As more ad dollars become digital dollars, brands are changing how they use more traditional marketing methods.
Marketers at Coca-Cola’s Sprite have been relying on digital out-of-home (DOOH) to cut through the summer heat, for example.
Alongside paid social activations on Meta, as well as online video and digital display units, the brand is running digital out-of-home (DOOH) work triggered by rising local temperatures. If the thermometer in Rome, for example, hits a preset temperature, ads reminding consumers to get a cold refreshment (preferably a Sprite) will run. Lower temperatures will trigger different ads from the beverage brand, which is running the campaign across the E.U. and in the U.K. Australia, Korea and the Philippines.
“Everything that we’re doing now is meant to reinforce Sprite as the ultimate refreshment,” explained Oana Vlad, global vp, Sprite. “We wanted to try something experimental in a channel that also gives scale.”
The mechanism relies on heat and humidity information drawn from commercial data company OpenWeather, Coca-Cola’s dynamic creative optimization partner Clinch, The Trade Desk and OOH firm Hivestack.
But Sprite’s not the only brand advertiser making space for street-level ad inventory this summer.
European dairy company Arla has been pushing its lactose-free range of products through the early summer months, a period that provides a key seasonal boost to sales, according to Laura Butler, strategic brand manager for Arla LactoFREE.
Its campaign in the U.K. encompasses CTV (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+), YouTube, retail media activations, paid social and PR. But DOOH has been playing an outsized role, taking up at a third of the campaign’s overall budget, said Butler, who declined to provide an overall budget estimate.
“Generally, out of home is a really important channel for us,” she said. Working with Dentsu media agency Carat (and a commercial partnership with OOH firm ClearChannel), the brand has been prioritizing DOOH units located within 500-800 meters of a shop stocking its range; 60% of the sites it’s using are digital, Butler confirmed.
The campaign also included specialist units such as a bespoke install at Boxpark Croydon in London, spanning digital video screens and static inventory. The brand showed creative promoting recipes using its products, which differed depending on the time of day — in the morning, for example, it ran video creative showcasing a breakfast recipe. Such activity can help a brand spread “super simple, really impactful” messages to target consumers, said John Treacy, executive creative director at Zeal, the agency that created the Boxpark DOOH assets.
“Context is key” to making such placements work, said Emma Labrador, CMO of French DOOH network Displayce.
Unsurprisingly, advertiser demand for digital out of home outstrips traditional OOH. Per the Out-of-Home Advertising Association of America (OAAA), digital OOH accounted for 34% of total U.S. outdoor ad spending in Q1 of 2025, growing 9% over the same period last year.
Recent research provides solid evidence that the format is significantly more effective than its static cousin. Happydemics, a company that runs brand uplift studies for advertisers, collated over 1,300 reports on DOOH campaigns — and found that DOOH inventory prompted brand recall from pedestrians at 2.2x the rate of traditional billboards.
“It’s a great tool for shaping brand image and reinforcing key messages,” said Virginie Chesnais, CMO at Happydemics. Veterinary brand Dutch, for example, has begun using OOH in Florida and California to build upon previous brand awareness-boosting TV work.
“We need more eyes on us and increased brand exposure,” said Jenna Brennan, vp of growth.
The industry’s collective investment in out-of-home — digital or otherwise — has been falling for several years, as advertisers gradually siphon budget out of traditional channels and into digital ones. OOH’s share of global ad spend is expected to fall from 5.5% ($42.6 billion) in 2024 to 5.2% in 2027, according to Dentsu’s December ad spending forecast. That report also suggested that growth is set to slow from 4.8% last year to 3.4% by 2027. For what it’s worth, WPP Media pegs OOH’s total revenue in 2025 at $52 billion, 41% of which is digital revenue.
But OOH remains a regular tool of major advertisers — especially for specialist usages like Sprite’s campaign. “DOOH is a bridge between the physical and the digital world,” said Chesnais.
According to WPP Media’s latest biannual forecast, 75% of the world’s advertisers spend 80% of their media dollars on digital channels, while the top 25% spend 47% on digital — the remainder of their budgets being spread across TV, audio, cinema and our old friend the billboard.
That gap is growing smaller, as more of those major brands devote more budget to digital. But it’s unlikely to close entirely. In the first quarter of 2025, 60% of the top 100 out-of-home advertisers increased their investment, relative to the same period in 2024, according to Mediaradar data published by the OAAA.
In basic terms, expect to gradually see fewer small to mid-sized advertisers and more megabrands in OOH placements.
