CBS Stations will launch its eighth state-of-the-art Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality (AR/VR) technology-driven studio at CBS Texas this evening.
CBS Texas will debut the AR/VR system on-air today, Monday, June 23, during the CBS News Texas newscast at 5 PM, led by first alert chief meteorologist McKenna King, who will guide viewers through the first immersive weather segment using the new platform.
The AR/VR-enabled studio, measures approximately 20,384 cubic square feet. CBS Stations said it “transforms storytelling by offering a dynamic, visually rich experience that brings weather to life. From hyper-realistic weather simulations to immersive storytelling environments, the technology enhances both presentation and viewer comprehension of complex topics.”
“The launch in Texas further underscores our commitment to investing in the future of local journalism,” said Jennifer Mitchell, president of CBS Stations, and CBS News and Stations Digital. “Through the expansion of our technological capabilities, we continue to deepen how we serve our communities, elevate the viewer experience and shape the future of broadcast journalism.”
“Over the past year, we’ve evolved every part of our newsroom – from refreshing our newscasts, updating our brand and building a multiplatform coverage strategy,” said Raquel Amparo, president and general manager of CBS Texas. “This technology is the next chapter and allows us to enhance meaningful content for everyone we serve.”
The launch follows the successful implementation in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, the Bay Area, Denver and Miami.
In episode three of SuprOrdinary, Devin takes an unlikely material and attempts to turn it into a work of art. The material? His wife’s leftover shower hair. Don’t be fooled by the self-proclaimed “creepy” premise, Devin’s latest adventure is packed full of emotion, nostalgia, and an Oscar-worthy performance from the family dog.
Jill Whalen, a true SEO pioneer, recently passed away. Although she has been retired for over ten years, her influence continues in the content-first SEO practices she advocated that are gradually gaining ground thirty years after she first championed that approach to ranking websites.
As part of the first wave of SEO, her contribution to search marketing was to prove that a content-focused approach was sustainable as a long-term strategy. While that style of SEO is described as white hat, that term has lost meaning as many of the SEOs with the biggest and whitest hats tended to be algorithm chasers jumping from strategy to strategy, something Whalen was not.
Many of the second-wave SEOs from my generation focused on testing the limits of search engine algorithms and reading research papers to better understand how search engines worked. Whalen remained steadily focused on creating the kind of content search engines were trying to rank and used responsible link building to promote it, which turned out to be a winning strategy.
Left to right: Jill Whalen, Shelley Walsh
Her approach may have felt old-fashioned to some in the industry at the time, but she recently observed in an interview on Shelley Walsh’s SEO Pioneers show that she felt vindicated after Google’s Panda and Penguin algorithms, which rocked the search marketing industry but left her clients’ top-ranked websites untouched. Indeed, the entire SEO industry is coming around to Jill’s approach to SEO.
Whalen retired in 2013 and turned her attention to subjects that mattered to her, but her influence has always been felt through the thousands of SEOs who learned from her and who continue to pass those traditions on.
Christine Churchill (LinkedIn profile), a leading search marketer, explains how she met Jill Whalen and how she influenced her life and career.
“Wow, this loss really stings! I first met Jill at a speakers’ gathering that I almost skipped because I was dreading feeling out of place. I told myself to just go for five minutes, and when I walked in, I spotted Jill right away – the only other woman there. She flashed me a warm smile, and I found my way over to the bar where she was sitting. I was so nervous, but I was completely taken aback when she mentioned she had seen me speak at an earlier conference and actually knew who I was!
We ended up chatting until the bar closed, and from that night on, we bonded instantly. Jill had this incredible gift of helping us believe in ourselves and encouraging us to shine. Because of her, I also met amazing people like Debra Mastaler, Scottie Claibourne, Karon Thackston, Kim Krause Berg and so many more kindred spirits. We all became friendly faces in the crowd, supporting each other in countless ways.
Jill truly changed my life, and I got to travel the world alongside her! Even when she retired and we didn’t see each other as much, I always knew that if I needed a friend, she’d be just a call away.
I still remember that one conference (I think it was in Pennsylvania) where we met this fascinating guy who talked to ghosts. We ended up staying at the bar yet again, discussing spirits and the signs our departed loved ones send us. It feels like Jill is with all of us now, saying goodbye and cheering us on to keep blooming.
Thank you, Jill, for your incredible friendship and support. I’ll cherish my memories of you forever!”
