Following this first poster, the pair built up an Instagram following, featuring more artist posters and creating a buzz around Ipswich by putting up pieces “in shop windows and bars across the town, spreading some colour and highlighting the amazing talent of each artist’s on our doorstep”, shares Steve. One poster was discovered by a representative of Ipswich Town FC in a local pub toilet and the team loved it so much that they reached out to Steve and Richard asking permission to use their artwork on the cover of their official Premier League match-day programmes.
“The project snowballed really quickly”, Steve says, “we recruited our friends Kevin Bennett and Andy Mortimer to become a four-man team”, and from that point onward the team set out to gather an incredible lineup of artistic talent for everything that came next. Each poster took the idea of following a football club in so many different directions: “we had the static horse from the Ipswich badge come to life in fantastical style courtesy of Colombian born and now Ipswich resident Catalina Carvajal; Brie Harrison presented a still life with subtle hints to the teams involved; while Kelly Anna imagined a bold powerful character bursting through the fragmented badges of Ipswich and Arsenal”, Richard says. The project found its finish to the season with a collaboration with Ed Sheeran for poster 19.
To celebrate the community that the project has built, the Call Me Ted team recently hosted a pop-up exhibition in Ipswich town centre displaying all 19 of their artist collaborations to date at scale, “we also held artist-led workshops with more than 300 local school children, helping inspire the next generation of design talent”, shares Steve. As well as giving fans the chance to see works in person, the pair have started an online shop where you can get your hands on A3 posters and postcard sets of each match poster.
Whilst the premier league may not have ended in Ipswich’s favour, this intersection of art and football is something that the creative team want to keep exploring: “we’re now planning for season two of Call Me Ted, so watch this space!” ends Richard.
Regular audits are one of the foundational workflows in any paid media strategy.
Whether you’re investigating account anomalies, evaluating growth opportunities, or preparing to transition strategies or vendors, audits are an essential pillar of PPC success.
Here’s the thing: Not every audit strategy fits every account. A one-size-fits-all checklist won’t account for platform quirks, business goals, or campaign maturity.
That’s why in this month’s Ask the PPC, we’re taking a closer look at the value of doing regular audits – and how to do them in a way that actually drives meaningful insights and actions.
We’ll focus on cross-platform audits, with takeaways that apply whether you’re managing paid search or paid social campaigns.
At its core, the biggest benefit of auditing is clarity. If you’ve ever been surprised by an ad invoice and found yourself wondering, “What exactly did I pay for?” – you’re not alone.
Regular audits demystify performance. They help you understand why certain trends are happening and whether your structure is actually supporting your goals.
Beyond performance monitoring, audits unlock three critical value areas:
Ad platforms generally prefer putting spend behind “known” quantities – ads, keywords, and audiences with conversion data.
While that makes sense from a machine learning standpoint, it can sideline your new campaigns, ads, or targeting experiments unless you’re intentional about how you test.
Auditing helps ensure that newer entities aren’t starved for budget simply because older ones exist in competing campaigns/portfolios.
You can spot opportunities to move testing into separate campaigns or determine whether an older asset already covers the newer idea.
Go Do: When reviewing entity-level spend, ask: Are my new tests getting a fair shot? If not, consider spinning them out into their own campaigns with protected budgets. You’ll be able to tell if they’re being stifled by checking for impressions and budget access.
One of the biggest indicators of an account’s strategic health is the ratio of active to passive management.
If your audit reveals a lopsided emphasis on passive tasks, it may mean strategic opportunities are being missed.
While there’s value in letting campaigns run and gather data, relying too much on autopilot can result in performance stagnation.
Note: Passive tasks are important and shouldn’t be discontinued, but they shouldn’t be the only ones completed in an account.
Go Do: Review the change history. Are most changes bid-based or budget-related? If so, build a cadence to test new creative or targeting ideas each month.
We’re all susceptible to sticking with what’s worked in the past. That’s human nature. Yet, strategies that delivered last year might not be relevant today.
A solid audit can uncover blind spots, such as missing impression share, rising cost per click, or declining lead quality, and challenge assumptions you’ve made about your best performers.
