Amazon's ad business is growing despite heavy AI spending, raising questions about future returns. Q4 revenue rose 14% to $213.4B, ad revenue grew 22% to $21.3B, and AWS sales increased 24% to $35.6B. Prime Video now has 315M ad-supported viewers, up from 200M, and Thursday Night Football averaged 15M viewers per game, up 16%. Capital spending in 2026 is planned at $200B, about 50% higher than last year, while profit per dollar remains lower than rivals.
The intent economy is a system where marketing responds directly to real-time consumer intent instead of relying on assumptions or campaigns. AI detects needs, acts immediately, and learns from every interaction. The four-part model starts with relevance, which ensures a product is considered. Distinctiveness makes it noticed. Differentiation provides a reason to choose it. Default makes it the automatic choice and allows continuous optimization.
First, set up a subscriber lifecycle automation to check in at key intervals, like 90, 180, 270, and 365 days. Add personalization over time. Second, implement a sunset policy that automatically unsubscribes contacts who show no engagement. Together, these steps protect deliverability, recover potential revenue from partially engaged users, and remove the burden of manual list management.
In this webinar, the host will show how to use his "research agent stack". It deploys Deep Research to gather massive amounts of web data, then funnels it into NotebookLM to create a hallucination-free knowledge base. The process allows you to turn thousands of pages of research into instant briefings, podcasts, or "voice style guides" in one click. The free event will take place on February 13 at 9 AM PT.
This guide teaches how to use Claude Opus 4.6 to automate workflows by combining Skills, Cowork, and Plugins. Skills let you document processes once and have Claude follow them consistently. Cowork connects Claude to files, apps, and multi-step tasks, while Plugins bundle Skills with tool integrations and slash commands. The guide covers building Skills without code, applying them across content and visualization tasks, leveraging pre-built libraries, and creating custom plugins to scale team output efficiently.
Experiments let advertisers test PMax against other campaign types, final URL expansion, or measure incremental gains with Uplift tests. Data Exclusions now allows blocking specific audiences, including customer match and remarketing lists, from seeing ads. Product Overlap identifies Shopping campaign conflicts, helping advertisers optimize performance and exclude underperforming products.
Growth engineers are a hybrid of growth marketer and engineer. They think less about running experiments and more about building the infrastructure that enables those experiments. AI tools enable teams to execute independently, accelerating iteration as software build costs fall. Canva's programmatic SEO templates illustrate this scale, and companies like Ramp are already hiring for this hybrid role.
In 2011, Facebook's Open Graph let apps automatically share user activity on friends' feeds. Spotify leveraged this by connecting listens to Facebook, turning each play into a discovery loop that drove millions of new users. It increased engagement and boosted paid subscriptions fivefold in under two years. Many apps that relied solely on virality, like SocialCam and Viddy, collapsed when Facebook limited auto-sharing. Sustainable growth depends on both platform tailwinds and core product value.
AI agents that can take real actions for users are arriving fast, but current open source tools like OpenClaw are powerful and unsafe for business use today. OpenClaw runs on a local computer and can read email, contact vendors, and make purchases. Security reviews have discovered major risks, including plaintext credential storage, a remote code execution flaw, 341 malicious plugins, and 506 prompt injection attacks inside one agent social network. Businesses should avoid using it now, but expect managed and secured agent platforms within 6 to 24 months as the market moves from chat answers t..o automated task execution.
The Winter Olympics gives brands a rare chance to reach global audiences at scale and boost credibility through sports association. Research shows 57% of Italians link sporting events to greater brand credibility, while 56% of US viewers and 52% of Canadian viewers are more likely to notice brands that advertise in sports. Standing out remains difficult since Coca-Cola was the only Paris 2024 sponsor to achieve double-digit unprompted awareness at 21%, while the average sponsor scored 4%. Luxury and fashion brands use athlete partnerships and team outfitting to build lifestyle relevance. The event supports the shift in luxury toward experience, wellness, and emotional value instead of product focus.
Video ads perform best when they start with strong emotion and end with clear logic and solution-focused information. Researchers scanned the brains of 113 people and found that ads people liked most used empathy-driven stories, relevant narration, dialogue, captions, music, and dynamic visuals that engage both sight and hearing. The first 10 seconds had the highest impact on ad liking, and ads that pushed heavy numerical details reduced positive response. Emotional appeals work better for high-priced products, while rational messages work better for low-priced products. Product evaluation cues increased ad liking, while math-related or number-heavy messaging lowered it.