My good friend Debra Mastaler (LinkedIn profile) was one of Whalen’s early collaborators, handling link building. Debra shares how Jill was instrumental in shaping her career in SEO:
“I’ve been involved with the SEO industry since 1999, I started by owning a directory of organic food and clothing. When I started to rank well for a large number of money terms, business owners advertising in my directory asked if I could I help them “optimize” their sites. I had no clue what that meant so I started looking around for information and met Jill.
Jill took the time to explain what I was doing was called link building and how important it was. One thing led to another and she hired me to do all her link work and got me on the speaking circuit. About a year later, I felt confident enough to work on my own and I launched Alliance-Link.
Over the years, we traveled together, went to conferences, ran an SEO forum, published content together, shared family vacations and spoke almost every day. We drifted after she left the SEO industry but her mark on my life has never faded.”
Left to right: Debra Mastaler, Christine Churchill, Jill Whalen
Multilingual International SEO Michael Bonfils (LinkedIn profile), also an SEO pioneer himself, nce before SEO described who she was and how she influenced him.
“Twenty five years ago while attending one of the first SES (Search Engine Strategies) conferences in San Francisco, I noticed this incredibly enthusiastic lady who was leading a roundtable discussion about content. There were three things that struck me that I never forget.
From the beginning of her career, I’ve had so much respect for Jill that her and I over the decades would often talk about the good old days when everyone and everything in SEO was so uncertain. When she retired, I told her how bummed I was and then I of course accused her of faking it.
I am really going to miss Jill and just broken hearted to learn of her passing. She was truly a legend.”
Duane Forrester (LinkedIn profile, formerly of Bing) described how Jill Whalen helped him understand how to explain complex ideas in ways that were understandable to a wide audience.
“Yeah, safe to say that Jill influenced my sense of direction. I mean, I knew it was about working for/with the algorithms, but there had to be a balance. Not just in terms of the work, but how we explained it. Jill helped set me, personally, on a path of trying to explain the complex in ways that everyday business people could understand and adapt to.
Jill was adept at looking through the complex and finding ways forward that not only worked, but were approachable by a wide variety of people with various skills and skill levels. She had a sharp mind and managed to recall volumes of relevant information seemingly effortlessly.
It was always a highlight of any conference to cross paths with Jill. We lost a treasure and I, and I’m sure many, will miss her.”
Bill Hartzer (LinkedIn profile), one of the sharpest technical SEOs I know, remembered her as a centering voice, one who brought balance back to SEO.
He shared:
“She definitely was an influence, as she was more the “voice of reason” so to speak, when I was always trying to test the limits, test that “fine line” between white hat SEO and gray hat SEO.
She consistently advocated for doing SEO “the right way,” which is with integrity, transparency, and a focus on long-term value. Her work through High Rankings became a trusted symbol of ethical search marketing, long before it became the norm.”
Brett Tabke (LinkedIn profile), one of the leading founders of modern SEO, remembered her as a positive influence.
“She was always so nice. Had a smile on her face 90% of the time you were with her. I can’t remember a time when she didn’t appear happy to be with her friends. Even when she was presenting, she always made you feel good about what we were doing.”
Featured Image/Screenshot from SEO Pioneers interview
Most companies aren’t failing at AI because of bad tools. They’re failing because every team is pulling in a different direction. Without a clear strategy, even the best technology creates more noise than value.
While reports promise AI will add trillions to the global economy, the reality on the ground looks very different. Up to 42% of companies are abandoning AI projects faster than they can launch them, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
You don’t need to look far to see why. Picture your last board meeting: the CEO asks about your AI strategy. Your sales AI claims you’re the industry’s most trusted solution. Marketing says you’re the fastest-growing disruptor. Meanwhile, your content team just spent 23 hours fixing what AI got wrong. Legal caught another compliance issue. And your biggest competitor? They launched an AI campaign nearly identical to yours — only faster.
Sound familiar? You’re living through the AI version of the 1999 web chaos. Back then, every department built its own nightmare website with blinking text and “Best viewed in Netscape” badges. Companies knew they had to be online but didn’t know why.
Now, it’s AI turn: Same mess, different decade.
The failure to implement AI initiatives extends from the top of the funnel to the bottom. Companies can demonstrate AI works in controlled tests, but nearly half of those proofs-of-concept never make it to production due to real-world complexities and scaling challenges.
