With PS5 Pro out for over six months now and vague details of the next Xbox emerging, speculation is inevitably turning what Sony will do next. Presumably, there will be a PlayStation 6. But for now, all we really know about Sony’s vision for future hardware is that it’s working with GPU-maker AMD on an AI collaboration called Project Amethyst.
What is Project Amethyst and what does it mean for PS6 and future PlayStation consoles? Sony isn’t revealing much about its hardware, but it is talking about the AI tech (also see our pick of the best games consoles).
PS5 Pro Technical Seminar at SIE HQ – YouTube
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From the same source. Two branches. One vision.My good friend and fellow gamer @cerny and I recently reflected on our shared journey — symbolized by these two pieces of amethyst, split from the same stone.Project Amethyst is a co-engineering effort between @PlayStation and… pic.twitter.com/De9HWV3Ub2July 1, 2025
ROG Xbox Ally World Premiere Reveal Trailer | Xbox Games Showcase – YouTube
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Most marketing measurement models operate on a simple assumption: effects are additive.
Campaign A drives 100 leads, Campaign B drives 200, so the total impact is 300.
But in reality, marketing often defies this logic. Some efforts multiply the effects of others.
And in some cases, combined initiatives create outcomes that are greater than the sum – or even the product – of their parts. These are known as additive, multiplicative, and synergistic effects.
Consider a glass of cold milk and an Oreo cookie. Each is perfectly enjoyable on its own. But together, they create something unexpectedly better. The same principle applies to marketing: when initiatives are strategically integrated, the outcome can be amplified far beyond what any single effort could achieve on its own.
Which raises a few important questions:
Let’s start by defining the terms.
Let’s start with a quick visual before getting into the details:
Definition: The total effect is simply the sum of individual efforts.
Marketing example: If Campaign A drives 100 leads, and Campaign B drives 200 leads, then the combined result is 300 leads. No interaction – just stacking results.
Limitation: This assumes each tactic works in isolation and doesn’t influence the effectiveness of others.
Definition: The total effect is the product of factors, one enhances or scales the other.
Marketing example: If awareness increases by two times, and conversion rate increases by 1.5 times, the combined impact on sales is 2 x 1.5 = 3x. Changes in one variable amplify the other.
Limitation: It still assumes predictable, mathematical interaction, which often oversimplifies real-world marketing dynamics.
Definition: The combined effect is greater than the sum or product of individual parts – a case of “1 + 1 = 3”.
Marketing example (Les Binet-style): Long-term brand building primes an audience emotionally, while short-term performance-focused campaigns convert that primed audience into buyers. Each alone performs OK. But together, they reinforce and amplify each other – leading to non-linear, sometimes exponentially better results.
Since we’re talking about Les Binet, let’s go even deeper and throw in a time-decay element. Binet emphasizes that brand campaigns build the brand through every impression but battle the daily erosion of market share – with DR campaigns funding short-term brand defense as well.
Key insight: Marketing activities often interact in mutually reinforcing ways that can’t be reduced to simple math.
Limitation: Hard to model, and requires additional experimentation.
Dig deeper: Use AI marketing tools to automate and scale your strategy
The concept of incrementality is getting more interest these days as marketing budget distribution is under greater scrutiny.
In general, this is a good thing. For marketing budgets to be spent effectively, brands need to know:
In this way, incrementality casts a keen critical eye on additive effects and some multiplicative effects (especially toward the bottom of the funnel, since brand campaigns likely would produce conversions on their own that direct response campaigns partly cannibalize).
While incrementality testing in a silo is a powerful way to establish causality between a cause and a marketing effect, it misses the point in terms of potential synergies across channels. Yes, it’s an important component of good marketing analysis, but it needs reinforcements to determine optimal budget distribution.
Dig deeper: 3 tools every martech pro needs to turn strategy into action
Advertising platforms (e.g., Google Ads, Meta Ads) use additive effects (mostly). That’s right, advertising platforms generally use simple attribution models like last-click attribution, which assume that the last interaction is the sole contributor to a conversion.
These platforms usually treat the effects of individual ads or campaigns in isolation, assuming an additive effect.
Multi-touch attribution (MTA) uses synergistic effects (mostly). It takes into account the entire customer journey and assigns value to multiple touchpoints. It assumes that the interactions between various marketing channels and touchpoints work together synergistically, meaning combined.
Salesforce uses additive effects. Its attribution models often focus on assigning credit to various touchpoints based on lead or sales data. They tend to follow additive effects, treating each interaction as having an individual contribution without fully factoring in the synergistic interaction between channels or activities.
Shopify uses additive or multiplicative effects (based on the model). Shopify often uses attribution models that can range from simple last click or first click (additive) to more complex models that might include weighted attribution (multiplicative). Shopify’s attribution doesn’t inherently assume synergy but can be configured to weigh different touchpoints more complexly.
