In-person events can be powerful marketing tools, but only if they align with a startup's audience, go-to-market motion, and existing strengths. Events should be evaluated like any other marketing channel, using clear frameworks that consider fit, expected ROI, and whether the team has the right resources to execute well. Success depends on treating events as full campaigns, with strong creative, content, and follow-up. Coverage and composition are key to choosing the right events: high coverage brings reach, while high composition ensures relevance. Events fail when handled by the wrong people, are overly sales-driven, or lack brand alignment, so thoughtful planning and execution are critical.
Scale AI's growth in search visibility is closely tied to its exploding product and brand presence. Scale's brand strategy has positioned it as essential AI infrastructure, using high-profile partnerships and credibility signals to dominate organic and generative search. Meta's $14.3 billion investment in the company triggered a 140% increase in traffic and resulted in 93,000 backlinks. Its homepage now receives 80% of all organic traffic, while product pages reinforce trust and credibility to optimize for high-intent users. Scale also gained significant visibility in generative engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, with ChatGPT alone accounting for 25% of its web referrals last month.
When asked how to optimize for LLM, a starting point is to see how your brand is currently represented by ChatGPT. Begin by prompting with “What is [your brand name]?” and review if the description matches your current offerings or if it's outdated. Check the sources ChatGPT uses, update or remove old content to align with your latest messaging. Then repeat the process with common prospect questions.
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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.
Profound helps brands understand how AI impacts their online presence. It monitors brand mentions, citations, and search volume, showing how AI platforms present a brand. Features include dashboards for AI crawl activity, share-of-voice insights, and competitive analysis. Brands can discover top questions, create content briefs, and optimize answers to increase AI visibility.
This piece features over 50 examples of tools built by non-technical people. Projects include apartment delivery buzzers, meal planners, parenting apps, Chrome extensions, and productivity tools. Many began by describing their ideas in plain language and refining them through iteration. Popular platforms include Cursor, Claude Code, Replit, and Lovable, along with v0, Bolt, and ChatGPT. While most tools solve personal needs, many also end up benefiting others. Chrome extensions are especially common, and women are well represented in this growing space.
Traditional attribution models are no longer reliable due to privacy laws, ad blockers, and fragmented customer journeys. A better way to measure results is through lift-based testing. This approach tracks the increase in conversions or engagement after a specific tactic begins. It compares results against a baseline to show real impact. The process starts with measuring exposure, such as impressions. It then looks at engagement, like replies or subscriptions, followed by conversions or sales. Testing different tactics over time reveals what actually works.
Alamo Drafthouse redefined the movie theater experience by treating film as a cultural event rather than passive entertainment. It earned national acclaim through unique programming like live-scored silent films, curated pre-shows, and interactive comedy events. By 2012, it ran Austin's three highest-volume restaurants and reported over $12 profit per person, far exceeding traditional theaters. Its acquisition by Sony in 2024 confirmed its lasting influence, as it continues to thrive by building local communities around film rather than copying industry trends.
TikTok has officially denied reports that it's building a U.S.-only version of its app, as part of its efforts to remain in America following the forced sell-off of the platform.
Prompts for competitive analysis, account based marketing, and newsletter links.
3 static ad examples that focus on consumer psychology to drive conversions.
Brands are using Substack to create newsletters focused on personal stories, advice, and behind-the-scenes content that readers seek. The Head of Lifestyle at Substack advises against treating newsletters like traditional email marketing. Brands should share authentic, first-person stories led by founders or trusted writers. Substack followers are often “superfans” who deeply engage and spread the word. For brands, the goal should be community-building, not sales. Lean into niche content and create a space for slower, more meaningful engagement.
Podcast ad spending is rising fast, but Spotify is moving away from ads. Its Partner Program pays creators directly through subscriptions and platform revenue. Over 70% of shows have joined, with listening hours up 25%. Some creators now earn far more than on YouTube. Networks are losing out, as Spotify blocks ads for Premium users. Podcasts are also shifting into video, live shows, and influencer content. Spotify's aim is not to win podcasting, but to rebuild it on its own terms.
Millbank FX, a low-traffic but high-value foreign exchange provider, used in-depth user research and A/B usability testing to redesign its website for better engagement. Initial testing showed users struggled to understand its services, missed key content like the homepage video, and found the site less informative than competitors. The team rewrote content to address user pain points, boosted credibility with testimonials and trust signals, clarified CTAs, and restructured the page to guide users through a persuasive flow. After launching the new pages, the company saw a 100% increase in leads, stronger lead quality, more organic traffic, and confirmed improvements in usability testing.
Keep the lead magnet short, solve a specific problem, and make it easy to use in under 10 minutes. Avoid long ebooks and focus on quick wins. Promote it by adding the link to your bio, messaging new followers, and using clear CTAs. Ask people to comment for access, then direct them to a landing page to collect emails before delivering the lead magnet.