The breakdown isn’t technical; it’s strategic, stemming from weak alignment across the organization. Gartner reports that 20% of generative AI projects will fail, while a RAND study suggests AI projects fail at roughly double the rate of traditional IT projects without AI. Cost miscalculations can range from 500% to 1,000% because most teams don’t understand how AI expenses scale across their technology infrastructure.
You can see the pattern everywhere: pilot purgatory, cost explosion, operational chaos. Most organizations lack AI readiness and a structured decision-making process for evaluating feasibility.
Some 27% of organizations still rely on employees to review all AI-generated content before it’s used — effectively paying twice. First for the AI, then for humans to fix what is wrong. The result? Wasted time, workforce inefficiencies and a diluted case for automation.
Dig deeper: AI readiness checklist: 7 key steps to a successful integration
Sarah got the call on Thursday. A qualified prospect had spent three weeks researching their solution across multiple touchpoints — chatbot, sales emails, marketing content, you name it. But instead of converting, the prospect was confused.
“Your chatbot says you’re the most secure. Sales emails say you’re the fastest. Your white paper says you’re the cheapest. Which one is it?”
Sarah’s stomach dropped. Same company, three different messages — none aligned. The AI tools hadn’t failed. They’d done exactly what they were told — in isolation, without a shared strategy or message architecture across departments.
It’s a replay from the early web era when letting every team build their website led to disjointed, frustrating experiences. Today, uncoordinated AI is doing the same damage — only faster and more expensively.
Every prompt your team writes shapes how your brand appears. Without a unified AI strategy, you’re not reinforcing brand value; you’re fracturing it at scale. The result is a chorus of conflicting voices that erode trust by confusing your customers.
General counsel discovered the customer service AI telling people about partnerships that didn’t exist, using trademarked language the company didn’t have the rights to and making compliance promises that legal never approved.
“Did you authorize AI to mention our BigCorp partnership?” she asked. “Because it just did — publicly — and we’re not authorized to use their name.”
That is the hidden liability no vendor mentions in their sales pitch: every AI interaction carries legal risk. Every claim it makes reflects your compliance posture. And every response could invite regulatory scrutiny across any domain you operate in.
Air Canada found this out the hard way when its chatbot provided incorrect bereavement policy information. A tribunal ruled the company liable, setting a precedent: businesses are responsible for what their AI says, regardless of how it was trained or built.
A similar incident went viral when DPD’s chatbot began swearing at customers and generating poems mocking the company. What started as a customer service tool quickly became a brand and reputational crisis.
Without guardrails and governance, enterprise AI isn’t a strategic asset — it’s a legal and operational disaster waiting to happen. Building trustworthy AI requires rigor in design and implementation.
The metrics looked impressive: 847 AI blog posts, 1,200 social updates, 340 email campaigns and 89 white papers. Monthly AI spend: $18,000. Business impact: zero. No traffic. No engagement. Declining email opens. White papers unread.
“Show me the value,” the CEO said. “I see expenses. Where’s the ROI?” This scene plays out across boardrooms everywhere. Leadership demands measurable outcomes, yet most companies can’t tie AI efforts to financial performance. Without clear success metrics or accessible business data, value is impossible to prove, and budgets are the first to go.
Too often, AI portfolios lack defined timelines, goals and alignment with strategic objectives. The result is disconnected efforts that look productive on paper but deliver little in practice.
The companies seeing real returns from AI aren’t just producing more — they’re producing smarter. Their AI doesn’t just generate content faster; it aligns with brand strategy, persuades effectively and drives business results. They’ve moved from automation to true integration.
Dig deeper: Smarter AI means bigger risks — Why guardrails matter more than ever
The pattern across every failure is identical: companies implement AI tools without a coherent strategy. Here’s what winning looks like instead:
Stop generating random content. Start generating brand-consistent narratives aligned with your strategic positioning.
While competitors buy more AI subscriptions, winners build positioning systems that strategically align AI output. Your AI becomes a positioning amplifier, not a content factory. This requires careful data product selection and ensuring data accessibility across teams.
The key is developing an AI vision that includes tactical applications and strategic differentiator capabilities. That demands collaboration between marketing, product and technical teams to ensure consistent messaging architecture.
Stop subscribing to conflicting AI tools. Start architecting how your brand speaks across every touchpoint and customer interaction. Every AI output must follow a unified messaging framework, preventing the contradictory brand voices that confuse prospects. That requires establishing clear guardrails and governance protocols.
