The flash floods that have devastated central Texas have led to 90 deaths as of Monday morning, with the number expected to keep growing.
The loss of life includes 27 children and counselors from an all-girls summer camp, Camp Mystic, located in Kerr County, Texas. USA Today reports that 700 children were in attendance when the nearby Guadalupe River rose to 26 feet in less than an hour on Friday, July 4th, following a period of continuous heavy rain.
“We will remain 100% dedicated, searching for every single one of the children who were at Camp Mystic as well as anybody else in the riverbed,” said Texas Gov. Greg Abbot. “We are working as swiftly as possible.”
Following the tragedy, news networks have sent teams to the region to offer extensive coverage:
ABC News
World News Tonight anchor David Muir will be in Texas for Monday’s broadcast. Joining him on location will be ABC News Live Prime anchor Linsey Davis, who will also anchor her primetime show from Texas on Monday night. Chief national correspondent Matt Gutman has been on the ground, filing a report that aired on Good Morning America and will contribute to other news programs. Also reporting from the region is national correspondent Mireya Villarreal and multi-platform reporter Jaclyn Lee.
CNN
Dallas-based CNN senior national correspondent Ed Lavandera was one of the first national reporters in the region and has been on location ever since. CNN’s Marybel Gonzalez, Isabel Rosales, and Leigh Waldman are also in Texas, as are CNN anchors Boris Sanchez and Pamela Brown. Notably, Brown had been a camper at Camp Mystic 30 years ago. On Sunday, she spoke of her time there, referring to it as “a magical place.”
—@PamelaBrownCNN was a camper at Camp Mystic thirty years ago. She is back there today anchoring for CNN.
“That river was the source of so much joy and fun for us… To think that that same river is the source of this devastation, it’s just hard to wrap my head around.” pic.twitter.com/cPvEpi4xBL
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) July 6, 2025
Fox News/Fox Weather
Lawrence Jones co-hosted Fox & Friends from Kerrville on Monday morning. Fox News correspondents Brooke Taylor, Mike Tobin, and Christina Coleman are also reporting from Kerrville. Over at Fox Weather, it has meteorologists Bayne Froney and Haley Meier in Texas, with Fox Weather correspondent Robert Ray reporting from the region on Tuesday.
NBC News
Savannah Guthrie anchored Monday’s edition of Today from Texas. NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Llamas is also in Texas and will anchor his program and Top Story from the region on Monday. Correspondents Ryan Chandler and Aaron Gilchrist are reporting from various parts of the region. Finally, Morgan Chesky, who is from Kerrville, Texas, is also on the ground and spoke to the Today hosts, telling them that his mother had to evacuate her home.
NewsNation
Senior national correspondent Brian Entin will anchor special editions of Cuomo and Banfield live from Kerrville, Texas, at 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. ET, respectively. National correspondent Jorge Ventura will provide coverage from Kerrville, Texas, while Xavier Walton will report live from Hunt, Texas.
Scripps News
Freelance correspondent Michael Anthony Adams will be in Kerrville and will remain on the scene through Tuesday as the story develops.
“Spineless material is as difficult to pigeonhole aesthetically and intellectually as it is to house on traditional library shelves” shares co-curator Chris. “Often hidden in stores and boxes, this exhibition brings this material to the fore and explores the relationships between format and content.” The shape and form of the ephemera on show allowed many creators to urgently respond to current affairs cheaply and efficiently such as: “an anti-fascist pamphlet produced in 1959 to fight against Oswald Mosley, which is not even folded, just held together with staples”, or Raging Woman: In Reply to Breaching the Peace, a pamphlet that addressed the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common. Other works in the library’s collection consist of limited-edition artists’ works or conscious experiments that have pondered the construction of paper and traditional forms of print over the 500 year period.
Many of the objects on display were, due to their very nature, created outside of mainstream publishing structures – birthed by counter cultures, independent activist groups or self publishing ventures. And so, they provide an alternative, and more rebellious telling of the history of political movements and cultural or creative expression in their contents. “One of my favourite sections of the show focusses on community publishing, showing works published in the 1970s and 1980s, from publishers including Centerprise (London) and Commonword (Manchester) – these gave voice to writers who might otherwise be excluded from the mainstream publishing world.” shares Leila.
“Spineless Wonders offers an exciting opportunity to explore how publishing without the ‘support’ of a spine challenges ideas of permanence, authority, and voice, both historically and in contemporary contexts”, shares Chris. As diverse in format as they are in subject matter, these published pieces offer a snapshot into the eras they were circulated in and provide “a rare insight into the materiality of early printed works and how they were first encountered and read”, ends Tansy.
