Sponsored YouTube videos can extend their marketing value into AI search when the video is cited, especially through the description text that names the sponsor. The sponsor appeared in 40% of AI answers that cited a sponsored video, compared with 32.3% when the video was not cited, and the lift reached 1.35x on unbranded prompts. Brands should make specific description language part of influencer contracts and track YouTube citations for the prompts that matter to them, rather than treating sponsorship as a view-based channel alone. The opportunity is temporary because YouTube citation rates fell 43% within a month, so citation monitoring needs to be ongoing.
Shopping ad CTRs are rising while impressions are falling across thousands of campaigns, with clicks relatively flat or slightly down. One hypothesis is that Google's AI Overviews are appearing on queries less likely to generate ad clicks, leaving Shopping ads for higher-intent searches. The data doesn't prove AI Overviews are causing the decline, but advertisers should look beyond CTR and track impressions, clicks, and overall traffic to understand whether performance is actually improving.
Increase sales by labeling a mid-priced product as “recommended” instead of your most expensive option. In eight experiments involving more than 6,200 participants, sales of a recommended cafe drink increased 58% when a pricier option was added, while sales were unchanged without the recommendation. Consumers appear more receptive to recommendations when the suggested product is cheaper because the brand seems less motivated by profit. Use objective badges such as “Bestseller” when recommending a premium product, and test this pricing tactic on comparable products where customers can easily evaluate the price difference.
Sometimes a brand's old identity becomes valuable again simply because the category around it moved. As dining shifted toward fast casual, delivery, and pricier meals, Chili's leaned into value, booths, and the Triple Dipper, and a format that once looked dated became the countertrend against expensive takeout. Barnes & Noble made a similar bet, handing individual stores control over what to stock and display instead of running every location identically, so each one behaves like a local bookstore again. Both bets worked because the brand stopped trying to outrun its category and let the category's shift make its old strengths relevant.
Sponsored
KRITHIKA S., Stripe and OpenAI's first marketing hire and now head of marketing at Thrive Capital, joins CHRISTY ROACH (CMO, AirOps) live on Sep 17. They break down a new study of 300+ marketing teams: how high-growth teams hire, budget, and win more resources. Free, one hour.
Google released an open-source tool that tests whether an ad actually caused a sale, not just which platform claims credit for one. GeoX works by comparing regions where a campaign keeps running against regions where it's paused or given more budget, then measuring how sales in each group differ from what historical data would have predicted anyway. It can track spend across platforms beyond Google's own and combine online and offline sales in the same test. It plugs into Google's existing Meridian measurement software, so the results can also refine how a budget gets split across channels.
Amazon has spent months locking AI shopping agents like Claude and Gemini out of its own storefront while building its own AI shopping tools, then quietly became ChatGPT's top retail advertiser between April and August instead. It's now opening that same access to other brands that already buy through its demand-side platform, letting them run ads inside ChatGPT conversations too. Campaigns are still set up and managed inside Amazon's own systems, while OpenAI's ad system keeps control over which ad actually gets served.
Time magazine is testing ads designed specifically for AI agents, exposing them to brand-verified facts before they access webpages. The goal is to influence what AI systems retain and potentially correct inaccurate information about brands. As agentic traffic grows, companies are also optimizing websites and product data for AI discovery and recommendations. Brands are beginning to treat AI agents as an emerging advertising and distribution channel.
Skincare spent decades built around the idea that a good product should be invisible. Starface inverted that by making a pimple patch impossible to miss, then expanded through Target, Walmart, Sephora, and Ulta specifically because its bright yellow stars stand out against a retail aisle of clinical whites and pastels. That same bet is now showing up industry-wide, with LED light masks and other visible skincare wearables replacing creams that disappear on the skin.
AI will not eliminate software so much as change how companies decide what gets automated, standardized, or left improvised. Most employees do not naturally identify the workflows that should become software, and important processes often span multiple teams and systems, so successful automation still requires people who can spot problems, design solutions, and get the organization to adopt them. AI will expand existing software and make tools like spreadsheets, email, and chatbots more capable, while also creating new vertical applications that move work between improvised and institutionalized systems. The bigger opportunity for businesses is to look beyond faster versions of existing workflows and identify new products, services, and operating models that AI makes possible for the first time.
Rather than using AI to generate a list of prompts to track, pull "People Also Asked" for the top Google searches in your niche.
IMDb adds “Digital Creator” as a new professional category on both IMDb and IMDbPro.
The US will ban Canadian motorbikes, mopeds, dairy, wine, whisky, and spirits starting on September 29.
Sponsored
8 million tech professionals read TLDR to stay on top of the news, ideas, and tools shaping their work. Put your brand in front of them. Become a TLDR sponsor [4].