Effective message architecture involves processing data from customer interactions, analyzing conversation patterns and building consistent response frameworks. The goal is to create accessibility to brand voice across all AI applications while maintaining quality and compliance standards.
Stop managing AI chaos. Start building competitive IP through AI systems that embed your unique strategic intelligence. When your AI embeds that instead of generic language model algorithms, it becomes a proprietary business advantage. This transforms AI from an operational cost into a strategic moat that competitors cannot easily replicate.
That requires moving from vendor relationships to true growth partnerships where AI capabilities are integral to your value proposition. It demands finding partners who understand your business and can support long-term scaling objectives.
Don’t let AI initiatives die in pilot purgatory. In weeks, you can go from a high-value problem to a working prototype. This dramatically reduces complexities and allows for faster lifecycle management.
An AI proof of concept (PoC) de-risks innovation by establishing clear feasibility parameters. It lets you test an idea, get real performance indicators and secure stakeholder buy-in before committing millions to a full-scale project that might fail.
The most successful PoCs focus on specific datasets and clearly defined use cases. They establish timeline expectations, resource requirements and success metrics upfront. This thinking prevents scope creep and ensures business alignment from day one.
It’s a classic “fail fast, fail better” approach that separates winning AI strategies from the ones that get abandoned. The key is building AI readiness through structured experimentation rather than hoping large-scale implementations will work.
Dig deeper: Marketing gains from AI begin with governance
But before governance frameworks or deployment protocols come into play, companies must step back and ask a more fundamental question: What are we trying to achieve? Too often, teams jump into oversight structures without first defining strategic intent.
Effective integration starts with technical leads and business stakeholders collaborating to ensure AI serves actual objectives. That means establishing brand guardrails, compliance requirements and KPIs the C-suite cares about — from data privacy and bias detection to transparency and accountability.
This strategic alignment must come first. Without it, governance becomes red tape. You can’t monitor success if you haven’t defined it. Strategic clarity is the foundation of any meaningful data or AI governance framework.
Think of it as reverse-engineering excellence: align first, then operationalize. Otherwise, even the most advanced oversight structures risk optimizing for the wrong outcomes.
This approach allows teams to iterate quickly, align cross-functional efforts and scale with purpose. It’s the most effective way to implement the three strategic shifts and to transform AI from a source of chaos into a durable, competitive asset.
You survived the browser wars by standardizing first. The same opportunity exists now, only the stakes are higher. The 58% of companies that master rapid, strategically aligned prototyping won’t just win the AI race — they’ll reshape their markets entirely.
This framework offers the path forward: from fragmented experimentation to strategic differentiation, ensuring AI becomes an asset, not another unchecked expense.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the martech community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. The opinions they express are their own.
Right, let’s get one thing straight from the off: the Daily Mail’s breathless coverage of the Gov.uk rebrand is not journalism – it’s performance art. Bad performance art. The kind where someone pretends to be outraged about a dot moving, whilst completely ignoring the actual story unfolding in front of them.
Yesterday’s Mail Online piece screamed about the government “blowing over half a million on ‘vanity’ makeover for website which involved moving a full stop.” A full stop! The audacity! Except, of course, that’s not what happened at all. But why let facts get in the way of a perfectly good frothing session?
You may like
(Image credit: Gov.uk)
YouTube is rolling out updates to its Advanced Mode analytics in YouTube Studio.
The changes are designed to make data easier to access and interpret, particularly for creators and marketers who may not use these tools regularly.
Among the new features are custom report saving and a simplified interface that reduces visual clutter without removing functionality.
YouTube’s analytics team walked through the updates in a recent video, which you can see below:
The redesigned layout includes a new sidebar that puts filters, breakdowns, and metric selectors in one place. This allows you to make changes from any analytics page.
You can now save custom report configurations. This feature eliminates the need to reset filters and metrics every time you check the same data.
After configuring a report, click the Save button and assign a name to the report. Saved reports are accessible from the top navigation and are private to the logged-in user on that channel.
For example, a creator monitoring traffic sources for long-form content can save that specific setup and return to it without rebuilding the report.
The update improves how you find and sort content in Advanced mode:
The updated breakdown picker includes options like geography, content type, and revenue sources. New filters help narrow down data to the most useful metrics.
YouTube has added shortcuts to frequently used reports. These include:
Like other reports, these can also be saved for future use.
These changes make it easier to track performance without needing to reconfigure data views.