Media mix modeling (MMM) is a more sophisticated statistical approach to assessing the overall impact of various marketing activities (TV, print, digital, etc.). It captures synergistic effects, where the combined impact of multiple channels can result in an effect that’s greater than the sum of individual contributions, while not explicitly reporting on those effects. MMM accounts for the interdependence between different marketing activities, capturing nonlinear relationships.
Dig deeper: It’s time to move on from multi-touch attribution
You may already have some of these campaigns set up in isolation, but here’s a quick breakdown of how to assess the campaigns and their attendant effects.
In isolation, without lower-funnel campaigns to influence, branding campaigns won’t show much face value.
The effects of this campaign in a silo are almost purely additive.
In this scenario, branding is expected to take on a multiplicative role when paired with a direct response campaign. The key idea is that their combined impact should be greater than the simple sum of what each delivers in isolation. If the results from Test 3 exceed the combined performance of Tests 1 and 2, that confirms it: marketing effects aren’t merely additive – they’re multiplicative.
With greater scale, I would expect branding campaigns to enhance direct response performance in a non-linear fashion, showing synergistic effects as opposed to multiplicative.
Dig deeper: How AI flipped the funnel and made GTM tactics obsolete
Any attribution method assuming additive effects is mostly inaccurate by design. Advertisers should make sure they use more advanced models accounting for multiplicative or – even better – synergistic effects. Capturing synergistic effects will require some additional experimentation. However, optimizing your media mix is well worth it.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
A lot of Brooklyn-based graphic designer and visual artist Rebecca Wilkinson’s work is about “making visible, the oftentimes invisible labour of design”, she tells us – something that she explored at length in her MFA thesis: Perform—Produce. That’s why you’ll sometimes see her make an appearance in her projects, revealing the person behind their production. “I believe strongly that the work of design is increasingly devalued as a result of its increasing detachment and disembodiment from its producer (the designer)”, she shares, “seeing the person making the work is key to reimagining the structures and material conditions under which this work is produced.”
This subject of work itself is central to Rebecca’s practice and is often what the designer is exploring across a range of digital and analogue mediums: self-published books, video essays, workshops, experimental publications, and performances. This fieldwork has seen her not only interrogate her own tools and techniques in playful and imaginative ways but also turn to other designers for their two cents — such as her incredibly thorough research project on all things chairs: Common Dimensions manifests as a platform and series of self published works that present interviews with a range of furniture designers and makers on their practice.
At the outset of a project, Rebecca usually finds herself writing a set of instructions before settling in – a preoccupation with rules and parameters as springboards for creativity that’s loosely inspired by the Fluxus artists, especially Sol Lewitt’s famous instructions for wall drawings. This methodology has its roots in the designer’s belief that “most ideas can be communicated visually through simple intentional moves”, she shares, which sees her work with minimal means to design entire visual systems “in one single typeface”.
The goal is always to have as little surrounding noise as possible: “I believe my work is most successful when I can make the least amount of visual elements possible and can still communicate a strong idea,” she says, “to me, one smart, legible move is better than ten unnecessary flourishes.”
WordPress is the most popular content management system in the world, arguably because of its ability to become virtually any kind of website users want it to be.
This flexibility is made possible by thousands of third-party plugins that add the features needed to turn ideas into functioning businesses and platforms.
The WordPress plugin community is what really brings the platform to life and enables publishers and developers to build websites that enhance the experience for site visitors and publishers.
Based on my own experience and from others in the WordPress community, the following is a list of high-quality plugins that provide essential functionality for building a successful website.
All the WordPress plugins evaluated and selected are created by trustworthy developers according to the following criteria:
There are nine categories of plugins on the list:
SEO plugins handle critical tasks that every WordPress site needs to rank well in search engines.
They automate essentials like generating sitemaps, adding meta descriptions and title tags, and inserting schema.org structured data.
They also provide a way to manually add article excerpts and centralize on-page optimization by managing internal linking, rank tracking, redirects, and integrating with Google Search Console for performance insights.
These are the five most widely used and trusted SEO plugins, listed by number of installations:
Yoast SEO is a go-to plugin for handling the basics of on-page optimization.
It has a measurably imperceptible impact on site performance and a long track record of providing fast updates in response to changes at Google.
It also deserves special mention for its trustworthiness in terms of security.
WordPress site security is sometimes overlooked in favor of focusing on sales or SEO, but all it takes is one security incident to understand the severe impact a vulnerability can have on sales and search performance.
Top 3 WordPress Security Plugins
Wordfence is one of the most widely used WordPress security plugins, trusted by over 5 million users.