Google AI Overviews often surface old forum complaints as if they're fact. This turns minority opinions into perceived consensus and skews brand perception negatively. Reddit and Quora threads rise in prominence, resolved issues resurface, and “pros vs cons” summaries amplify engagement-driven negativity. To manage this, brands should monitor forums for trending threads and create clear authoritative content for AI to cite. Respond thoughtfully where criticism appears, and track AI visibility to ensure the narrative reflects their brand accurately rather than outdated complaints.
Consumer behavior around Valentine's Day has shifted away from purely romantic gifting toward self-purchase and low-pressure participation. Younger audiences in particular respond to humor and anti-Valentine's messaging that acknowledges breakups, loneliness, or indifference to the holiday. Earn attention by going beyond the mainstream pink hearts and red roses approach.
Do you know how to shape AI recommendations? With EVERTUNE, you get a prioritized list of sites that influence AI — and with Partner Connect [11], you can target high-influence websites in your category through impact.com or PartnerStack. Activate your brand [11] to show up more often in AI answers.
Emails today are about trust and control. AI-driven personalization swaps first-name tokens for behavior-based content. Modular layouts and predictive send times make emails feel relevant. Interactive elements like polls, carousels, and gamified offers increase clicks. Ethical practices shape visuals with minimalism and natural colors. Mobile-first design uses single-column layouts and key info above the fold. Micro-animations guide attention without slowing load times.
Spotify now lets users in the US and UK buy physical books through its app via Bookshop.org. The company earns affiliate fees while supporting independent bookstores. Spotify is also rolling out Page Match, which lets users scan a page to jump to the exact spot in an audiobook. Audiobook Recaps are coming to Android too, offering quick summaries based on where listeners left off.
Advertising has evolved from a cultural artifact into a constant behavioral intrusion, appearing across entertainment, transportation, communication, and private moments. Scale and repetition, instead of relevance or creativity, now drive effectiveness in the attention economy. This shift prioritizes extraction of human focus over meaningful engagement, with measurable emotional and cognitive costs. Regaining agency in this context requires actively choosing how time and mental energy are spent rather than reacting to interruption.
Meta is testing strict link limits for non-verified professional Facebook accounts, effectively throttling reach rather than blocking posts outright. The move creates a clear pay-to-distribute dynamic, pushing marketers toward Meta Verified subscriptions or alternative traffic paths like comments and Stories. With the changes, ads and inbox-driven strategies become more predictable sources of traffic than organic posts.
A series of Super Bowl ads from Anthropic mocked ad-supported AI chats, directly targeting OpenAI after its announcement that ads are coming to ChatGPT's free tier.
Large-scale testing across ChatGPT, Claude, and Google AI shows brand recommendations change almost every run. Lists, order, and result counts vary widely, which makes ranking positions meaningless. When prompts repeat at scale, certain brands still appear often. That makes visibility percentage across many runs a usable signal. Even with very different human prompts, AIs surface similar core brands. Avoid ranking-based AI tracking and use visibility rates instead. Demand transparent, stats-backed methods before spending on AI measurement.
The valuation milestone reflects how Walmart has shifted profit growth toward higher-margin businesses like its third-party marketplace and advertising unit. Digital initiatives modeled after Amazon have accelerated earnings growth faster than store sales, reshaping how investors value the business. Listing on the Nasdaq 100 reinforced the company's positioning as a retail platform with tech-like economics.
AI search creates far more queries per prompt than traditional SEO, which makes content coverage harder to manage at scale. Google Gemini averages 9 fan out queries per prompt, can reach up to 28, and creates about 900 queries for every 100 prompts tracked. ChatGPT averages 2 fan out queries, and there is overlap in terms across systems, which means sites must cover many related query variations. The process uses the Gemini 3 API to extract fan out queries and then maps them against site content using a Domain Coverage Analyzer to identify gaps.
Appoint one senior person to enforce standards and make final decisions. Use a tool like ClickUp, Asana, or Monday to track every content piece and its workflow. Before rolling it out, explain why the system exists and show the costs of skipping steps to your entire team. This ensures everyone follows the plan and meets deadlines.
This post shows how Claude Code installed SEO and GEO skills with a single npx command and ran audits to find broken titles, missing SEO, weak meta descriptions, schema gaps, and pages needing migration. Marketing and AI visibility skills guided what to fix, while Cowork with the Directus MCP applied changes across hundreds of pages. Links to both the SEO and GEO repositories are in the post's comments.
YouTube is expanding its auto-dubbing feature to all creators, allowing them to auto-translate content into 27 different languages. The platform has also launched “Expressive Speech” in 8 languages (English, French, German, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish), which is designed to capture a creator's original emotion and energy.