For example, the ability to compare playlists and demographic groups can support more targeted content planning. Saved reports help streamline recurring tasks like client reporting or internal reviews.
Teams can also experiment with formats and strategies more efficiently by using the built-in comparison tools to analyze what works best.
The updates are rolling out to creators gradually. Once available, the redesigned Advanced Mode can be accessed from any analytics page in YouTube Studio.
AI was the buzzword of the week at Cannes Lions but platforms behind it were largely out of the public eye. CMOs suspect that won’t be the case for long.
Perplexity, ChatGPT and others may be holding off on the full-blown ad pitch but the economics say that will shift. GPUs, cloud computing, data pipelines, top-tier engineers — it’s a high-burn business. At some point, the math forces the model to monetize.
And when it does, there’s still only one revenue stream big enough to make a dent: advertising.
Which is why Cannes, with its proximity to brand wallets and holdco power brokers, is becoming more than backdrop. It’s the warm-up act for AI’s inevitable move into the ad business.
“I would not be surprised if that was the play,” said Bose’s cmo and president of luxury audio Jim Mollica, who spoke to Digiday at the festival.
Turns out, it already is. Perplexity quietly sent ad execs to the south of France, including Taz Patel, its head of advertising and shopping, who spent the week meeting with agency and brand leads to show where the company’s ad business stands — and where it wants to go.
Anthropic was there too. As reported by The Information, the company quietly sent a team of ad execs to Cannes for the first time, including Lexie Barnhom, its head of influencer marketing.
“People are moving from the single most monetized space across the web to a space that, at least in theory, would be much harder to monetize,” said Matthew Dacey, CMO at TripAdvisor. “If they don’t figure out how to get ads in there then they’re going to have big problems.”
That tension came up repeatedly in conversations with CMOs in the south of France: they worry that in a rush to juice revenue, these platforms could end up compromising the utility, speed and trust that made them so useful to so many people in the first place. Because making ads work in environments like ChatGPT or Perplexity isn’t just about inventory. It’s about fitting into a space that was never built for ads to begin with.
“Whatever happens I think context becomes more significant because what they [AI platforms] know about the user allows them to surface ads in a far more relevant way than what happens today,” said Dacey. “They [the platforms] will figure it out, I just hope it takes on a different kind of advertising.”
So far, it’s still unclear. But the groundwork is being laid. Quietly.
“What always seems to happen in these moments is before they start taking ad dollars, they start having conversations to get information from people,” said Mollica, who recalled similar moves from Meta, Google and Twitter during his time at Disney in the late aughts.
Back then, Cannes was their coming out party. Now, it looks like AI platforms are following the same script. Client councils, holdco partnerships and brand advisory groups are likely next.
But showing up is just the beginning. Generative AI comes with a different set of constraints. Infrastructure costs are crushing. Ad inventory doesn’t scale yet. And more user queries are still exploratory not commercial, making near-term ad performance a tough sell. Buyers want measurability, targeting and brad safety. The platforms aren’t there yet.
Cannes may have marked AI’s soft entry into the ad world but turning curiosity into spend will require more than just showing up. As one ad exec, who asked not to be named because they had a colleague who met with Perplexity, put it: “As more of these solutions from those companies come out, we’re going to see more of them here.”
https://digiday.com/?p=581530
“America has always been a blood circus,” says Jordan Sullivan, a New York based painter and writer who grew up “in the rustbelt” of rural Ohio. “The myth and history of America were developed simultaneously, creating a fractured reality and a unique kind of psychosis within the country.” Only a painter like Jordan can get away with vicious takedowns of his country, because his paintings are absurdist, horrific and empathetic peepholes into a garbled nightmare-world that doesn’t look too different from the one we currently inhabit. In his series American Psychosis, which proves to be popular on Instagram, expletives are written in chemtrails, men urinate in the corners of art galleries and an act of self-immolation takes place in the middle of a nightclub. “My paintings attest to how deviancy, addiction, fantasy and dreams of destruction are symptoms of living in a country that is impossible to make sense of,” says Jordan. In these scenes, which often channel Harmony Korine’s suburban-absurdism and kitsch, Jordan attempts to reach into not a shared consciousness, but a shared psychosis. Still, a scruffy, lean type of beauty (and humour) prevails somehow, inspired by his work as a drug and alcohol counsellor for teenagers.