The free version protects websites against external threats by locking down commonly exploited areas and running a malware scan that checks for intrusions.
It also blocks malicious files from executing in sensitive folders, sends alerts when plugins and themes need updating, and provides an option to enforce strong passwords.
Its standout feature is a built-in firewall that automatically detects and blocks suspicious activity and user agents. These blocks are temporary and automatically lifted after a preset time to prevent database bloat.
Wordfence also allows users to define custom firewall rules, offering precise control against malicious bots (learn how to use Wordfence’s custom rules).
It is authorized by the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures Program as a CVE Numbering Authority, which means it contributes vulnerability discoveries to the official CVE® database and underscores its credibility in the security space.
For most users, the free version offers strong baseline protection that makes Wordfence an essential plugin. The Premium version adds real-time threat signatures to protect against newly discovered vulnerabilities.
Sucuri, which is currently owned by GoDaddy, is a security auditing, malware scanning, and website hardening solution that complements other security plugins.
It doesn’t duplicate the features in Wordfence, so the two can be used together as a layered security strategy.
Sucuri includes a file integrity scanner that alerts users to changed files, secures the website against intrusions, and provides security notices, such as when someone logs in.
The paid version includes a firewall that actively blocks threats, but even the free version adds meaningful protection.
When combined with Wordfence, Sucuri offers a highly effective and essential level of WordPress security.
Patchstack helps secure WordPress sites by detecting vulnerabilities in themes and plugins.
It provides email notifications and real-time alerts, including a dashboard for monitoring up to 10 websites in the free version and up to 50 in the premium solution.
WordPress plugins and themes can contribute to unnecessary code bloat and render-blocking scripts, which negatively impact website performance.
Caching and web performance plugins address these issues by applying the latest speed and optimization techniques, helping sites load faster and perform more efficiently.
Recommended Caching Plugins
This is the official WordPress performance plugin developed by the WordPress Performance Team, composed of WordPress core contributors.
It offers advanced performance optimizations that take advantage of the latest technologies and browser capabilities, some of which may be included in future versions of WordPress.
Its modular design enables users to activate only the performance features most relevant to their websites.
The purpose of the plugin is to allow users to provide feedback on how the performance improvements work with their websites.
While there is a small possibility of unexpected issues, the plugin is generally stable and safe to use.
Some of the latest performance improvements offered are:
WP Rocket addresses core performance challenges that affect most WordPress websites, offering everything a site needs to improve speed and load times, plus compatibility with other plugins and themes.
Virtually every recommended optimization, from lazy loading to delaying JavaScript, is included.
The attention to detail is top-notch. For example, one of the most recent updates was to preload fonts that show above the fold.
The solutions provided by WP Rocket reduce the need to hand-code performance optimizations, resulting in lower development and maintenance costs.
W3 Total Cache (W3TC) improves website speed by offering extensive caching options, including database objects, and minification of JavaScript and CSS resources.
It also handles deferring non-critical resources and converting images to the WebP format, helping websites meet modern performance standards.
Backing up and archiving a WordPress site is critical to protecting it from catastrophic failure due to a server issue or site hacking.
Backups are also invaluable when unintended changes are made and need to be reverted.
Using a dedicated backup plugin is the most reliable way to ensure regular, complete backups are available when needed. The importance of website backups cannot be overstated.
Recommended Backup Plugins
The UpdraftPlus WordPress Backup plugin is trusted by over 3 million users.
It provides a reliable, easy-to-use solution for creating full backups and restoring a site to a previous version when needed.
In addition to website recovery, UpdraftPlus supports site migration between servers, making it a practical tool for both maintenance and server changes.
Backing up and restoring a WordPress site with this plugin is straightforward, even in urgent situations like accidental file deletion.
BlogVault offers real-time incremental backups that include free off-site storage and a 90-day archive.
The plugin backs up the WordPress database, themes, plugins, settings, and images, covering all critical components of a WordPress site.
The official WordPress repository page for the plugin states that BlogVault is the official site migration plugin for Cloudways, Flywheel, Liquid Web, Pantheon, and WP Engine, further reinforcing its reliability.
BlogVault also provides a free staging environment. The paid Pro version offers automation features, one-click recovery and migration, plus priority customer support starting at $149. Higher tiers offer built-in malware scans.
The free version provides many of the backup and storage functionalities that most websites need, and its staging capabilities are a strong bonus, allowing users to safely test changes before deploying them to a live site.
Jetpack VaultPress Backup is a component of the Jetpack plugin bundle that starts at $9.95/month. It’s by Automattic, founded by Matt Mullenweg, who is the co-founder of WordPress.
VaultPress Backup provides daily and real-time backups of WordPress and WooCommerce stores, including all customer and order data, making it especially well-suited for websites where uptime and data integrity are crucial.