Spineless Wonders: The power of print unbound is open until 15 November 2025.
The Movement For An Open Web and other organizations filed a legal challenge against Google, alleging harm to UK news publishers. The crux of the legal filing is the allegation that Google’s AI Overviews product is using news content as part of its summaries and for grounding AI answers, but not allowing publishers to opt out of that use without also opting out of appearing in search results.
The Movement For An Open Web (MOW) in the UK published details of a complaint to the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA):
“Last week, the CMA announced plans to consult on how to make Google search fairer, including providing “more control and transparency for publishers over how their content collected for search is used, including in AI-generated responses.” However, the complaint from Foxglove, the Alliance and MOW warns that news organisations are already being harmed in the UK and action is needed immediately.
In particular, publishers urgently need the ability to opt out of Google’s AI summaries without being removed from search altogether. This is a measure that has already been proposed by other leading regulators, including the US Department of Justice and the South African Competition Commission. Foxglove is warning that without immediate action, the UK – and its news industry – risks being left behind, while other states take steps to protect independent news from Google.
Foxglove is therefore seeking interim measures to prevent Google misusing publisher content pending the outcome of the CMA’s more detailed review.”
Reuters is reporting on an EU antitrust complaint filed in Brussels seeking relief for the same thing:
“Google’s core search engine service is misusing web content for Google’s AI Overviews in Google Search, which have caused, and continue to cause, significant harm to publishers, including news publishers in the form of traffic, readership and revenue loss.”
Google is under increasing criticism from the publisher and the SEO community for sending fewer clicks to users, although Google itself insists it is sending more traffic than ever. This may be one of those occasions where the phrase “let the judge decide” describes where this is all going, because there are no signs that Google is backing down from its decade-long trend of showing fewer links and more answers.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/nitpicker
Kwame Taylor-Hayford doesn’t just produce work for the hell of it. His focus is on creating projects that bring about meaningful positive change for society. The agency he co-founded, Kin, shares this mission, and was awarded AdAge’s Purpose-Led Agency of the Year, Silver, in 2022.
Kwame is also D&AD’s President, dedicating his time to make sure that the industry’s most prestigious not-for-profit grows and expands, supporting and championing as many creatives as possible.
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Kwame Taylor-Hayford
D&AD President, Co-founder, Kin
Kwame is a creative executive and entrepreneur with a passion for storytelling, design, innovation and impact. He is also co-founder at Kin, a creative company designed to advance social change through culture for brands including Delta Air Lines, Mailchimp, Chobani and Ben & Jerry’s.
I think it starts with knowing who you are and what you do. That belief and those values need to be very much in alignment with the actions that you take.
I feel it’s important to commit not for next month or next year, but to the five year journey
(Image credit: Delta)
I’ll mention a project we did for Delta Airlines, which was focused on helping to more accurately and authentically represent today’s traveler. The travel industry historically has not been very good at showing that travel is an experience that many of us can have, and when I say many of us, what I mean is travel has often been depicted as a privilege.
It’s often been depicted as a luxury afforded to mostly very wealthy people and has definitely not included the stories of historically marginalised or historically underrepresented travellers like people from black communities, Asian communities, Hispanic communities.
So we worked with Delta to develop a platform called Faces of Travel, which really celebrates the experiences of Muslim travellers and gay travellers and black travellers, and we created this visual library that we made freely available to the travel industry to use. So if you’re a blogger or you’re a magazine, or if you’re another airline and you’re creating content around travel, you can go to this library and you can get images that represent today’s travellers very authentically and use them for free in your communication.
(Image credit: Delta)
I think what you have to do is be very clear about the KPIs or the OKRs at the onset. And there are many things that you could measure, but you need to align with the brand that you’re working with on what’s important to them.
And in Delta’s case, these brand health metrics: brand that I love, brand that cares about my community, brand that represents what I believe. We were able to talk with them and agree on these very specific metrics and agree on how much ideally we’d want to move them, and then we measured against that.
(Image credit: Delta)
D&AD’s Shift is for creatives without a formal degree (Image credit: D&AD)
The short answer is, I think there are many ways. I think the way that we’re choosing to do it at D&AD is we have Shift, which is our night school for creatives that don’t have a formal degree. They’re self taught. And what we’re doing, through the support of many incredible brands including Delta, is we’re giving them opportunities to work on real briefs and real projects.
We just completed a collaboration with Delta through my agency Kin where we worked with their community engagement team to create a campaign that was focused on celebrating the work they do in that area. So we worked with the Shifters on strategy. They developed some creative ideas.