There’s an immediacy that drives Jordan to capture the current state of America, a type of documentarian obligation to fight against passing time. “Time doesn’t disappear, it accumulates, like dirt filling a grave, and it’s important to recognise the times and the history that came before, which still impact this moment,” says Jordan. In one particularly striking painting, Jordan transports an astronaut and Jesus’ crucifixion from the famous poster for William Peter Blatty’s The Ninth Configuration from the moon to the garden of an average home, implying that our world is as strange as anything in outer space. Be it lines of pensioners worshipping at an altar of slot machines or strippers back-lit by Tesla cybertrucks, Jordan makes sense of the world through nonsense, because why not? The world is topsy-turvy – art tends to follow suit. “I’m not sure we are still human,” says Jordan. “Sometimes I think we’ve evolved into something far more absurd.”
Jordan Sullivan’s new book Drinking Margaritas at the Mall is available now here.
There are three types of marketing leaders right now:
There should be a fourth who is planning for the future, trying to work out where AI sits in their organization and how to get ahead, so they do not get lost and can confidently say we have an internal owner.
Right now, I only know a handful of chief marketing officers who are taking it seriously enough.
The challenge for most is, “Who do I trust enough to do a great job in pulling the department, and often the non-technical parts of the company, on the AI journey?”
As someone who’s held both CMO and chief growth officer titles and now coaches C-Suite leaders and consults, I decided to dedicate the last six months to going deep into AI.
I have worked with companies in and around AI since 2022. However, over the last six months, we have seen AI transition from a set of tools and models to help, to starting to influence the reduction of team headcounts and being responsible for hiring freezes unless you can prove AI cannot do it first.
If you haven’t started, it will become a hotly discussed talking point in board and leadership meetings.
The promise of AI is exactly what everyone is looking for: productivity gains (not starting from zero every time), cost savings (on hiring, having to rely on data analysts or agencies), and the ability to leverage competitive advantages. We are seeing some of this play out.
The return on investment of going first and early will mean you are ahead of competitors, you will quickly understand the investment case, and you will be able to calculate ROI early.
Where to start? Most people struggle with where to start and where it makes sense to kickstart the AI agenda.
With coaching and consultancy clients, I offer two ways to tackle this:
You must have an owner – someone who will be there with the team and responsible for championing tech and tools and integrating them into their workflow.
When that owner says something is important, the teams treat it as such. You need an owner for when something breaks, they take control. This is a high-trust role with a lot of status attached.
You have co-owners, those who feel connected – the team members who don’t like being left behind but aren’t confident enough to own it themselves. You might say these are the ones who are likely on the fence about leaving.
Last are the collaborators, the team members who need to learn, need co-workers to help them develop and talk through what the tools have done and where they have likely used AI to get themselves out of missing a deadline or a situation where they’ve missed something.
This requires a strong and forward-thinking department leader who requires reshaping your teams to adapt to the new technology shift.
A proactive and visionary department leader is now essential. This leader must restructure teams to embrace and adapt to the significant shift towards new technologies.
You are not just shifting for hires and skills gaps, as most do. You are reshaping for the next two years.
You have to plan out how the next six, 12, and 18 months will change, move team members around, where there will be headcount reshuffles, and in this situation, a new technology that will reach all marketing disciplines.
The Opportunity: You will need to assign a natural long-term leader to AI. AI is not going away and will be the driving force in most businesses for the foreseeable future. You have to get ahead of when boards and C-Suites push you for your plan.
The Threat To Be Ahead Of: You must identify those who just will not naturally fit in the short to mid-term, and reshuffle your team members.
In this “do more with less” era, you will have to be at the front, leading and potentially losing headcount. AI has already seen mass layoffs, and this is unlikely to stop.
You will need to be ahead of the industry shifts. Being ahead is critical. Being close to your new owner or captain is pivotal.
Who will be the owner of AI? And, how will you reshape your department?
Whether you are a marketing leader or a growth leader, you have to think about where these elements connect and who has the most exposure and muscle memory in big shifts.
Potential AI owners could come from several areas:
You will know who fits best in your department. However, I predict it’s likely the search or growth team.
You need someone who is used to unpicking shifts – someone who can understand technical aspects and interface with product teams and engineers while teaching their colleagues.
For the top tier of SEO or search professionals, this is something they have had to do for years.
This is an opportunity for your team members, particularly in search, as Carl Hendy and I discussed in a recent podcast: It’s time to reset, mature, and take ownership from across different disciplines.