DOOH media owners are leaning in. Pearl Media, a New Jersey-based DOOH provider, recently expanded its portfolio in midtown Manhattan, adding 40 digital screens throughout the central neighborhood, each roughly four times the size of a city bus shelter and each capable of displaying video (or indeed any other creative asset — 3D included) at any time of day.
According to Pearl Media’s CEO Joshua Cohen, the company added the new screens to hoover up latent demand from big brands. “We built this network to attract the world’s biggest advertisers to amplify their message,” Cohen told Digiday.
In line with broader industry trends, the new midtown network can be bought programmatically. Cohen, naturally, is keen to highlight the advantages to brands buying the entire set direct — chiefly, that they can turn such a buy into an event that gets them attention at street level.
“It’s an opportunity to really get involved with New Yorkers during their days and their nights,” he said.
Kwame Taylor-Hayford is a busy man. He is President of D&AD, the global non-profit that represents the pinnacle of creative excellence, and co-founder of Kin, a creative agency focused on driving positive change for its clients. Kin’s client list includes Intuit Mailchimp, Delta Air Lines, Uber and the Obama Foundation.
I met him recently at D&AD Festival where we spoke about his role at D&AD, his advice for young creatives and the challenges branding is facing today.
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(Image credit: D&AD / Owen Billcliffe)
The short answer to that is very badly. I heard this quote not long ago from Shonda Rhimes, who’s a big executive producer, showrunner from the US. And she talks about how when you see her succeeding at one thing, it’s because she’s failing at 10 other things.
So when you see her on the red carpet accepting an Emmy for one of her TV shows, it’s because she’s failing at being a mom at that moment in time, because she’s not there and she’s not present. So I sort of embraced that. It made me feel a lot better about quite a few things that I do. I have accepted that to be amazing in one area sometimes I might need to drop a few balls in other areas, but the key is to try to pick those balls up before anybody notices.
My relationship with D&AD started through D&AD Impact, as someone who’s really excited about creativity, but also social impact. I joined the impact Council, and it was an amazing group of humans – 40 odd people from all over the world who would often convene and just share thinking and insights. And the jury members for the Impact and Future Impact categories are largely chosen from the impact Council. I got to judge Impact, and that was exciting.
But then I think my relationship grew through Shift, which is a night school for creatives that don’t have a degree. I’ve been ECD for New York for a few years, and honestly, I love the program because it kicks open the door and it allows for people who often have no idea the industries of advertising and design exist, but who have a lot of creative sensibilities and a big interest in work that’s more in the creative realm.
It gives them an opportunity to be a part of what we’re doing. And so after doing that for two years, I joined the board and then after a few years of being on the board, I was asked to be President. So here we are. Amazing. It’s really humbling to be in the seat and to help steward what is a very storied institution into the future,
(Image credit: D&AD / Owen Billcliffe)
The future of D&AD is to continue to make it a very global and important part of the creative industries that we participate in. I think there’s so much amazing talent and work in different pockets around the globe, and as the world becomes more connected – I know there’s a bit of a wave of nationalism sweeping the globe right now – but I feel it’s inevitable that through technology and through how all of our different cultures intersect, we’re going to be more connected.
So the more we can appreciate different perspectives, backgrounds and interests, the more we can find ways to celebrate what is different, but also appreciate what we have in common, the better off we’re all going to be.
I think D&AD can play a massive role in the worlds of advertising and design, which are hugely influential culturally. I think we can do a really good job of equipping the next generation of talent with what they need to know to thrive.
(Image credit: D&AD / Owen Billcliffe)
I think the best advice I can give is just stay curious. I think the only constant, the only thing that’s guaranteed is that things will always be changing. But if you stay curious and motivated and if you continue to embrace this learning mindset, you will always be able to achieve what you set out to achieve.
You’ll have access to the tools through organisations like D&AD, [you’ll have] the knowledge and the references and the people, and you’ll be able to grow. And I think that’s an important aspect of being a creative person – this idea that you’re always growing. You’re always growing and taking in new inputs and coming up with new ideas.
(Image credit: D&AD / Owen Billcliffe)
I think they’re an essential part of what we do. I feel peer recognition and acknowledgement that what you’re doing is inspiring and motivating others. Which is really what we’re doing when we pick projects and say that this is, a Yellow Pencil, for example, we’re confirming that it signals the future, and it’s something that people should be striving for, and that it is how we are innovating and building new and different perspective.