Inspired by Will Guidara's Unreasonable Hospitality, email marketing should treat subscribers like guests, not targets. Most brands rely on no-reply inboxes and optimize for efficiency over connection. Real email hospitality means replying to people, honoring content and frequency choices, and writing welcome emails that start conversations. These choices build trust and treat subscribers like humans.
Sticky call-to-action (CTA) patterns can drive strong gains in some cases but can also reduce orders and revenue. In one test with over 8m users, a sticky incentives footer increased incentivized orders by 0.35% but reduced total food orders per user by 0.13% and revenue per user by 0.18%, both statistically significant. In another test with nearly 700k users, a sticky buy-now-pay-later CTA increased adoption by 40.2% and raised orders per user and revenue per user by about 9%. Results show that sticky CTAs are powerful but context dependent, and can hurt core metrics even when engagement rises.
Analysis of 200 B2B software products shows free trials are used by 57% of companies, far outpacing freemium, but median free-to-paid conversion clusters unevenly around 8%. Conversion rates vary by more than 10x between top and bottom performers, making benchmarks misleading without context. Credit-card-required trials deliver ~30% conversion, but materially reduce signups, shifting the growth equation from optimization to trade-off management.
The era of "brand forgiveness" is over, especially for the customers you can't afford to lose. New global research from the Oliver Wyman Forum shows 69% of high-income consumers will switch brands after a single bad experience.
Using the VIT framework (Volume, Frequency, Impact, and Trust), brands now prioritize relevance over raw numbers. While most industries saw performance declines despite hiring more influencers, Beauty stood out with a 22% VIT increase by focusing on retention. Smaller voices are driving this shift. Nano-creators saw a 50% VIT surge in high-intent actions like saves. They're moving away from cookie-cutter posts toward authentic, creator-led systems that reward consistency.
Short Super Bowl ad teasers create weaker emotional impact than longer ads and reduce campaign effectiveness. Analysis across six years shows teaser spots score about 0.5 Stars lower than full length ads because viewers have less time to connect and build memory. The research finds that 20 to 40 second ads perform best, and brands should start Super Bowl campaigns in January and continue running ads after the game to extend impact. A 30 second Super Bowl ad now costs about $8 million, so it is important for a brand to run longer pre game ads and keep top performers in rotation, as seen in a 5.9 Star rated Lay's ad that still airs a year later.
Short email pitches drive the best journalist engagement. Emails with 100 to 300 word bodies get the highest open rates and reply rates, while emails under 300 words earn the most replies. About 50% of pitches paste a full press release into the email body, which is mainly a UK practice, while US pitches more often use short plain text. Personalization varies in depth, as 83% use the journalist's name but only 57% reference past articles, and shallow flattery often fails. Relevant connections to prior coverage work better. Strong pitches usually start with a timely stat or trend hook, give a clear headline takeaway, include about four bolded bullet points, and add expert quotes that explain why the findings matter instead of repeating the data.
Dinners are becoming more scalable than sponsoring trade shows because they're more targeted. They should be treated as a core channel, not just a social outing. Apply the same strategic rigor and high-quality data to these events as you would to any other GTM motion.
ChatGPT, Gemini, and AI Overviews are where your highest-intent customers search. If your brand isn't mentioned, you're not even in the race. Evertune [9] monitors how AI sees your brand, identifies the sites that shape AI responses, and prioritizes them for your teams to
Set alerts for any company on CompetitorTrack. Their emails will show up to your inbox automatically. SendView tracks trends across all your competitors. It also allows you to visually analyze their programs and campaigns. Owletter archives competitor newsletters, making it easy to go back months and compare campaigns and track patterns.
To make slides with Claude, go to claude.ai and connect Gamma and Google Drive via "Connectors". Then prompt Claude to create a deck, pulling relevant Drive docs and web graphics. Answer a few questions about format, tone, and length, and edit heavily through Gamma if needed. For branded slides, skip Gamma's default templates, create your own style in Gamma. Save fonts, colors, and logo placement. Then prompt Claude to use that style so every deck reflects your brand.
Beehiiv's State of Newsletters 2026 report highlights that 28B emails were sent in 2025, yet engagement increased, reinforcing newsletters as a reliable owned channel. Readers favor concise subject lines, straightforward “here's what you need to know” framing, and strong opening sentences that justify the click. Consistency in send time and format builds habit, while misleading urgency language and surprise paywalls actively hurt performance.
Marketing is shifting from campaign launches to continuous systems as the cost and speed of experimentation collapse. AI reduces the effort to generate and deploy variations, pushing advantage toward teams that can measure results and make fast decisions. Content moves from single assets to always-on streams built from modular components, while personalization shifts from static segments to real-time situations like objections or constraints. Winning teams focus less on producing volume and more on building pipelines that test and learn based on compounding insights.