A core skill to look out for in the right candidate is having the ability to understand the importance of changes for the whole business and be able to hold their own with C-Suite executives.
The AI leader will have to hold strong, informed opinions based on knowledge of what is happening and how they assign budget and resources across the business.
Your AI lead will be a close colleague in many important meetings, so you trusting them and being able to learn and gain reverse mentorship will be essential.
Immediate: Week 1-2
Short-Term: 30-90 Days
The Long-Term Plan: 6-18 Months
Remember, in an ever-evolving AI landscape, you can be on top of being proactive and be well prepared for when your business needs to be reactive.
Good luck on your AI journey!
More Resources:
Featured Image: DC Studio/Shutterstock
The Indiana Pacers and Oklahoma City Thunder took their NBA Finals matchup to Game 7, but just making it this far took each team’s merch, sports marketing, and media to another level.
Oklahoma City got the Thunder in 2008 and had just over 601,000 people when a team featuring Kevin Durant, Russell Westbrook, and James Harden went to the Finals in 2012. Amid the team’s success and struggles that followed, the city’s population grew to more than 713,000—moving from the 29th-largest in the U.S. in 2012 to the 20th-largest today—and has become more diverse.
This year, with star Shai Gilgeous-Alexander named the league’s MVP and memories of three straight losing seasons from 2021 to 2023 all but erased, the Thunder have maintained their years-long “Onward” marketing strategy, bringing fans, brands, and community partners into the fold. The strategy focused on placing all 18 players on team graphics and merchandise, bringing in local designers to create special-edition gear, and encouraging fans to buy through their website or at activations like their Loud City HQ weeklong pop-up.
“We are consistent with our brand’s identity at every touch point, whether that be through the guest experience, the traditional marketing exposures, whatever that might be, and that is something that we adhere to, regardless of who’s on the roster at that time or what performance is on the court,” said Erin Lewis, the Thunder’s director of brand identity.
In Indianapolis, meanwhile, the Pacers’ surroundings have also grown considerably since Reggie Miller, Jalen Rose, and Rik Smits took the team to its last Finals in 2000. Not only has the city’s population jumped from roughly 782,000 to almost 900,000 in that time—and diversified rapidly—but the Pacers were joined in the city’s pro ranks that year by the WNBA’s Indiana Fever (which won the WNBA title behind Hall of Famer Tamika Catchings in 2012). This year, Pacers Sports & Entertainment has not only used social media to effectively tell the story of its “Yes ‘Cers” campaign and the clutch shooting of star Tyrese Haliburton but also to note the occasional presence of Fever stars Caitlin Clark, Aliyah Boston, and Lexie Hull during NBA Finals games.
As a result, Tyler Beadlescomb, svp of marketing and content at Pacers Sports and Entertainment, noted that the Pacers have stronger social media engagement in May and June of this year than they’ve had during the entire NBA preseason and regular season combined. Meanwhile, demand for Haliburton jerseys, gold Yes ‘Cers shirts, and anything with an NBA Finals logo on it has tripled demand for Pacers merchandise from regular-season levels.
As the NBA Finals head into Game 7, the series’ effect on each team’s business and marketing extends far beyond displays at the Omni Hotel or JW Marriott and fan parties at Gainbridge Fieldhouse or Scissortail Park.
“In The Finals, [Game 5] had just over 9 million viewers for the broadcast. That’s a lot more than are normally watching Pacers games, so we’re working with our partners at the NBA, ABC, and ESPN to provide them content that we have around the team to help get that in front of more eyeballs,” Beadlescomb said. “Realistically, this is your best chance to convert casual basketball fans that just love the NBA and are looking for a good series and a good game into Pacers fans, so we believe that if casual fans learn our players’ stories, and they see out the exciting brand of basketball, we think that we can get them hooked.”
Michelle Matthews, director of fan engagement and retail for the Thunder, noted that some of the key changes in fan culture since the Thunder’s 2012 Finals appearance have driven this year’s success. For one, the fanbase is more digitally engaged, with sign-ups for the team’s SMS fan text alerts increasing during the postseason as followers try to stay informed.
Matthews has been with the Thunder for nearly 11 years, but came into her current position in the summer of 2023, after the Thunder ended their third-straight losing season. She noted that even in those early stages, data collected from fan interactions allowed her and her colleagues to rethink certain portions of the business: It introduced the Thunder Artist Group (TAG) to create street art and merch designs aimed at multiple generations.
