers have shifted more than $10 billion from discretionary purchases toward essentials since 2019, as prices for that group have risen 35% since January 2018. Consumer spending has still held steady in 2026, but many consumers are tapping into their savings to keep spending. This may not be sustainable if inflation, gas prices, and other costs continue to rise.
California now allows fines of up to $5,000 per post for creators who fail to disclose paid political content from campaigns. AB 1130 gives the Fair Political Practices Commission enforcement powers that were previously missing. The law applies when creators are paid by campaign committees to support or oppose candidates or ballot measures. It doesn't cover unpaid political opinions. The law follows growing use of influencers in political campaigns and similar disclosure efforts elsewhere.
A visual checklist showing the 6 key elements of a page optimized for AEO. Allowing major AI crawlers and server-side rendering makes the page accessible, while four to six direct sentences near the top give AI a concise answer to extract. Tables, lists, clear heading hierarchies, and FAQs make information easier to parse, and pages less than three months old are reportedly 3x more likely to earn citations.
An agent growth team can take over drafting and routing but should never take over sending. One solo operator pairs an orchestrator with about ten channel agents, covering everything from SEO to paid media to lifecycle email, each tied to a share of a 900-signup, 200-customer monthly target. Every task goes on a Todoist board that separates decisions from execution, and each card must say what the task is, why it matters, and where to click. Finished cards trigger the next agent's follow-up automatically, so the founder only approves and sends.
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Wistia's ungated report [12] on AI video marketing trends pulls data on 500+ marketers to show you how creatives are making assets that command attention. See what AI is being used for, how that's changing budget conversations, and who is adopting first. Plus get the AI video
A Looker Studio template that pulls data from Google Analytics. It visualizes AI-generated website traffic metrics, including breakdowns by AI tool and page.
OpenAI has launched GPT-6 Sol and GPT-6 Luna, two faster and more affordable models for everyday work, coding, computer use, and AI agents. Both bring improvements from GPT-6 Astra, including stronger factuality and collaboration. GPT-6 Sol costs $2 input and $10 output per 1M tokens, while Luna costs $0.10 input and $0.50 output, both 50% cheaper than GPT-5.6 promotional pricing.
People answer surveys as the person they want to be rather than the one they are, and synthetic surveys try to close that gap by simulating behavior instead of asking. AI personas built from interviews and behavioral records can return results in hours at about half the cost of human panels, and incumbents like Gallup and Qualtrics are already testing them. The simulations tend to match overall results but miss on subgroups and on questions outside their training data, where they rarely admit uncertainty.
Australia's under-16 social media ban deactivated 4.7M accounts, yet more than 80% of surveyed children still used age-restricted services. A “child-free” internet could push young users toward gaming, messaging, and smaller platforms, making their activity harder to monitor. Children could also remain visible through adult-run family influencer accounts. The shift could make young consumers' influence less visible to brands while limiting children's access to online communities and digital experiences.
B2B content ideas from Canva, Ramp, Optimizely, and Notion.
Meta pitched the feature publicly as AI, but internal posts describe a "human agent layer," and at least one tester only found out after the call that a person had placed it.
The bottleneck is merchant infrastructure rather than AI reasoning.
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Advertising is evolving fast. StackAdapt's Co-Founder and CEO, OpenAI's VP of Monetization, and a leading AI/ML Computer Scientist & Educator will share their insights into the future of advertising at StackAdapt's _Innovation Forum_ [4].
What's on the virtual event's agenda:
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Reddit can now play a broader role in media plans because its users already show strong purchase intent across categories, not just gaming or IT. New bidding options, lead generation, and age targeting give advertisers more control, and early tests of the new bidding structures showed a 15% reduction in CPA. Brands can treat Reddit as a performance channel when they have a strong measurement framework, rather than limiting it to experimental or upper funnel spend. Reddit still needs to preserve the authenticity that creates its value, since making ads too intrusive could undermine the user behavior that generates purchase intent in the first place.
A public Google NotebookLM report was cited as an AI Overview source within 24 hours of being published. Public notebooks promoting e-bike and peptide coupon codes, crypto refunds, backlink tools, and Instagram-engagement services are now showing up indexed on Google's own domain, borrowing ranking trust that a standalone site wouldn't have. Blocking crawler access and adding noindex work differently, too, and applying either broadly would also remove the legitimate study guides and business manuals the feature was built for.
Put target keywords in the first 1-2 lines of LinkedIn posts because LinkedIn uses the opening text in the post URL slug. This can create a public connection between your name and the terms you want to rank for, helping Google surface your LinkedIn content for relevant searches.