AI labs are releasing model updates at a faster pace, making it harder for businesses to evaluate which tools are worth adopting. Anthropic, Meta, Google, and OpenAI all launched updates in one week. The rapid rollout is creating “model fatigue” as teams spend more time comparing capabilities and performance.
Likes and comments are dropping across social platforms. Instagram likes are down 73% on carousels and 81% on Reels. Platforms are relying on signals like watch time, completion rate, replays, and dwell time to rank content. Engagement metrics are becoming less useful, while retention and strong hooks matter more.
Entity SEO is now a core part of making a brand understandable to Google and AI systems. Start by auditing owned properties so brand names, people, products, relationships, and structured data are accurate and consistent. Then build credibility through relevant third-party mentions, expert commentary, and evidence that supports what the brand claims to be known for. An entity map can reveal gaps between intended positioning and how search data and the wider web actually connect the brand to people, products, services, and topics.
For mobile apps, 7-day trials convert 10% better than 3-day trials overall, with paywall-to-paid conversion rising from 1.55% to 1.70%. The difference is larger on Android, where 7-day trials deliver a 20% lift, compared with 5% on iOS. However, results vary by region. In North America, 3-day trials outperform 7-day on iOS, while 7-day performs better across most Android markets. The data suggests trial length should be tested by platform and region.
Welcome emails already draw close to four times the click rate of a regular campaign, proof that readers respond fastest to something that feels personally addressed to them. Newsletters that open on a specific moment or an odd, memorable detail get read as correspondence instead of content to skim past. Confiding in a reader works better than performing for an audience, since specificity is what makes writing sound like an actual person rather than a content calendar. Replying when someone writes back extends that same logic into a growth strategy, not just a courtesy.
Sponsored
Nearly 9 in 10 consumers say relevant, personalized mail influences them to act, per Lob's State of Direct Mail: Consumer Insights 2026 [11]. Lob's new No-Code Design Suite takes campaigns from idea to production faster — design in the Visual Editor or connect Figma and InDesign, personalize in a few clicks, zero developer support.
Google Ads video ad sequence campaigns let advertisers build a planned narrative across multiple YouTube videos, moving viewers from brand introduction to reinforcement, differentiation, or action. Each step can use a different video format and transition based on whether viewers saw, watched, or skipped the previous ad. You can also test headlines, CTAs, and landing pages at each stage while using frequency caps to control exposure.
ChatGPT Sites makes website creation possible without coding. Select Sites mode and describe the site to build. Add files or screenshots for context, then refine it with feedback. Create landing pages, guides, interactive tools, or games, and publish the finished site.
Custom attribution is premature until a channel has proven it works and the marketing mix is genuinely difficult to measure. Attribution helps answer where to put the next dollar across multiple working channels, not which channel works in the first place. Test channels first, then fix tracking, standardize ROAS, and model conversion value before building an attribution model. Custom attribution can pay off above roughly $3M in annual paid media, but the right threshold depends more on the complexity of the channel mix than the budget itself.
7 Brew's TikTok strategy runs on movie-parody videos tied to real brand moments, from a 2001 A Space Odyssey riff for its new app launch to earlier takes on Indiana Jones and Mean Girls, and has built a following of more than 685,000 with 7.5 million likes. The tactic works by riding cultural references fans already have affection for rather than manufacturing a campaign from scratch. That approach sits on top of a brand that already rates first in consumer satisfaction among US QSR chains, so the content amplifies existing goodwill instead of trying to create it.
ChatGPT ads make paid placements a guaranteed AI answer surface, while earned citations remain unpredictable and harder for marketers to control.
The text snippets that used to populate Google's People Also Ask boxes have been replaced by AI-written answers in 97% of cases.
Build an ICP, give AI persistent business context that doesn't need to be re-explained every session, and audit content for risk reduction rather than just engagement.
Sponsored
For (at least) the last two years, marketers have been told to optimize for AI: lead with answers, add FAQs, eliminate the adjectives.
But when machine readability comes at the expense of voice, insight, and originality, the result may be easy to parse, and easy to ignore.
Write for Humans, Not AI [5]is Markup AI's framework for B2B marketing teams using AI to scale content production without losing what makes their brand worth reading. Learn where AI belongs in the content process, where human judgment matters most, and how to check whether a piece is genuinely ready to publish.
Reach and impressions show who saw a campaign, not what they remember. 47% of industry leaders say experiential marketing's value comes from long-term brand memory. Emotional intensity and physical presence can help brands cut through crowded digital feeds. The strongest activations create stories people keep talking about rather than generating a short-lived spike in attention. Brands are increasingly using physical experiences to turn campaigns into lasting cultural moments.