We ultimately landed on one concept that we called ‘common ground’, and we then produced a film, some out of home, and some social assets that are live today, running on TV in the US to highlight this important commitment Delta has to education, equity, the environment and entire wellness. They do this community engagement work around the globe, and we wanted to celebrate it.
So it was an incredible experience. The Shift cohort that we had got to go to Bogotá to produce their first TV commercial and through that, they now have this beautiful work in their portfolios that they can use to then secure additional opportunities to be creative.
When I started working in the industry, this was around the advent of the Internet. I started in 2003/2004 and honestly, it felt like there was a lot of opportunity, a lot of disruption. I come more from advertising. So ad agency agencies were not really sure about this internet thing, and this digital thing and social media came into the mix, and experiential started to become more of a thing. And these were all new for an industry that was very heavily focused on TV and print and radio and out of home.
People were largely working in the office five days a week. I want to say 40 hours a week, but it was more like 60-80 hours a week. And the proximity back then to the worlds of entertainment and art weren’t, I don’t think, as much of a consideration. It felt very insular. I think today it’s totally different in a lot of ways, but also quite the same in a lot of ways.
I think AI is a bigger disruption than the internet was
New Blood Festival 2025 (Image credit: D&AD/Scott Little )
Google confirms the June 2025 core update is now rolling out and may take up to three weeks to complete.
Spreeeng is a bit more spread out than your straightforward design studio. If you were looking at a map there would be a pattern of pins across New York, Paris, London and Stuttgart to chart its members. Working across “borders and timezones”, the graphic design cooperative brings together the creative practices of John Philip Sage, Carlos Romo-Melgar, Héloïse d’Almeida, and Roxy Zeiher – all under one (metaphorical) roof.
The group’s output primarily sits within the worlds of editorial design, exhibition graphics, visual identities and innovative type design for clients in the cultural sector, although “Spreeeng functions as a flexible constellation: shapeshifting around each project”, John tells us, and with this flexibility comes the opportunity to “expand into other disciplines through external collaborators”, they say. This reach has seen Spreeng pair up with the likes of large cultural institutions such as the V&A or The Design Museum, whilst also working closely with a host of independent artists on more community-based projects like Store Projects.
Outside of an impressively multifarious practice that goes beyond the constraints of working in any one place, the cooperative model has granted members of Spreeeng the freedom to enact something that, sadly, you don’t always see across the design industry: a horizontal model. “Distributed authorship, shared crediting, and equal pay” alongside a rejection of the design dogma that uploads prevailing studio structures have all been called into question in their practice. In the true spirit of a co-op, the group’s members also spend nearly as much time sharing knowledge from their work as they do making it, regularly hosting workshops and pedagogical experiments in collaboration with a range of institutions. Their focus on the sharing of design knowledge also translates into the group’s personal publishing projects such as Dispatches, “where the cooperative zooms in at particular snapshots of their practice”, to share in print.
This week’s Ask an SEO question comes from an ecommerce site owner who’s experiencing a common frustration:
“Our ecommerce site has decent traffic but poor conversion rates. What data points should we be analyzing first, and what are two to three quick conversion rate optimization (CRO) wins that most companies overlook?”
This is a great question. Having good traffic but poor conversion rates is really frustrating for ecommerce site managers.
You’ve successfully managed to get hundreds or even thousands of people onto your landing pages, but only a tiny proportion of them turn into paying customers.
What’s going wrong, and what can you do about it?
I’ve broken down my tips as follows:
Before answering your question, I think it’s valuable to take a step back and think about your approach to running your site – and what your goals are.
People often get lots of low-quality traffic for the following kinds of reasons:
For me, conversion is always built on the same key fundamentals:
So, before making changes, I’d encourage you to step back and think about your goals and objectives for the site. Everything else will feed into that.
It’s helpful to have a benchmark for what your conversion rate should be.
According to Shopify data, the average ecommerce site conversion rate is 1.4%. A very good rate is 3.2% or above, while very few sites hit more than 5%.
A common reason people get high traffic but low conversions is due to problems with their targeting. Essentially, they’re attracting the wrong kinds of site visitors.
For example, you might run a site selling tennis memorabilia. But most of the traffic you get is from people searching for tickets to tennis tournaments. As a consequence, most visitors bounce.
If this is the case, it’s time to rethink your SEO. Are you ranking for the right keywords? Are your landing pages aligned with the top queries for those search terms? Making changes here can make a big difference.
However, if your targeting is correct but conversion is still off, it’s time to look into CRO.
By analyzing how people navigate your site, you can start to build a picture of how they’re using it – and which features of your site or the user journey are turning visitors off.