The clearest diagnostic is whether someone could describe what a brand talks about in one sentence when recommending them to a friend, and a vague answer usually means the positioning, not the writing, is the problem. People don't follow accounts they vaguely find interesting - they follow accounts that feel predictable in a good way, recognizable rather than random. A content pillar, a specific territory like social strategy or industry trends rather than an occasional topic, gives someone a consistent answer to that test instead of a different subject every day.
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Google has never seen a challenge like AI agents, and Google Ads no longer work for every business. This in-depth, ungated WordStream guide lays out what types of businesses Google Ads reliably works for, along with some free tools and calculators [9] to help you figure out
Podcast advertising is evolving as video and creator-led formats reshape how brands reach listeners. This guide looks at how video affects podcast performance, why audiences skip fewer ads than expected, and why smaller shows can outperform larger ones.
Reported blog performance just hit an all-time low, with only 13.9% of respondents calling results strong, and the cause traces back to abandoned tactics rather than AI. Influencer collaboration, the single strongest predictor of success in the dataset at 2.6x the benchmark, has dropped from 25% of respondents in 2017 to 7% today, while original research, keyword research, and formal human editing have all declined too. AI use jumped from near zero to 92% in three years, yet users and non-users report strong results at the same rate, with only non-users skewing toward disappointing ones.
Refining an idea with AI made it rated 30% more creative than not using AI at all, though the type of AI feedback needs to match the idea's maturity. Mature ideas refined through AI-written text came out 18% more creative than the same ideas refined through AI-generated images. Vague ideas benefited more from AI images instead. Images make an idea feel finished and discourage further refinement, while text leaves gaps that force more imaginative thinking.
Brands are optimising for visibility when they should be building memory. As AI makes it easier to produce more content, physical brand objects can create lasting connections that digital ads often lack. The strongest objects are distinctive enough to identify without a logo, useful or emotionally meaningful enough to keep, and rooted in something the brand genuinely owns. Starting with what a brand can make rather than what content a channel needs can lead to fewer, more memorable ideas that generate organic digital content.
“Brain rot” may look like evidence of declining attention spans, but Gen Z participants describe it as a response to an attention economy that constantly demands engagement. Absurd, meaningless content can feel like a break from polished, monetized media, even as endless scrolling leaves people drained and guilty. The deeper problem is the social media infrastructure that optimizes for attention rather than users' well-being.
A list of videos and podcasts on modern copywriting, personal brand building, and cultivating curiosity.
Over a billion people play mobile games daily, and relevant in-game ads are treated as a discovery mechanism for products that those players were not already seeking.
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Ahrefs Brand Radar [5] tracks your brand across 471M+ real search-backed prompts.
* EVERY MAJOR PLATFORM – ChatGPT, AI Overviews, AI Mode, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot * BENCHMARK COMPETITORS side by side, on any domain * SEE WHAT AI CITES – the pages, videos, and Reddit threads behind each answer * CUSTOM PROMPTS – add your buyers' exact questions, checked daily
Brands are favoring mid-tier creators as engagement and measurable performance matter more than follower count. Creators with 50K–500K followers can deliver lower CPVs, while historical views, watch time, and audience fit increasingly shape pricing decisions. Mega creators still command premiums when they offer mass reach or cultural relevance, but brands are pushing for fees that better reflect expected campaign performance.
OpenAI can build an effective ad model if it keeps ads separate from answers and clearly labels them, similar to early Google AdWords. ChatGPT Ads reached $1B in annualized revenue in under 200 days, suggesting strong advertiser demand before the format has fully matured. Running shoes, travel, and price comparisons are especially promising because users now ask ChatGPT to research these commercial decisions instead of using Google.
Customer proof lands harder as a story or a stunt than as a logo row. Deel lists Snoop Dogg as a customer, Hinge commissioned novels from real couples' stories, and Shopify lit up the Las Vegas Sphere with every merchant's first sale. Smaller versions work too, like turning a "too advanced" one-star review into an ad or showing "customer since" dates under logos.
Great products still need strong stories that help people imagine how they fit into everyday life. Lead with the customer experience rather than technical capabilities, and show the human outcome the product enables. VisiCalc gave people a clear reason to buy the Apple II, while Tesla could frame FSD around making long-distance travel less exhausting rather than simply highlighting autonomous driving. Turn complex technology into a relatable vision of what life could look like.
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Ahrefs Brand Radar [11] tracks your brand across ChatGPT, AI Overviews, Gemini, Perplexity and Copilot — from 471M+ real search-backed prompts. Benchmark competitors, see what AI cites, add your own prompts.