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Conversational shopping is gaining real momentum with consumers, with 93% of shoppers considering it important. Shoppers want AI [9] that gives them honest, helpful recommendations as part of their buying journey. Are you ready to provide these experiences? Get the report by Bloomreach → _How AI Is Teaching Us To Shop Like Humans Again_ [9].
YouTube is allowing creators in its partner program to share aggregated audience and performance data with brands to increase monetization opportunities. The data includes views, likes, comments, subscriber counts, demographics, and shopping tag performance. YouTube is also enhancing its content enforcement by improving the detection of mass-produced and AI-generated videos. Additional updates include loyalty badges for up to ten years, a new filter to flag shopping tag violations, and a pull-to-refresh feature for Channel pages.
Starting today, Instagram will let Google and Bing index public posts, reels, and videos from professional accounts. This applies only to public accounts run by users over 18, and older content before 2020 is excluded. Users can opt out through privacy settings or by switching to a personal or private account. This update could help creators and businesses gain more visibility outside Instagram, as their posts may now appear in Google search results.
Brands are using escapist marketing to create emotionally immersive experiences that offer relief from stress and digital fatigue, especially through fantasy and storytelling. Gen Z favors brands that provide emotional connection and creativity, and the most admired brands in Canada are seen as adventurous, honest, and imaginative. Fantastical campaigns like Coca-Cola's “Real Magic” and Apple's “Mother Nature” use surreal visuals to deepen engagement and build brand loyalty. However, consumers may lose trust if these campaigns lack authenticity or try to cover unethical practices, making transparency essential for long-term success.
Google's AI Overviews have caused a drop in click-through rates, with one study showing desktop CTR dropped by up to two-thirds when AIOs appear. These features most often show up on informational queries and reduce organic traffic even when a site is cited in the AI response. Marketers should analyze whether their keywords and content are being impacted and adjust their strategies accordingly. For traffic and conversion goals, it is better to target lower-funnel keywords with commercial or transactional intent. If brand awareness is the goal, use tactics like clear answers, authoritative content, and embedded media.
Unilever's Dirt Is Good promotes the benefits of getting dirty, challenging traditional cleanliness messaging. The brand practices “storyliving” instead of just storytelling, with its team fully believing in and living the story of the brand. It uses local insights, finding sweat is the most common stain, followed by period and food stains, with many unaware of how to remove them. The “Every Stain Should Be Part of The Game” campaign found that 68% of UK and 90% of Saudi women don't know how to treat period stains. Dirt Is Good also embraces influencer marketing, using “cleanfluencers” on TikTok to boost engagement.
A list of this year's most influential digital voices categorized by Titans, Leaders, Phenoms, and Catalysts.
This feature shows how simple, useful online tools keep shoppers coming back.
Men on Pinterest focus on wellbeing, style, tech, and family. Over one-third of Pinterest's global users are men, with Pilates searches up to 300% and rock climbing aesthetics growing by 95%. Half of Gen Z and Millennial men care about appearance and self-care, with male makeup searches up 50% and beard styles rising 205%. Tech interest is high, shown by 1,210% growth in 3D printer design searches and 620% growth in investment app searches. Parenthood is also trending, with milestone picture searches increasing 415%.
Influencer marketing is projected to surpass $10 billion in U.S. investment this year, and LinkedIn has become a strong contender for both B2B and B2C campaigns due to its focus on credibility and professional audiences. LinkedIn's updates, including vertical video and ad revenue sharing, have boosted video consumption by 36% year over year. One company's LinkedIn influencer campaigns in 2024 generated over 4 million impressions, 100,000 engagements, and 500 leads through 125 content pieces. Brands like Lyft and Sweet Loren's have shown that LinkedIn can also drive impact for consumer-facing products by sparking authentic conversations and creative engagement.
Don't rely on chat-based workflows with AI tools for every task. Instead, create detailed, structured prompts with clear variables to ensure repeatable results. Test and refine these prompts, break complex tasks into smaller steps, and integrate them into automations like custom GPTs or Zapier workflows. Use reusable, well-crafted prompts to scale AI beyond one-off conversations.
Direct mail has become a top-performing channel: 84% of marketers report that it provides the highest ROI. Joy Gendusa, CEO of PostcardMania, built a $100 million business using direct mail and emphasizes making print pieces modern through tools like QR codes, CRM integration, and personalized targeting. She warns against falling into spammy habits and stresses that clarity in headlines and eye-catching CTAs are key to effective mailers.
Genspark.ai includes an AI browser that blocks ads, automates tasks, compares products, and integrates with apps like Notion, Slack, and Discord. It can generate decks, spreadsheets, and slides, automate research, create reports, run lead generation, and build websites or tools, making it a versatile all-in-one assistant.
This guide is a deep dive into the inner workings of ChatGPT. It covers what transformer architecture is, how pre-training AI works, and ChatGPT's training datasets.