So to me, that’s what awards exemplify. It’s all about talent. It’s all about motivating and inspiring, and it’s about how we ensure that we’re continuing to break new ground in what we do.
(Image credit: D&AD / Owen Billcliffe)
I think there are many. But perhaps the biggest challenge is what we consider to be branding in this world that is increasingly changing because of technology and because of how people engage in the world. I was chatting with one of the [D&AD Awards] jury members, and I think we often think of branding as very visual, and you know, what’s the colour, what’s the type, and these, of course, are important aspects of it.
But as brands and as we as a society, come more out of this kind of post Covid context, I think people are excited to engage in the world again and to be more together. So when you think about experience, and even when you think about how technology is evolving, soon you’ll have spectacles that you put on, and you’ll have information overlaid over your real world through augmented reality; we’re talking a lot more to our devices and and so you won’t have probably as many visual inputs consistently in your world.
What does that mean from a sonic standpoint, and how do brands translate to that medium? I think it’s exciting to think about how we expand the conversation around what is branding and how that will evolve honestly, as how we engage evolves.
I do think it’s important to not be afraid, to be yourself. And I know that sounds really weird, but I do think you have seen a bit of this wash. Of sort of sameness across a lot of brands and and I think you’re starting to see a few more brands take a bit more risk in showing up a bit differently. And whether that’s going from a very clean serif, almost like a very neutral colour palette to brands being a bit more expressive, with more serifs, and more hand done elements. I mean, I think there’s something very exciting to me about brands taking a bit more risk.
I guess, it’s that thing about being a bit more human as well, in the place where machines are kind of taking over… I feel we’re all so unique and bespoke, and I think it’s nice for brands to lean into a bit more of that.
Find out more about Kin and D&AD.
Building on our previous exploration of Agentic SEO’s ideation capabilities, this article takes a closer look at the second pillar: Audit.
As promised, we’ll look at how AI agents can transform the SEO audit process by providing corrections and thorough analysis that would otherwise take hundreds of hours of manual work.
Traditional SEO audits are often time-consuming, involving multiple tools and manual reviews.
With Agentic SEO, however, this process can be streamlined through autonomous AI agents that identify problems and recommend and implement solutions in real time.
Agentic SEO transforms the review process by:
Image from author, May 2025
Example: Firecrawl Demo
With advanced AI crawling, Firecrawl can meticulously analyze HTML structures, extract microformats, and provide detailed performance metrics, revealing critical areas that need optimization and might otherwise be missed.
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Example: Similar to tools like Cursor integrated with GitHub, Agentic SEO enables immediate application of code fixes.
When an issue is identified, the agent directly suggests optimized code changes, allowing seamless implementation through direct integration with your repository, ensuring rapid and error-free remediation.
I’m confident that OpenAI’s Codex and Google’s Jules will be equally effective for these tasks.
Image from author, May 2025
Similar to our idea workflows, audit workflows consist of specialized components.
Image from author, May 2025
The audit workflow typically includes:
AI agents excel at identifying technical issues that are often overlooked:
Image from author, May 2025
The agent doesn’t just flag the problem. It provides contextual recommendations and implementation guidance.
Beyond traditional auditing, AI agents can identify content gaps by:
Image from author, May 2025
One of the most powerful applications is internal linking analysis:
Image from author, May 2025
Creating an effective audit agent requires:
In less than 30 minutes, our Agentic SEO Audit System identified 347 critical technical issues for a mid-sized ecommerce site with 15,000 product pages.
Implementing these recommendations resulted in a 32% increase in organic traffic within 60 days.
Although powerful, Agentic SEO auditing does have its challenges.
Here are some practical tools to help you get started:
To improve your understanding and skills in building SEO audit agents, you can also explore these resources:
Agentic SEO’s audit capabilities represent a fundamental shift in how we approach technical optimization.
By combining AI’s pattern recognition abilities with the strategic insight of human experts, we can create audit systems that are more comprehensive and actionable than traditional approaches.
In our next article, we’ll explore the final pillar of Agentic SEO: Generation. We will examine how AI agents can generate missing content, optimize existing assets, and scale content production while maintaining quality and relevance through the “SEO Expert in the Loop” approach.
Stay tuned, and experiment with these techniques to transform your SEO workflow!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Deemerwha studio/Shutterstock
Omnicom’s DDB Worldwide has been named Cannes Lions Network of the Year, 2025.
The accolade bookends a week of wins for the business, which has collected four Grand Prix this year and took home Regional Network of the Year in the Latin American and Pacific regions.