The Thunder arrived in Oklahoma City in 2008 and were great for more than a decade… until they weren’t. Team marketers worked to build a win-or-lose culture.David Dow/NBAE via Getty Images
It also retooled the team’s youth basketball program and eventually teamed with Devon Energy on rural school physical education takeovers, with Google on tech programs, and with local universities on a college ambassador program.
“Those youth programs are important because we’ve had so much growth in the city, and a lot of people have moved here. Maybe they’re not necessarily from here,” Matthews said. “But we know our standard for an experience—whether it’s a youth basketball camp or a book bus visit—is so high that you’re going to want to keep going back for more.”
Will Syring, the Thunder’s vp of corporate partnerships, still sees the occasional 2012 playoff T-shirt at his gym with an energy company’s logo affixed. Local utility Oklahoma Gas and Electric bought space on the Thunder’s Game 5 T-shirts, and Syring said he imagines seeing those around the city 10 to 13 years from now.
Syring noted that 2022-23 was a record revenue year for the Thunder, but it was also a year that they didn’t make the playoffs. While Syring said Thunder partners certainly take advantage of the exposure the Finals bring—with credentialed press from 40 countries in Oklahoma City for the event—having American Fidelity sponsor its book bus or Devon Energy buy the Thunder’s Loud City Partnerships’ naming rights for the home of the NCAA Women’s College Softball World Series (and 2028 Olympic softball host site) demonstrates an enduring commitment to the surrounding community that’s repaid in engagement and sales around the Finals.
This year, the Thunder also received city council approval for a new $1 billion arena that was overwhelmingly supported by voters and will keep the team in Oklahoma City for at least 25 more years.
“In pro sports, I would argue you are only as good as the level of engagement you get from your community,” Syring said. “Because your community drives ticket sales. It drives sponsorships. It drives fan development. It drives bookings in the camps that Michelle’s team is running. It drives merchandise sales. If your team, your community, is only engaged when your team is playing well, it’s very difficult to run an effective business.”
The Pacers have handed out tens of thousands of gold shirts and placards throughout Indianapolis during the playoffs, with brand partners Starry, Kroger, and Key Bank stamped on each iteration.
“It is hard to go anywhere in Indianapolis right now and not see a number of variations, because we do ‘Gold Outs’—and we did them all last playoffs and this playoffs. That means there are like 20 different designs out there,” Beadlescomb said. “You’ll be at a restaurant downtown, and you might see five different playoff shirts that people have worn in the last month.”
You can’t overestimate how much gold “Yes ‘Cers” gear currently exists in Indianapolis.Jeff Dean/NBAE via Getty Images
The “Yes ‘Cers” slogan is visible throughout the city from a graphic on the JW Marriott, less than a mile from Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Bars downtown are awash in gold signs, gold towels, and gold posters. Even when the Pacers have been on the road, the team has filled Pacers watch parties at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, with seats going for $5 apiece and proceeds going to the Pacers Foundation.
The team has told the stories of Haliburton hitting a dozen shots in the last two minutes of playoff games to either go ahead or win. They’ll tell anyone who’ll listen that they have eight players averaging 10 points or more during the playoffs. They’ve touted “the power of friendship” between players, fans, and their fellow Indiana teams, and how “basketball matters more in Indiana.”
Coming off of a celebrity-laden Eastern Conference Finals with the New York Knicks that averaged nearly 7 million viewers per game—the most for that series since 2014 without going seven games—the Pacers focused on its supportive stars like ESPN commentator and former Indianapolis Colts punter Pat McAfee, actor Terry Crews, TNT playcaller and Pacers legend Reggie Miller, and Indianapolis 500 winner Alex Palou.
The added focus on Indianapolis during the NBA Finals has also spread to other endeavors, including bringing attention to the Wheeler-Dowe Boys & Girls Club of Indianapolis, the Fever’s WNBA Commissioner’s Cup run, and Indianapolis’ upcoming WNBA All-Star host duties in July—complete with a Tamika Catchings mural going up just in time for the occasion.
“It’s been an incredible time for us in the city and the Pacers and Fever brands at the same time—you can’t fake or manufacture that type of energy,” Beadlescomb said. “We always try to leverage the opportunities at hand and make the most of them, but sometimes that timing is so perfect and and the synergy provides just extra special opportunities, and we’re there, so we’re trying to cherish it, enjoy it, and maximize it for our city and our state.”