It creates multiple redundant encrypted backups to ensure recovery is always possible.
Because VaultPress Backup is developed by Automattic, it’s coded to the highest standards and tested for compatibility with all major plugins and themes.
While a theme’s built-in contact form provides basic contact functions, third-party plugins are necessary for sites that rely on lead generation, marketing campaigns, or advanced features like multi-step forms.
The following contact form plugins offer greater flexibility and control to meet those needs.
WPForms is a visual contact form builder that can be adapted for accepting feedback, serving as subscription forms, and forms for accepting payments, integrating with Authorize.Net, PayPal, Stripe, and Square Payments.
The plugin offers over 2,000 templates to make it easy to create a form and offers easy customizability, exceeding the functions and adaptability of default contact forms typically found in themes.
There are different paid version levels, each providing increasingly sophisticated features and capabilities, but the free version is a reliable option for websites that need more than just basic contact functionality.
Gravity Forms is an advanced contact form plugin that offers conditional logic that can hide fields or pages depending on user answers, and can be configured for payments, product sales, and donations, all done with the highest levels of security.
Form configuration is done within a drag-and-drop visual editor and includes dozens of add-ons that can be used to make it integrate with a customer relationship management (CRM), analytics, or anti-spam solution, or add an autocomplete to increase conversions.
These capabilities make Gravity Forms particularly well-suited for websites that require flexible, advanced forms to handle complex data collection, transactions, and lead generation.
Gravity Forms is a professional-level plugin that can do virtually anything related to capturing user-provided data.
Ninja Forms is an easy-to-use contact form builder, but with increasingly complex functionalities that can be added according to need.
What makes Ninja Forms stand out is its modular system, which allows users to purchase add-ons to extend its capabilities. Paid add-ons include features like multi-step forms and conditional logic for advanced workflows.
The free version includes options that are premium features in many other form plugins.
For example, it is Akismet- and Google ReCaptcha-friendly, and can accommodate uploads, accept payments via PayPal and other gateways, and integrate with MailChimp, Constant Contact, multiple CRMs, and more.
It’s a practical choice for websites that need a reliable form solution right away, with the flexibility to expand as requirements grow.
Formidable Forms is an advanced custom form builder that is easy to configure, with an intuitive drag-and-drop builder interface that makes it easy to create a custom form.
It’s engineered for fast performance and is WCAG/A11Y compliant, making it suitable for sites that need accessible, high-performance forms.
The Pro version enables forms to be adapted for payments, calculations, surveys, quizzes, and dozens of integrations with CRMs and email marketing platforms, making it a strong choice for websites that need flexible, feature-rich form capabilities.
Image optimization plugins address one of the most common performance issues by compressing images and converting them to more efficient formats for faster loading.
This helps reduce page load times, improve user experience, and increase conversions.
EWWW Image Optimizer uses a server’s image optimization apps to optimize images, converting them to the appropriate format for each one.
The plugin is compatible with major plugins and handles optimization automatically.
The premium version offers higher compression rates and uses their servers to reduce the user’s server load. It’s a reliable tool trusted by over one million users.
Smush is a free, no-limits image optimizer plugin that doesn’t run on a user’s server, which avoids slowing down the website.
The free version includes a wide range of features, and the premium version adds background optimization and conversion to advanced image formats like WebP and AVIF.
Image optimization is automatic, with support for resizing, lazy loading, incorrect image size detection, and no monthly limits other than a maximum image size of 5 MB, making it a strong choice for improving site performance with minimal effort.
In addition to optimizing images (including WebP) and PDFs, ShortPixel can automatically add alt-text and block AI bots from downloading images, features that support both accessibility and content protection.
The plugin can also convert images to modern formats like WebP and AVIF, which significantly reduce image file sizes for faster page loads.
Since the free version uses ShortPixel’s servers for compression, it helps maintain site speed by reducing the load on your own hosting environment.
Akismet is an easy-to-use anti-spam solution that automatically filters spam comments and allows site owners to review and restore them if necessary.
It’s easy to implement for protecting comment sections and contact forms that integrate with it. It’s a useful plugin for any site that has comments enabled or accepts form submissions.
Akismet is developed by Automattic, founded by Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress.
Advanced Google reCAPTCHA adds Google’s reCAPTCHA to contact forms, registration forms, and password resets, and integrates with WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and BuddyPress.
By blocking brute-force login attempts and preventing spam registrations, it mounts an effective defense against two of the most common threats faced by WordPress sites, making it a practical security solution for websites that accept user input.
The advanced Google reCAPTCHA is published by WebFactory, core contributors to WordPress and creators of many popular plugins.
WordPress, by design, offers only basic search functionality.
Ecommerce stores, content-heavy sites, and sites with knowledge bases and documentation rely on advanced search engine plugins to help users quickly find products and information.