This is the second time DDB has secured the title, with its first win occurring in 2023. In 2025, DDB surpassed its 2023 award tally, earning a total of 112 Lions, including 20 Gold, 37 Silver, and 51 Bronze in addition to the four Grand Prix.
The agency has reclaimed Network of the Year status from 2024 winner Ogilvy. This year, Ogilvy and FCB placed second and third in the special award category, which is calculated using a points-based system.
The win comes one year after the agency appointed Alex Lubar as its new chief executive officer (CEO) and Chaka Sobhani as its global chief creative officer (CCO).
It also follows Omnicom bringing its creative agencies under one umbrella with the formation of the Omnicom Advertising Group (OAG), led by Troy Ruhanen as global chief executive officer.
In a statement, Lubar put the Cannes win down to the “result of a global network aligned around a simple belief: Creativity is the most powerful force in business.”
Among DDB agencies’ four Grand Prix, Africa Creative DDB and Brazil DDB’s “One Second Ads” work for Budweiser won in the Audio & Radio category. The push featured the opening notes of iconic songs from artists like Beyoncé and The Beatles, challenging fans to guess the songs on social.
DDB Latina Puerto Rico was presented with the top award in the Entertainment Lions for Music for its “Tracking Bad Bunny” campaign for Rimas Entertainment. In partnership with Google Maps and Spotify, the work promoted the Puerto Rican musician’s sixth album, “Debí Tirar Más Fotos.”
The Creative Data Grand Prix was awarded to DM9 São Paulo’s “Efficient Way to Pay” campaign for home appliance company Consul Appliances. The ads turned electricity savings into currency, using real-time consumption data to let low-income families buy energy-efficient refrigerators with the money they saved on their utility bills.
DDB’s fourth Grand Prix came in the Sustainable Development Goals Lions for Natura’s “The Amazon Greenventory” by Africa Creative DDB.
Accepting the award, Sobhani said, “Hopefully, this is the start of much more to come from DDB—and on a personal note, I can only say it’s been the most incredible first year.”
DDB’s parent company, Omnicom, is due to complete its acquisition of IPG in the second half of 2025.
Industry insiders have predicted the acquisition will lead to consolidation and potential elimination of legacy creative agency brands on both sides, despite leadership stating they don’t plan to eliminate existing agency brands.
In the other special Cannes Lions categories, WPP won Creative Company of the Year and Publicis Conseil was named Agency of the Year.
Fellow Omnicom company OMD Worldwide won Media Network of the Year, 2025.
Caroline Garland’s path was less traditional. Working as an executive assistant at a national newspaper, she missed being part of the creative world. A brief detour to work with a jeweller left her wanting more, so she took a leap and signed up for Falmouth’s Sustainable Fashion MA.
What drew her in was how Falmouth’s unique artistic heritage and perspective as a university at the end of the country was present in the online course’s slower, nature-first approach. “This course isn’t just about business or trends, it’s about imagining a fairer world and how fashion can be part of that. It made me feel like I could really make a difference,” she tells us. One assignment asked her to picture what her neighbourhood would look like in 2040. Including the Fashion & Textile Museum sparked an event she helped organise for World Climate Day, turning coursework into real-world impact.
Juggling a full-time job and study was intense, Caroline admits, but totally worth it. “I was worried about going back to learning after all these years — anxiety and all — but it’s been the best decision. I’m still buzzing and can’t wait to keep going.”
All three agree that studying online wasn’t just about convenience — it was what made their next chapters possible. Falmouth’s courses are designed from the ground up for remote learning, with tutors who are active creatives themselves and understand the balance needed. Whether it’s building discipline, finding your voice, or simply believing in change, these students discovered tools and confidence they now carry into their careers.
Yoast SEO rushed out an update to fix a bug that introduced a known fingerprint of AI-generated content. The bug was highlighted on social media, and Yoast corrected the error within hours.
Copying a block of text from a live web page or even a Microsoft Word document and then pasting it into a WordPress editor will also paste the underlying formatting from the original document. That’s basically the reason why copy-pasting content directly from ChatGPT and into a WordPress editor will also inject HTML “classes” code from an AI chatbot output.
An HTML “class” is something that’s added to an HTML element like a paragraph element
, which can then be used to attach a style to it, like specifying a font. This bug only happens when a ChatGPT user highlights generated text, copies it, then pastes it into the WordPress editor. It won’t happen if the user clicks the ChatGPT “copy” icon to copy the generated content.