If you’re using a store builder like Shopify, Wix, or Squarespace, you should have access to quite a lot of CRO data within the dashboard. On older sites, it can be a bit trickier to figure these things out.
There are lots of metrics that can give you insights into conversion rates. But the following information is often most telling:
This can seem like a lot of work! However, what you’re really looking for is a basic benchmark for each of the above points that you can plug into a spreadsheet.
You only need to gather this data once. Then, it’s just a case of seeing how changes you make affect those scores.
For example, say you have a high cart abandonment rate of 90%. You might decide to make some simple changes to the process (e.g., letting users check out as a guest). You’ll then be able to see what effect your change has had.
This is all about putting yourself in your users’ shoes. I’m often surprised by how few ecommerce site owners do this, yet you can’t understand what’s going wrong if you don’t use the site like a user would.
Simulating user journeys often exposes glaring usability issues.
For example, it’s quite common to land on a category page for, say, sports T-shirts, and find it’s full of broken links. You click on a T-shirt that looks good, but it leads to a 404. That’s such a turn-off to potential customers.
There are, of course, endless possible ways that people can navigate your site. I’d prioritize a handful of your most popular products and try to imagine how people would go through the process of buying them.
Here are some of the things to look out for:
Landing Page (First Impression)
Navigation And Search
Category Pages
Product Detail Pages
Cart And Checkout
Speed
Conversion rate optimization doesn’t always require a root-and-branch site upgrade.
Here are some simple tweaks you can make that can be surprisingly impactful.
If a user lands on a product page, it’s crucial to communicate key information to them. Yet, for many products, people have to scroll below the fold to find the information they need.
It can sometimes be surprisingly difficult for people to know how to actually buy things on ecommerce sites, particularly when using mobile. I’d recommend:
Any ecommerce site today should have a search bar where people can look for products. Help people find products by offering auto-suggestions with images and categories.
I’d also recommend tracking no-results queries and fixing them with redirects or better tagging. You might also want to promote high-converting products in the top results.
A poor checkout experience can be a real killer for conversion. The priority here is almost always about making things as easy as possible for buyers.
Exit-intent technology can be very helpful, at least on some kinds of websites.
However, it’s important to use it thoughtfully and appropriately (what makes sense on a fast-fashion website won’t look as good on a luxury goods store).
Instead of broad discounts, use behavioral targeting. Here are some options:
Last but not least, I’d always recommend A/B testing before rolling out whole site changes.
If you’ve tweaked a certain part of the user journey or the layout of a landing page, trial it for a week or so and see what results you get.
This avoids making damaging changes that harm conversion rates (and take a long time to rectify).
I hope these ideas for converting more of your ecommerce site’s visitors have helped.
As I’ve shown, there are tons of potential CRO techniques you can use, and it can get a bit overwhelming.
However, it’s often more straightforward than it seems, and you can often start with small steps that make a difference.
One of the reasons ecommerce site management can be so rewarding is the ability to experiment and see how small changes can make a big difference. Good luck!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
No longer a dim idea on the horizon, artificial intelligence has become part of everyday life at advertising agencies across the country. More than two-thirds of agency employees report using the technology a few times per week or more, according to a recent survey of ADWEEK readers.
At the same time, advertising jobs aren’t increasing.
Preliminary figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show employment at U.S. ad agencies rose slightly in May to 220,100 positions. On a seasonally adjusted basis, however, the number of industry jobs remains 3.5% lower than a high of 228,000 recorded in April 2023.
Several factors have contributed to this lack of growth.
Economic uncertainty related to global trade wars is one. Omnicom’s takeover of rival IPG is another.
“They are looking to be as lean as possible on paper, meaning there is a greater level of scrutiny given to any hire,” said Sasha Martens, president of recruiting firm Sasha the Mensch, about Omnicom’s planned acquisition of IPG.
Another element putting pressure on the decision to bring on more workers is the rise of AI, which agencies are embracing to do a variety of tasks, from copywriting to ad buying. Just over half of social media managers, for instance, say they can’t imagine doing their job without the technology, according to survey results from social media performance platform Hootsuite.
Additional employment statistics suggest AI is hitting entry-level jobs harder than more senior roles.
As Patrick Garvey, founding partner at ad agency We Are Pi, put it: “Now AI hoovers up the grunt work, so agencies are starting to skip the junior rung altogether.”
Examining a sample of nearly 50 U.S. marketing and advertising companies—from ad giants IPG and Omnicom to Publicis agencies Digitas and Starcom—figures from employment data provider Live Data Technologies reveal staff positions have declined more than 10% since January 2022. Manager and director jobs, meanwhile, have remained relatively steady during the same period.