Teens use Pinterest more intentionally than traditional social platforms. Re-Pins per user are up 64%, searches are up 44%, and board organization is up 68%. More than 77% proactively search to explore interests, while teens use feed and settings controls nearly 2X more than other age groups. Pinterest is positioning itself around inspiration and identity exploration rather than social performance, with art searches 1.26X higher among teens.
A growth engineering intern at Browserbase built an AI engine to automate its SEO and AEO workflow. 53% of search traffic came from just five posts, while only 17 of 77 posts had been cited by AI engines. BlogEO audits existing content, finds search opportunities, generates drafts, and tracks AI citations. Human approval remains in the loop. After 6 weeks, search impressions grew 5.8X, page-one queries grew 9.8X, and average blog position improved from 10.9 to 6.6.
Lovable treats free AI product usage as acquisition spend rather than a margin drain, measured against a 3-month payback threshold weighing conversion, retention, and expansion. That framing matters more now that AI has pushed gross margins from the SaaS era's 80-90% toward 40% or less, leading many companies to gate AI functionality behind paywalls instead of letting users experience it first. Free-to-paid conversion for Lovable runs 5-10%, and partner-driven giveaways with a strong audience match can convert at 40-60%. The realistic alternative to giving the product away is spending far more to acquire the same customers through paid channels, not keeping the money.
Sponsored
Litebox grew CopilotKit's organic traffic 3.6x in seven months. Brand, website, and SEO from one team, not four vendors. The GTM
This webinar, on September 23, will explore why AI coding agents produce inconsistent work even with more tools and context. It will explain why bigger context windows, RAG, and additional rules don't fully solve the problem. It will also cover how context engines can improve output while reducing token costs and review cycles. There will be a live demo that compares agent performance with and without organizational context.
Google can now generate a calculator, converter, or other interactive tool directly inside AI Overviews and AI Mode, expanded globally in English this August. Small utility sites built around one simple public formula, one input and one output, are the easiest target for a model to assemble on the spot.
An account reporting an 11x return on ad spend was losing money on every order once returns, VAT, cost of goods, and fulfillment came out of what the platform called conversion value. Much of that 11x came from brand campaigns near 18x, largely shoppers who had already decided to buy, blended with a real nonbrand return closer to 3x. Correcting for margin alone created a second problem, since bidding purely for efficiency starved an apparel SKU of volume, leaving more stock to mark down below cost at season's end. The fix was rebuilding conversion values around actual contribution and giving each SKU one deliberate job, for profit, for volume, or for cash back before the season closed.
The aftermarket can become a major source of value around durable products and platforms, so platform owners must decide whether to coexist, fight, license, or buy the businesses that emerge around them. AMG shows how licensing and acquisition can bring a successful modifier inside the brand, while Rolex's service restrictions show that fighting can leave substantial margin and customer demand to independent players. In software, platform owners control whether an aftermarket can legally form through decisions about open source, licensing, and developer tools, which helped create businesses like Counter Strike, Red Hat, and Cursor.
Dashboards make marketing easier to measure, but they can also hide the work that actually drives growth. Teams may optimize for traffic or output while overlooking customer knowledge and relationship-building. These efforts are harder to quantify but can have a bigger long-term impact. Treat metrics as incomplete maps and question what each dashboard leaves out. Regularly compare the data with what customers and teams are seeing firsthand.
Getting users to select your website as a Preferred Source makes it show up for them in Google's Top Stories, AI Overviews, and AI Mode.
A guide to why LinkedIn should be the primary PR channel for a B2B startup.
Producing content faster just means reaching approval bottlenecks sooner.
Google and YouTube still dominate web traffic in the US, but AI is reshaping the landscape. ChatGPT traffic jumped 48.4% year over year to 1.09B monthly visits, while Bing fell 50.4%. Meanwhile, GA4 is losing visibility into AI-driven traffic, with “direct” traffic increasingly absorbing visits it can't attribute.
Streaming prices have risen 3X faster than inflation since 2022. The 8 major services now cost around $151/month without ads or bundles, up from $90 four years ago. As subscription fatigue grows, Gen Z's “streaming cycling” trend is gaining traction. Consumers subscribe to one service at a time, then cancel and switch to another.
The best copy doesn't create desire. It taps into wants customers already have, then connects the product to those deeper motivations. Identify the emotional driver behind the purchase, name the obstacle standing in the way, and show the customer what success looks like through a vivid, specific scenario. Rather than simply stating a benefit, make readers experience it before they buy.
Cursor turned a giveaway into a competitor-poaching tool by offering its $200/month plan free to customers who canceled a rival and proved it with a screenshot. Claiming meant DMing the employee running the offer from her personal account, creating a private channel for retention offers and switching feedback. A second run added a 24-hour deadline and converted even better. Customers also posted cancellation screenshots publicly, creating free marketing.