The HTML classes injected into content are “data-start” and “data-end” which are only visible within the code, not on the published content.
This is what AI-generated content looks like with injected classes:
“He thought no one would notice—
the quiet hum of the AI
churning out words
like it knew something.
Google noticed.
Now he shelves canned beans at Safeway.”
This is what the content would look like in the visible version:
“He thought no one would notice—
the quiet hum of the AI
churning out words
like it knew something.
Google noticed.
Now he shelves canned beans at Safeway.”
The “data-start” and “data-end” classes are the telltale clues that the content was generated by AI. Savvy SEOs are using that knowledge as part of their SEO audits to indentify AI-generated content that was directly copied and pasted into their WordPress editor.
Alan Bleiweiss, known for content audits, called attention to the fact that Yoast SEO was injecting the “data-start” and “data-end” HTML classes into content. Alan called them “wrappers” but they’re technically HTML classes.
He posted:
“UPDATE
Yoast Plug-in pushed live without proper QA. Injecting AI wrappers without site owner permission.
Fortunately, according to Carolyn Shelby they’re working on a fix.
But tool providers need to do better.”
Alan indicated that no clarification was given as to how those classes were injected but the bug was limited to Yoast SEO Premium because the free version does not contain the necessary AI text generation feature (Yoast AI Optimize).
Yoast swiftly pushed an update, version 25.3.1, to fix the issue so that AI-generated content created by Yoast SEO Premium does not contain the classes. Happily, the updated plugin also removes the telltale HTML classes.
According to the Yoast SEO blog post announcement:
“Recently, we announced the rollout of Yoast AI Optimize for the Classic Editor in WordPress. …During the initial rollout, we discovered a technical issue where unintended classes were being added to content for some users. While these added classes are harmless and do not impact the functionality or appearance of your content, they should not have been added, that’s on us.
We take this seriously, and to maintain the quality you expect, we’ve been actively working on a solution. We’re pleased to share that a fix has now been released, and the issue has been resolved. For users already affected, we are automatically cleaning up the unintended classes as part of the fix, no action is needed on your part.”
The functionality was rolled out on June 2nd, which means that sites with affected content have been out there for at most two weeks.
The free version of the plugin has also been updated. The changelog offers this explanation:
“This is a maintenance release which is required to align with changes to Yoast SEO Premium 25.3.1.”
It’s probably unlikely that this has affected rankings but at this point it’s unknown if Google would have noticed. Google would have to specifically look for those classes which in themselves do not indicate anything about content quality. So again, it’s probably unlikely that this bug had an effect on search rankings.
Nevertheless users of the premium version of the Yoast SEO Plugin should update immediately to version 25.3.1 to fix any potential issues from this bug and users of the free version should update their versions as well, even though it’s not affected.
The AI class injection issue was only recently discovered, although it may have been out there for a while (since the introduction of the feature in August 2024). Changes to the content, site structure, and the underlying HTML should be something that all plugin developers check for before releasing a plugin to users.
This is especially true for the developers of the Yoast SEO plugin, because they have prior experience pushing out a troubled update that caused discernable changes to a website.
This then is at least the third time that Yoast has pushed a buggy update that could have been avoided if they had tested the plugin before pushing it live. All it takes is to check whether a test site remains the same before and after an update. Given the stakes with AI-generated content, the output of the generated content and the underlying code is something that should have been tested.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Jihan Nafiaa Zahri
MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals.
Source: MarTech 2025 State of Your Stack Survey. Click to enlarge.
MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack Survey found nearly one-quarter of the tools and capabilities marketers plan to add to their stacks will be homegrown solutions.
While nearly 60% of those new tools will come from commercial vendors, this is a surprising turnaround.
Another survey, the 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey, which was conducted less than a year earlier, found homegrown solutions were on the verge of extinction.
Source: 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey. Click to enlarge.
More than 70% of Replacement Survey respondents said they replaced commercial tools with another commercial tool, while less than 10% replaced a commercial application with a homegrown solution.
What’s behind this re-emergence of homegrown martech applications? It’s likely AI. Artificial intelligence enables the “citizen developers” who create applications without deep coding knowledge or experience.
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Nearly every art student groans at the mention of still life painting. It’s often seen as a tedious exercise reserved for hyperrealists – or for those who’ve supposedly run out of ideas. But that’s a myth worth challenging. In this workshop, I’ll help you rethink what still life painting can offer, especially in the digital age.