“All the routine tasks once handled by junior creatives, media planners, and account coordinators are increasingly being both automated and outsourced,” said J. Scott Hamilton, president and CEO of Live Data Technologies.
A view of jobs by department offers further insight into changes occurring throughout the industry.
Information technology and business management are the only areas experiencing growth, per Live Data Technologies. Every other team—from engineering to marketing and product—has seen its numbers shrink.
In June, WPP chief executive Mark Read stated AI will alter the advertising workforce, eliminating some jobs while creating others.
This shift is already well underway, with AI appearing in job requirements at a growing pace. Indeed, mentions of AI in global job listings for marketing and advertising roles have increased by more than 67% so far in 2025 compared to the same time last year, according to a recent report from software company Autodesk.
“We’ve begun to notice AI skills, training, and program knowledge appearing more in job specs, particularly in project management and operational capacities,” said Helen Kimber, founder of Creative Connections, a talent acquisition firm that works with global ad agencies.
For people looking to enter the ad industry, thinking of AI as an opportunity, rather than an obstacle, could be key to getting doors to open.
“More than once it has been mentioned to me that younger incoming talent is naturally more fluent with AI,” explained Martens from Sasha the Mensch. “Companies are keen to find people who are very comfortable with it.”
Whether or not you’re a car fanatic, you’ll likely recognise the Ford logo – an iconic emblem dating back to the early 1900s. While the design has remained fairly unchanged since the late 1920s, there was a time when the automobile maker almost switched things up, and my, it could’ve been marvellous.
Today, the Ford logo remains one of the best car logos on the road – a symbol of heritage and reliability that has stood the test of time. Having not updated its logo since 2003, Ford is well overdue a new look, and while this sleek alternative design sadly never got to see the light of day, I’d love to see it have its time to shine in the future.
(Image credit: Ford/Future)
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(Image credit: Ford)
Google Search Advocate John Mueller says core updates rely on longer-term patterns rather than recent site changes or link spam attacks.
The comment was made during a public discussion on Bluesky, where SEO professionals debated whether a recent wave of spammy backlinks could impact rankings during a core update.
Mueller’s comment offers timely clarification as Google rolls out its June core update.
Asked directly whether recent link spam would be factored into core update evaluations, Mueller said:
“Off-hand, I can’t think of how these links would play a role with the core updates. It’s possible there’s some interaction that I’m not aware of, but it seems really unlikely to me.
Also, core updates generally build on longer-term data, so something really recent wouldn’t play a role.”
For those concerned about negative SEO tactics, Mueller’s statement suggests recent spam links are unlikely to affect how Google evaluates a site during a core update.
The conversation began with SEO consultant Martin McGarry, who shared traffic data suggesting spam attacks were impacting sites targeting high-value keywords.
In a post linking to a recent SEJ article, McGarry wrote:
“This is traffic up in a high value keyword and the blue line is spammers attacking it… as you can see traffic disappears as clear as day.”
Mark Williams-Cook responded by referencing earlier commentary from a Google representative at the SEOFOMO event, where it was suggested that in most cases, links were not the root cause of visibility loss, even when the timing seemed suspicious.
This aligns with a broader theme in recent SEO discussions: it’s often difficult to prove that link-based attacks are directly responsible for ranking drops, especially during major algorithm updates.
As the discussion turned to mitigation strategies, Mueller reminded the community that Google’s disavow tool remains available, though it’s not always necessary.
“You can also use the domain: directive in the disavow file to cover a whole TLD, if you’re +/- certain that there are no good links for your site there.”
He added that the tool is often misunderstood or overused:
“It’s a tool that does what it says; almost nobody needs it, but if you think your case is exceptional, feel free.
Pushing it as a service to everyone says a bit about the SEO though.”
That final remark drew pushback from McGarry, who clarified that he doesn’t sell cleanup services and only uses the disavow tool in carefully reviewed edge cases.
Alan Bleiweiss joined the conversation by calling for Google to share more data about how many domains are already ignored algorithmically:
“That would be the best way to put site owners at ease, I think. There’s a psychology to all this cat & mouse wording without backing it up with data.”
His comment reflects a broader sentiment. Many professionals still feel in the dark about how Google handles potentially manipulative or low-quality links at scale.
Mueller’s comments offer guidance for anyone evaluating ranking changes during a core update:
If your site has seen changes in visibility since the start of the June core update, these insights suggest looking beyond recent link activity. Instead, focus on broader, long-term signals, such as content quality, site structure, and overall trust.