These plugins improve user experience by handling misspellings and using stemming to deliver broader, more relevant results.
The following plugins are highly recommended for WordPress websites where search plays a key role.
Recommended Search Engine Plugins
Relevanssi is a free WordPress search plugin that brings advanced capabilities often found only in paid tools.
It improves on the default WordPress search by offering sorting by relevance (instead of date), partial word matching, and support for advanced operators like “and,” “or,” and exact phrase searches using quotation marks.
These features make it easier for visitors to find the right content, especially on content-heavy sites or stores.
Relevanssi can display excerpts that show the search term in context and highlight those terms when users click through. It also integrates with WPML and Polylang, making it useful for multilingual sites.
One thing to be aware of is that Relevanssi increases database usage. The developers recommend checking the current size of the wp_posts table and estimating triple that amount for storage needs.
The Pro version adds features like the “Did you mean?” suggestion tool, support for indexing PDFs, taxonomy filtering, and weighted results.
A standout feature in the Pro version is stemming, which matches results to the meaning or topic of the query, not just the literal keyword. This improves result relevance and can reduce the size of the search index.
This plugin replaces the default WordPress search box with a more capable search tool that works across posts, pages, and custom post types like events, portfolio items, and WooCommerce products.
It can search in titles, descriptions, article excerpts, and custom fields, improving how users find content on the site.
It also offers useful options like excluding specific categories or posts from search results and can integrate with Google Analytics to track search behavior.
The plugin is multilingual-friendly and compatible with Polylang, QtranslateX, and WPML, making it a good fit for global audiences.
The paid Pro version expands support to popular page builders, additional content types like PDFs and Events Calendar, and includes advanced WooCommerce search functionality.
This paid search plugin is a widely trusted option among developers and publishers who need more advanced search capabilities than WordPress provides by default.
Its algorithm can prioritize frequently clicked results, apply custom weighting, include an include/exclude feature, and index content from custom fields, PDFs, media files, and custom post types. These features make it suitable for content-rich or complex sites that rely on internal search.
Ecommerce features include support for product attributes and taxonomy searches, with compatibility for WooCommerce, Easy Digital Downloads, and BigCommerce plugins.
Pricing at the time of writing is on sale for $99 per year.
Website staging is a feature offered by several WordPress plugins that allows users to create an exact copy of a site for safe testing.
They’re valuable for previewing changes before updating the WordPress core, plugins, or themes.
Staging plugins also help with debugging, trying out new templates, and customizing the site without affecting the live version.
Recommended Staging Plugins
The free version of the plugin enables users to clone their website to a subfolder of the website, including the database.
The clone can be used for staging a website, as well as for backup and migration.
The pro version of the plugin enables users to back up the website to third-party cloud providers and offers advanced site migration capabilities.
The free version of the plugin advertises that it’s so lightweight that it can even be used on a low-powered shared hosting environment. The paid version of the plugin is on sale at the time of writing and starts at $103/year.
WP Stagecoach is a paid premium solution that offers an easy way to stage a website safely on the WP Stagecoach servers and then push it to the live production server when it’s ready.
I’ve used WP Stagecoach and found it to be simple and convenient.
Pricing starts at $149/year.
While plugin needs can vary, certain plugins have proven useful across most types of WordPress sites.
The WordPress ecosystem offers thousands of plugins that extend website functionality.
The plugins on this page are trustworthy, widely used, and essential for increasing search visibility, increasing sales, improving the user experience, and supporting what makes WordPress the most popular CMS in the world.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Biscotto Design/Shutterstock
Condé Nast execs are pressured to retain ad dollars after Anna Wintour announced last week that she will no longer oversee the day-to-day operations of Vogue, the luxury brand she has led as editor-in-chief since 1988.
Wintour will remain in her broader roles as Condé Nast’s chief content officer and global editorial director for Vogue. And while it’s too soon for the ad industry to record a change in brands continuing to advertise or not, one agency exec acknowledged to Digiday the weight of Wintour’s moves: “[ad money] flows to Vogue because of Anna.”
Wintour has become synonymous with the Vogue brand. But the fashion media landscape has changed since Vogue’s print-dominant heyday. Brands are contending with shrinking referral traffic, ad dollars are shifting to search and social, the creator economy is booming, and generative AI technology is curating fashion and summarizing content in search engines.
“Having [Wintour] step back from day-to-day but still overseeing things is the best of both worlds. Vogue can still benefit from her influence and connections but they can also infuse the brand with new energy,” said a former Condé Nast editor, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely. “If they play their cards right, it can also signal to the advertising community that there’s something new and exciting in the air.”