Still life isn’t just about bowls of fruit or dusty vases – it’s a powerful way to sharpen your observational skills, deepen your understanding of form, texture, and light, and ultimately boost your ability to bring imaginative ideas to life with greater precision. Whether you’re rendering futuristic landscapes or stylised character designs, being able to accurately depict materials like glass, metal, and fabric will elevate your work.
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(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
When setting up the composition for my still life, I choose landscape orientation. This offers me a wider display of my other subject matters, such as the black light bulb and copper pitcher. I deliberately choose a wide selection of different types of materials to give the painting variety and texture. I also balance the composition by placing the brighter objects further apart from each other, while the dark bulb lays in shadow in the middle and doesn’t distract.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
Part of my composition process is finding the ‘star’ or the main subject for my still life painting. Here, my main star is the obviously tall and bright pitcher, as it is the only object with such an array of shapes and curves, and is the brightest colour on the palette (yellow). All of the other objects in this composition are going to accentuate and complement my pitcher in one way or another, either by their texture contrast or simply through colour play.
When setting up my composition on the table, I move it at an odd angle to the sun coming in from the window. I purposely use sunlight as it offers me the greatest contrast at certain times of the day (sunrise or sunset), and will also give richer, truer colours. I have aimed the light through the leaves of the dry branch and eggs to offer not only a more interesting shadow, but also brilliant orange and red colours which will accentuate the image.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
Now that I have photographed my image, I have taken my reference with me to my computer and started a new canvas in Photoshop. I try and keep the aspect ratio of the painting and reference about the same, so that I know how my proportions will lay out. I set up ‘plot points’ where I believe objects will be placed. Doing this helps my eventual sketch to be much more accurate when I get there.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
At this stage I have already begun to put in some basic values and give myself a greater understanding of where the lights and darks will be in my painting. Using the plot points from my previous step, I can refine and place the objects in their proper spots, making sure to measure with my eye where the edges, lines, and important landmarks will be. I pay close attention to negative and positive shapes, for greater accuracy.
Negative and positive shapes are essential to laying out my sketch, and play a very important role in the overall success of my painting. Negative shapes are the shapes I look for between objects, like the handle of the pitcher, and what shape that produces, rather than the handle itself. Double-checking these shapes is one of the most important steps of the entire painting. It is crucial for me to get it right.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
This is the part of the painting where I start to breathe life into it. My main focus is to grab all the mid-tone colours and their respective values, and place them into the image for an overall look at it. Here, I really start to refine the values of the image, paying close attention to the chroma of the mid-tones, like the brightness of the orange leaves, versus the dim and dark cloth.
This step begins my approach to removing the crutch of my sketch, and venturing further into the colouring process. My goal here is to nearly remove all of the line edges from my sketch by painting over them (yet preserving them on another layer), so that my understanding of the forms of the subjects and their surroundings can be gathered with greater potential. I begin understanding the reflections, but do not concern myself with detail.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
During my painting process, I pay close attention to my subjects, especially the ones that reflect their surroundings. Here, my pitcher and bulb are reflecting all sorts of objects surrounding them, sometimes even disappearing at those edges because of how little of their own material shows through. In the bulb I can even see myself, taking a photo of the composition. In a more distant fashion, the red in the pitcher is also a reflection of me, adding colour.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
On the completely opposite spectrum of my harder, shinier objects, is the cloth. It poses a more complex subject to paint, as the folds try and confuse me. I take my time in understanding where the folds are going in order to portray them correctly, letting the light guide my eye over each fold and where it disappears. Part of the difficulty comes from accurately representing the buoyancy of the cloth, making sure the weight of the eggs shows.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
The purpose of the eggs in this composition is for great light play. I set up my light and twig to give the eggs a very particular shadow on their side, while the sun coming through the shell gives them lively colour. The hardest part of painting these is making sure to keep their shape hard, without losing the soft glow of the light play. I purposely use as soft a brush as I can for an even gradation.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
Part of my painting process involves looking for the lost and found edges in the composition. In doing so, I can play with the more painterly look of the piece, and lose a bit of detail to help the focus of the more obvious parts of the painting. Losing the edge of the eggs, pitcher, and bulb will accentuate their other obvious traits, like curves, shadow, or colour contrast.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
Now that my painting is nearly finished, I can play with some special effects to help it look less like a smooth digital painting, and closer to a photo. Using some textures found on the web, I overlay these straight onto the canvas, touching up parts or colours I don’t like, for an overall feel.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
On an Overlay layer, I select some of the brightest chroma in the image and start to use the Gradient tool to give things like the pitcher a shinier, more dramatic look. I also use the Gradient/ Overlay layer to help push the FX of the light source from the left.