Google's AI Overviews prioritize sponsored content and ads. It often pushes biased or fake product recommendations sourced mostly from manufacturers and sponsored reviews. This focus on advertising revenue harms independent websites, whose search traffic declines while Reddit threads filled with affiliate spam surge. Users should fact-check AI answers and log out of Google accounts for clearer results.
Creative agencies have evolved into transformation partners focused on driving business value. Design alone is no longer enough to help brands stand out. As branding became more accessible, businesses turned to agencies for help with deeper challenges like growth, loyalty, and product strategy. In response, agencies expanded into strategic services, competing with consultancies by offering faster, more creative, and often more affordable solutions.
Product information management (PIM) software helps businesses manage product data across multiple channels and is essential for those with thousands of SKUs. It enables growth by supporting strategies like SKU expansion, higher conversion rates, and selling more profitable items. Modern PIMs use AI to create personalized product personas and adapt descriptions, images, and translations for different platforms and audiences. While integration is complex and best suited for larger businesses, AI has made PIM a powerful growth tool by automating tasks like translation, data cleansing, and content generation.
Repurpose content by reformatting, splitting into smaller posts, or reposting every 6-12 months.
TouchBasePro's Head of Marketing & Ops shares email trends, AI impact, and their tech stack.
TikTok plans to launch a new version of its app for US users on September 5.
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A new report by Bloomreach [4] explores how conversational AI is teaching people to shop like humans again — and what that means for your brand.
Google does not penalize or reward AI-generated content based on its presence alone. An analysis of 600K pages showed that 86.5% of top-ranking pages contained some level of AI assistance, while only 13.5% were purely human-written. The correlation between AI usage and search rank was 0.011, indicating no meaningful relationship. However, pages that rank in the #1 position tended to use less AI, suggesting a slight preference for lightly AI-assisted or more human-created content.
Gen Z favors authenticity, speed, and cultural alignment over polished campaigns and linear journeys. Nearly half of them say they would prefer life without the internet. This reflects their desire for transparency and meaningful connection in a saturated digital world. They rely on social platforms and creators for product discovery, often skipping traditional search engines in favor of TikTok or generative AI tools. The funnel is not broken, but fragmented and looped, requiring brands to engage with fast and participatory content across multiple touchpoints.
AI prompts should include clear context, structure, and intent. Assign expert roles and outline specific processes to guide results. Use iterative feedback loops to refine ideas through ongoing reviews. Encourage pattern-breaking by prompting for unusual, risky, or unconventional ideas to inspire fresh thinking. Incorporate strong, opinionated personas to challenge assumptions and offer contrasting perspectives.
Acquiring a new customer costs 5X more than retaining one. Improving retention by 5% can boost profits by up to 95%. Netflix's win-back email failed because it gave generic reasons to return and did not address the specific reason the customer canceled. Athletic Greens succeeded by responding directly to a cancellation reason with a helpful solution, showing the power of segmentation. Companies should act quickly, build objection-specific funnels, and offer solutions that directly address customer concerns to improve retention.
This tool analyzes how well your webpage performs for AI-driven search queries. By entering a target keyword and URL, it generates related search variations, breaks your page into sections, and uses semantic analysis to match content with search intent. It reveals keyword opportunities, shows which parts of your page best match queries, highlights content gaps, and compares your page against top competitors. This helps you improve AI search visibility and better structure content for SEO.
77% of TikTok users are more likely to search global music artists than the average listener. Use TikTok's Creative Center to monitor trending sounds by region, TokChart to track audio performance over time, and CapCut templates that pair emerging audio with ready-made video formats.
The future of travel loyalty is shifting from points to emotional connections. Travelers now value recognition, exclusive access, and personalized experiences. Gen Z and Millennials want programs that feel modern and relevant. Airlines, cruises, and hotels are using AI and data to offer tailored perks and memorable moments. Loyalty programs now focus on driving direct bookings and creating loyal customers through emotionally engaging travel experiences.
B2B marketers continue to rely on outdated funnel models even as automation and attribution tools become more advanced. Agentic Marketing replaces these legacy systems with intelligent agents that engage leads instantly across chat, email, and web without delays or manual routing. Demandbase and Crunchbase have used this approach to double the volume of meetings booked, triple AI-driven conversations, and increase pipeline while reducing dependency on SDR headcount.
Tactics include guest posting on Hackernoon, sponsoring hackathons, and responding to relevant topics on Reddit/Quora.
Billboard ads still work today because of ‘costly signaling', where the high cost signals higher value to people.
This week's Prime Day sales is projected to be equivalent to two Black Fridays.
Consumers are becoming more privacy-aware and are taking control over their data. 42% read cookie banners often, and 46% clicked "accept all" less than they did three years ago. Trust in brands now depends on transparency, with 44% of consumers saying clear data use is the top reason they trust a brand. Privacy-Led Marketing has become a strategic necessity, turning privacy from a legal checkbox into a competitive advantage. Brands that embed transparency and education into every touchpoint can build deeper trust and reduce friction.