Condé Nast (and Vogue) aren’t immune to the shifting media landscape. Vogue lowered its audience rate base to its advertisers in the past month from 1.2 million to 1 million, according to an agency exec, who requested anonymity. It now puts the publication’s circulation at a similar level of competitors like Elle and Harper’s Bazaar, they said.
A Condé Nast spokesperson declined to comment on this story. But they shared digital performance figures with Digiday, including how its most recent Vogue cover featuring Lauren Sanchez Bezos performed, claiming 1.6 million visitors and 3.4 million TikTok views.
Vogue’s next editorial leader will need to have a more platform-centric approach to content distribution and monetization, to continue attracting an audience that is increasingly less inclined to come to a publisher’s owned properties, according to a former Condé Nast exec. That means giving up more control.
“Whoever comes after her next is going to have more autonomy to be able to think about the evolution from print and websites to third-party distributed platforms and AI, LLMs,” said the former Condé Nast exec, who requested anonymity due to their personal relationship with Wintour. “The day-to-day content creation and audience strategy is going to be run by somebody else. But the aura connected with [Wintour], and the cultural gravity — I don’t think that’s going to go anywhere for the foreseeable future.”
Creators are increasingly taking larger shares of marketers’ budgets, said Kim Harrison, group media director, connections strategy at Fitzco. Vogue as a brand has become more influential than Vogue as a magazine, said Tricia Logan, managing partner of global consumer & retail practice at DHR Global, executive search and leadership consulting firm.
Being associated with Vogue “still means something,” the former Condé Nast editor said. “Yes there are creators, but what do those creators want? They all want to be in Vogue. That’s powerful,” they said.
That’s also apparent in how Condé Nast is selling inventory. “It’s not like you’re selling one deal across five [Condé Nast] brands on Instagram. You’re selling Vogue on Instagram, Vogue on TikTok, Vogue on YouTube,” the former Condé Nast exec said.
Condé Nast went through rounds of layoffs and cost-cutting last year, merging Pitchfork into GQ in January 2024 and letting go of senior executives in December. Legacy media companies have pared back on spending executives were once afforded, under pressure from audiences and marketers shifting to social and video platforms, and economic headwinds.
However, the sheen of Vogue remains intact, according to ad agency and publisher execs alike. That goes for the majority of Condé Nast brands, said one senior agency exec at a holding group agency, who asked to remain anonymous so as not to appear to either disparage or elevate any particular publisher. They believe that Condé Nast, and Vogue, are well-positioned to tap the creator economy more effectively than they have done to date.
“Anyone writing for a magazine [like theirs] is influencing culture. And those [writers] are sought-after talent in this new world where creators and influencers are super important,” said the agency exec. “But I don’t think they’ve leveraged it nearly to the degree that they should have. There’s been ways that they’ve been able to monetize it in small ways, but, like, not scalable. I think there is work to be done there,” they said.
The hiring of Elizabeth Herbst-Brady as chief revenue officer at Condé Nast — having led revenue and advertising teams at tech companies like Verizon, Snap, Viacom and Yahoo — last year signaled the media group’s intention to shift gears, the exec added. “That, plus the access they have — whether it’s Hollywood talent, you can go across the board — those brands are still adored. And they’ve got the attention of pockets of influencers, no matter what property we’re talking about. With Anna changing roles, I think it will help folk reimagine it in this new way.”
Wintour’s move hasn’t spurred a notable ripple effect among advertisers — at least not yet. Vogue’s grasp on the luxury market remains strong. Vogue is still valuable for advertisers looking for a safe, trusted environment and to reach an audience interested in luxury brands, two agency execs told Digiday.
But those ad dollars are intertwined with Wintour. With Wintour still at the helm, it’s unlikely a new Vogue editorial leader will have a completely different vision from their predecessor. And maybe that’s the point.
“It’s hard to separate the two,” Logan said.
—Jessica Davies, Digiday senior media editor, contributed to this story.
We’ve been covering rebrands long enough to know the formula for their announcement. A quote-filled press release is accompanied by some splashy before-and-after animations posted to social media, along with a detailed case study on the creative agency’s website for the design nerds (guilty).
The announcement of TripAdvisor’s new rebrand, designed by Koto, features most of the above. But the brand has also found a pretty hilarious way to announce the redesign of its owl logo.
The rebrand marks TripAdvisor’s 25th anniversary (Image credit: Koto)
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(Image credit: Koto)
As emerging technologies, particularly AI, reshape B2B marketing strategies, many organizations are shifting resources toward digital transformation to remain competitive.
However, sidelining traditional marketing tactics to prioritize innovation can be a costly misstep.
Traditional channels such as print, direct mail, billboards, and events have considerable value, particularly when they are thoughtfully integrated with digital strategies and real-time demand intelligence.
Combining traditional and digital approaches offers a unique advantage, namely the ability for a brand to stand out in the sea of sameness.