(Image: © Damien Mammoliti)
My last touches for my painting are with adjustments to odd shapes by using the Liquify tool, or putting in some more effects of light through the cast shadow and leaves. Overall, I flip the image multiple times (even upside-down), and might even do a quick hue/saturation grey test to make sure things are as accurate as possible to my reference. Once I’m happy with the final image, I can save it out and call it a day!
The most exciting moment of your new WordPress project is right at the beginning. You have an idea that one day, you hope will soon be shared with the world. But it can also be overwhelming.
WordPress has countless plugins that do pretty much everything under the sun. In fact, the WordPress ecosystem has doubled in terms of plugin submissions in 2025.
So, which ones should you use?
In this post, I will talk through how I plan to build a WordPress website.
To plan a WordPress site really is a must-do process that reduces the risk of the project spiralling in time and cost.
Spending an hour or two following a simple checklist, like the one I’ve detailed below, puts you and the client on the same page when building the website.
Time and again, I’ve seen projects that’ve undefined elements that need to be factored in, which eliminates potential scope creep.
It will also give you a list of tasks, so as well as avoiding scope creep, you can easily transfer the elements of your plan into your project management tool as tasks and milestones. That will speed up development time.
The first thing you should do is define the goals of the website. The easiest way to begin this process is to ask yourself the following two questions:
Assuming that the site is a brochure site, then more than likely, you’d want your visitors to come from search engines, and you want them to contact you.
That way, you’ll need a plugin like Yoast SEO or Gravity Forms.
You may have other goals, like growing a newsletter or an ecommerce store. Or you may get traffic from a social media platform that your blog needs to integrate with.
Each of these needs to be defined, as this will help define your tech stack.
Once you’ve defined your goals, you need to think about the layout and what custom work you will need to do.
When building your site, I prefer to think of templates, rather than pages.
You don’t need a template for every blog post, for example. If you are building a website for a solicitor, for example, all services it offers (e.g., Conveyancing/Wills & Probate) could run off a similar template, cutting build time.
This is not necessarily true if you’re using a page builder, as sometimes page builders treat each individual page separately.
You could also look at custom post types and taxonomies for certain pages.
For example, if you have a “Meet the Team” page, then every person could be their own post. This makes maintenance a lot easier, as it allows a new team member to be easily integrated without too much trouble.
Testimonials work well as a custom post type as you can create a “bank” of them to use throughout the site.
Once you’ve got the structure of the site and what you are using to build it, that should be the templates.
Generally, for a brochure site with a blog and a “Meet the Team” section, you would have the following templates:
The “Catch All” template I find useful as it’s used for pages that are present but don’t need much design, something like a Terms & Conditions or your Privacy Policy pages.
I tend to start with these first, as you can build a header/footer easily enough here.
Finally, you may want to consider whether you have multiple languages or if you have different regional offices. A large site may be better suited for a multisite, rather than an individual WordPress installation.
Once done, you should have a WordPress theme and a WordPress plugin ready to build.
My general thought is that any WordPress functionality you wish to retain when redesigning should be in a plugin, rather than a theme.
Things like definitions of custom post types or SEO changes you make programmatically are ideal for a custom plugin.
Depending on the complexity of the project, it could mean that you split functionality into a number of plugins.
For example, I have an ecommerce site where their custom invoicing is in one plugin, and the voucher management is in another plugin. There is also the “helper” plugin that has minor performance improvements and a custom post type.
Of course, a well-built WordPress theme, with a range of custom and supporting plugins, is just the beginning. Your website needs content.
If you are a marketing agency, you may be responsible for the creation of the content, but what about imagery? It’s a good idea to define in the WordPress site planning things like who is responsible for the content.
If you are using the content of the old site, it’s a good idea to define who handles the migration, or at the very least be aware if it’s transferable – not all content systems are!
Other things to define in your WordPress site plan are training, who will have access to the site, and what level. Ideally, you want as few administrators as possible.
If you are pushing a new design to an existing site, there’s an approach of making everybody but yourself authors or editors, and see who complains about lacking access. That works remarkably well!
In reality, the more you create plans and pitches for WordPress websites, the more refined your toolset and your planning process become.
I already know the tools I’ll be using for the next 10, maybe 20 sites, with often very little variance among them. What works for a solicitor’s website will probably work for a cleaning firm.