Experiences that blend the old with the new are more likely to capture attention, foster trust, and drive meaningful engagement.
By aligning traditional media with digital insights and delivery systems, marketers can create a cohesive brand-to-demand experience – one that resonates with today’s self-directed, risk-averse buyers.
Here are five high-impact ways to integrate traditional and digital marketing for a more personalized and effective buyer experience.
When fueled by intent data intelligence, the cold calls of yesterday become the insight-driven conversations of tomorrow.
Intent data empowers organizations to identify where prospects are within the buyer’s journey and to gauge their level of interest in specific solutions.
This approach transcends cold outreach, enabling marketers and sales teams to engage with prospects who are actively exhibiting buying intent signals.
Before initiating outreach, Go-To-Market (GTM) teams can use intent data to identify:
Organizations can begin capturing meaningful intent signals directly from their own client relationship manager (CRM) and digital ecosystem.
Key first-party intent signals include:
Once foundational tracking is established, GTM teams should consider enhancing their database with firmographic and technographic data.
When integrated thoughtfully into your GTM strategy, intent intelligence allows you to engage buyers with relevant messaging, transforming passive prospects into sales-ready opportunities.
The most effective B2B marketers are meeting the demands of cautious, self-directed buying groups by orchestrating deep media presence that aligns with how prospects prefer to research and engage.
Yet, according to our own Q4 2024 market research, only 22% of marketing teams prioritize the creation of buyer enablement materials, highlighting a significant gap between awareness-building efforts and buyer-centric strategies that support purchase decisions.
The most progressive strategies integrate AI-powered targeting, first-party intent data, and omnichannel delivery systems to ensure buyers receive value at every stage of their journey.
We know that on average, 33-50% of buyers go through seven or more pieces of content during the purchase process. Print media offers a distinct opportunity to break through this noise and command attention.
When informed by behavioral insights and demand intelligence, print media can be strategically activated in niche publications consumed by your target buying groups, delivering a high return on investment.
Here is how B2B buyer intelligence enhances print media experiences:
For marketers focused on brand-to-demand integration, combining technology-enabled media strategies with high-trust formats, such as print, provides a unique and differentiated way to capture buyer attention.
Ensuring that key accounts receive a personalized follow-up experience through an Account-Based Experience (ABX) strategy is an effective way to bridge traditional event marketing with modern, buyer-centric engagement.
ABX enables marketers to connect with prospects before, during, and after an event, creating a cohesive journey that adds value at every stage.
Before the event, contacts can be engaged with targeted nurture streams that build interest and provide relevant insights, effectively “priming” them with content that addresses common pain points, frequently asked questions, or industry trends.
This not only enhances their readiness to engage at the event, but also empowers them with the context to have more meaningful conversations on-site.
For example, if a prospect receives content around B2B buyer advocacy in pre-event nurture, they may arrive at the booth with a deeper understanding of the topic and specific questions in mind.
This creates an opportunity for sales to engage in more relevant, high-value discussions, transforming a standard booth interaction into strategically qualified engagement.
By extending the event experience beyond the show floor, ABX ensures that traditional marketing efforts are amplified through intent-driven, personalized interactions.
This leads to stronger relationships, clearer value exchange, and accelerated pipeline progression.
To maximize the effectiveness of traditional advertising platforms such as billboards and posters, marketers can integrate geotargeting to bridge physical impressions with digital engagement.
Geotargeting enables the delivery of tailored follow-up content based on a viewer’s location, allowing billboard placements to align strategically with key account locations, such as near a corporate headquarters or an industry event venue.
When paired with compelling creatives and a clear call to action, such as a short, memorable URL or QR code, billboards can guide viewers to personalized landing pages that extend the message and encourage deeper interaction.
These landing pages can be tailored by industry, buyer stage, or intent signals, further enhancing relevance and conversion potential.
At a more advanced level, mobile location data can be used to identify devices that have passed by a billboard.
This type of geotargeting enables marketers to retarget those individuals with personalized digital nurture campaigns, reinforcing the original message across multiple touchpoints.
By combining location-specific placement with digital activation, billboards evolve from static awareness tools into measurable components of a modern ABX strategy that drives engagement and accelerates pipeline.
When executed with precision and relevance, direct mail can be a powerful tool for re-engaging prospects who have become unresponsive to digital touchpoints.
A well-timed physical asset can prompt renewed interest, particularly when guided by demand and buyer intelligence.
Technology can play a critical role in elevating direct mail from a generic outreach method in the following ways:
If five follow-up emails have failed to elicit a response, a sixth is unlikely to succeed. However, a timely and thoughtful piece of direct mail, such as a handwritten note, a tailored infographic, or a personalized token of value, can break through resistance and reinitiate dialogue.
Beyond performance metrics, direct mail also builds trust. When buyers feel recognized and understood, they are more inclined to engage, respond, and move forward in their buying journey.
As part of a broader demand strategy, direct mail plays a key role in creating high-impact, memorable moments that differentiate your brand from the competition.
More Resources:
Featured Image: JMiks/Shutterstock
AI Max now appears as a distinct search match type in reporting dashboards, giving marketers a new layer of visibility into performance data that previously lived in a black box.
How to find it. Users with AI Max-enabled campaigns can now segment their Keywords tab by “Search terms match type” to view performance specifically attributed to AI Max. That data includes critical metrics like ROAS, CPA, CPC, and revenue.
Zoom in. The AI Max match type covers queries surfaced through Google’s latest automation, blending:
This approach allows campaigns to expand reach beyond predefined keyword lists, often drawing criticism from advertisers concerned about cost control and relevance.
Why we care. This change marks a notable shift in how advertisers can analyze search campaigns powered by Google’s automation. By categorizing AI Max as its own match type, marketers can now analyze its performance separately from traditional match types, unlocking clearer insights into what’s driving results.
This helps teams make data-backed decisions about whether AI Max is improving efficiency or simply increasing costs, and ultimately allows for more intelligent budget allocation in an increasingly automated ad ecosystem.
Part of a broader beta rollout. First announced in May, the AI Max for Search campaigns beta gives advertisers the option to enable or disable AI Max within standard Search campaigns, offering flexibility to test the feature before full-scale adoption. The introduction of match type-level reporting is one of several visibility improvements included in the rollout.
The bottom line. Google isn’t just automating campaign targeting — it’s slowly making automation more measurable. With AI Max now treated as a formal match type in reporting, advertisers are better equipped to decide when and where AI belongs in their search strategies.
MarTech is owned by Semrush. We remain committed to providing high-quality coverage of marketing topics. Unless otherwise noted, this page’s content was written by either an employee or a paid contractor of Semrush Inc.
We all want to believe that the only thing that matters in design is work itself. And for a long time, that was more or less true (or at least easier to believe). In the early 20th century, the work of visual communication was largely split between commercial artists, illustrators, and printers. It wasn’t until the postwar period, driven by mass consumerism and corporate expansion, that graphic design began to solidify into its own discipline. Early modernist figures like Massimo Vignelli, Josef Müller-Brockmann, and Paul Rand (the closest person our industry has to Don Draper), operated within the cultural posture of architects and academics: method-driven system-builders and rational problem-solvers. They were public in a professional sense, via publishing, teaching, or speaking, but not quite public personalities. They could show up in an AIGA Journal photograph, but otherwise mostly stayed behind the curtain.
By the 1980s, the designer and their work were becoming more entangled. In contemporary art, the artist had become the subject. Chris Burden and Marina Abramović used their bodies as instruments in performance, Cindy Sherman staged elaborate self-portraits, and Nan Goldin exhibited photographs of her intimate circle in gallery settings. Meanwhile, celebrity talk shows, lifestyle brands, and self-promotion as entertainment were entering the mainstream. Design absorbed some of that same ethos, giving designers room to position themselves as cultural figures rather than just technicians. Tibor Kalman used Colors magazine to push his personal politics, while April Greiman layered her nude body into an early digital composition for Design Quarterly. If the early modernists sold method and mastery, this next wave began inserting personal stakes more clearly; client briefs still set the parameters, but designers were claiming more space within them.
When Stefan Sagmeister launched Sagmeister Inc. in 1994, he announced it with a photo of himself wearing only socks, plus a black redaction bar which implied that starting his own studio had given him a bigger dick. 1990s misogyny aside, the image captured where design culture was tilting: hiring a designer meant buying into their mythology as well as their output. Five years later, for an AIGA conference poster, Sagmeister had an intern carve the event details directly into his torso with an X-Acto knife and photographed the result. Eat your heart out, April Greiman – this was pure exhibitionism, designed to shock. James Victore built a parallel persona around outlaw bravado and brooding masculine genius; Neville Brody positioned himself as a renegade theorist, merging experimental typography with academic weight. These were auteur figures with a rockstar attitude. The client still signed the check, but the designer’s name was part of the product.
In 2012, when Jessica Walsh joined Sagmeister as partner to form Sagmeister & Walsh, he marked the occasion with another naked photo (quelle surprise). But in 2012, the duo added something new: a 24/7 livestream of their office on the studio website. You could now watch interns eating lunch and designers standing at the plotter in real time. In 2019, Public Works launched a similar livestream project, with a different creative team streaming their workspace each month. The studio itself had become the site of ongoing performance, collapsing personal life, process, and promotion into a self-reinforcing brand.