I have a core group of about five to 10 plugins and two to three themes that I use, and then I add extra plugins as needed.
Those plugins are personal to me, but over time, you’ll build your own list of plugins. Doing so will make WordPress site planning far more efficient.
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What started as a weekend experiment is now a fully-fledged AI voice assistant on Hearst’s recipe site Delish, helping home cooks follow recipes hands-free.
Hearst’s senior director of AI initiatives, Alexandria Redmon wanted a personal chef assistant — something she could talk to while cooking, without smearing her phone with batter. Using OpenAI’s GPT large language model (Hearst has a content licensing deal with OpenAI), Redmon built the prototype in a few days. It’s aimed at helping to solve everyday kitchen problems: running multiple cooking timers, managing ingredient swaps, and navigating recipes hands-free.
Redmon teamed up with Delish editorial director Joanna Saltz and director of product Ashley Szwec. They spent five months developing the “Cooking Coach” voice assistant, which rolled out across the Delish site this month. It’s trained only on Delish’s content of over 30,000 recipes on the 10-year-old site.
It’s the first AI product for Delish (Hearst’s Good Housekeeping publication developed an AI-powered gift guide last year).
A pop-up on the site invites users to enable their microphone, unlocking access to the Cooking Coach assistant. Once activated, the voice tool helps users choose and follow Delish recipes (“I’m looking for chicken tacos that take less than an hour”). It can also suggest ingredient swaps, adjust serving sizes, set multiple timers and answer questions about cooking techniques and terminology — all in multiple languages. (It took a while to finesse — the original Cooking Coach voice had a “Scottish brogue,” Saltz noted.)
Publishers are ramping up generative AI products — from chatbots to search assistants — to keep readers on their websites for longer, and surface more of their own content on the platforms they own and operate. The push comes as AI products and search engines increasingly siphon off users’ attention, by serving up quick, simplified answers that bypass publishers altogether.
“User expectations are shifting from reading content to relying on AI tools that help them complete tasks step by step. Publishers need to meet that shift by building interactive, utility-driven experiences. Tools like this are one way to do that,” said Josh Jaffe, AI and media consultant and former president of media at the publisher Ingenio.
As Google adds more generative AI summarizations to its search engine, some lifestyle publishers are finding it a uniquely challenging time to keep traffic stable amid declining search referral traffic. Google’s AI-generated summaries can generate full recipes for users, putting recipe sites particularly at risk. Delish has seen “a little bit of an impact” on its traffic from these Google AI features, Saltz said. But she’s not worried.
“Coming out with innovations that are different and interesting and fun and make cooking easier? I think it’s going to ensure that we’re relevant for a long time,” she said.
Voice assistants are getting smarter with the help of generative AI technology. Amazon is courting news publishers for potential AI licensing partnerships to feed quality content into a smarter version of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant product, Axios reported last December. The New York Times’ announcement of its recent AI licensing deal with Amazon hints at having its content power the new Alexa+.
Redmon declined to comment on whether Hearst was in talks with Amazon about making its content and AI voice initiatives available through Alexa, though she said she can see the value of device-specific integrations.
“Instead of limiting myself to just folks that have Alexa… I at least wanted to be able to prove out what could be done,” said Redmon. “And so making it a mobile-optimized web app was a way to reach basically everybody in this space at launch.”
The Delish team is tracking engagement metrics to gauge the success of the Cooking Coach product. The Delish team can also track chat logs with Cooking Coach to see how users are interacting with recipe discovery, Szwec added. The team plans to expand features that are popular with users down the line, she said.
“It’s not groundbreaking tech, but it’s a smart start,” Jaffe said. “A next-level version would integrate predictive personalization and contextual tips based on user behavior, turning it into a true personal sous chef. That’s the kind of AI-native product publishers need to be building now if they want to stay competitive.”
Meanwhile, the Delish team is exploring using AI technology to improve the search function on its site. For example, using natural language search to give users a way to find recipes that exclude certain ingredients or use terms like “vegetarian,” even if those terms aren’t in the title of the recipe. They are also looking at developing photo-based search, where a user can take a picture of items in their pantry and ask the cooking assistant what to make.
“This is just the beginning,” said Ronak Patel, gm of the lifestyle group at Hearst Magazines.
Jaffe believes that people will only prefer a publisher’s AI experience over a generic ChatGPT result if the UX, tone and content stand out. “That is where publishers still have an edge,” he added.