Go Do: Build a comparison view of top-performing assets this quarter vs. last. Are your “winning” campaigns still winning? Or are they riding on past success?
Now that we’ve explored the why, let’s get into the how.
Block off time every quarter for structured audits. One to two hours per quarter per account is a good benchmark – not because the audit takes that long, but because carving out dedicated time ensures it actually gets done.
Pro Tip: Treat it like a client meeting, even if it’s internal. If it’s on your calendar, it’s happening.
A good audit doesn’t just ask, “Is my CPA low?” It asks, “Is this CPA real, and does it reflect meaningful conversions?”
If you’re seeing great-looking cost-per-acquisition numbers, dig deeper:
Make sure you differentiate between reported cost per acquisition (in your CRM or Google Analytics 4) and platform CPA (Google, Meta, Microsoft, etc.). If there’s a mismatch, it might be time to clean up your conversion tracking setup.
Go Do: Pull a side-by-side view of your platform-reported CPA vs. your actual revenue-driving conversions. Audit the quality and intent behind each tracked action.
Creative audits aren’t just about freshness or click-through rate. They’re also about compliance, especially in regulated industries. Messaging that skirts policy lines (even unintentionally) can tank account performance.
This is where industry-specific knowledge becomes non-negotiable. Your creative might be attention-grabbing, but is it allowed in your vertical?
Go Do: Cross-reference your current ad copy and creative with the platform’s most recent ad policy update. Bonus: Loop in your legal or compliance team before launching new assets.
Audits are more than housekeeping; they’re strategic resets. They help you validate your current direction, challenge stale assumptions, and carve out space to innovate.
Too often, accounts get stuck in maintenance mode. Auditing breaks that cycle.
By incorporating regular, structured audits into your workflow, you create a feedback loop that protects budget, sharpens strategy, and ultimately drives better results.
Have a question you want addressed? Ask here!
More Resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
This article is a WTF explainer, in which we break down media and marketing’s most confusing terms. More from the series →
This video is sponsored by Index Exchange. For more information about sell-side decisioning, check out this report.
A lot of decisions are made between the time someone shows up on a website and when an ad loads on the page. But many of those decisions are left up to advertisers and the demand-side platforms they deploy to do their programmatic ad buying. Fewer decisions are made by publishers and the supply-side platforms they use to sell impressions.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. With programmatic processes speeding up, publishers and SSPs can do more merchandising of impressions before they are put up for auction. This merchandising can take different forms — such as setting price floors, adding contextual signals and affixing brand suitability scores to a bid request — all of which can fall under the umbrella term of sell-side decisioning, as the video below explains.
Index Exchange did not have any input or approval over the video’s editorial content.
https://digiday.com/?p=580735
This post was sponsored by Cloudways. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Have you ever woken up to a 3 AM client website panic?
Did your client’s ecommerce site crash during a flash sale?
Has another client asked why their site is slow, “even though we’re paying for premium hosting.”
This isn’t just an occasional nuisance.
If you’re managing multiple client sites, hosting maintenance becomes a full-on job in itself. The worst part? None of this time is billable, and every minute spent troubleshooting is a minute you’re not spending on business growth.
Here’s the truth: The way you handle hosting maintenance may be broken. And it’s costing you far more than you realize, in time, money, and missed opportunities.
In this article, we’ll explore:
You and your agency may lose countless hours to hosting maintenance without realizing the true cost.
Behind every “quick fix” lies a hidden drain on productivity and profits.
A frantic client message or monitoring alert, often hours after the problem started. Then:
The financial impact is staggering when you do the math.
Consider an agency managing just 30 websites.
If each site experiences only 2 hosting incidents per month requiring 3 hours to resolve, that’s 180 hours annually.
This is nearly an entire month’s worth of lost productivity.
Each downtime incident plants seeds of doubt about your agency’s technical competence. After just a few occurrences, clients start questioning why they’re paying premium rates for what feels like unreliable service. This erosion of confidence makes contract renewals harder and opens the door for competitors.
Most agencies cycle through the same ineffective solutions, each with significant drawbacks:
The most common solution is hiring dedicated infrastructure staff. Many agencies believe bringing a systems admin or DevOps engineer on board will solve their hosting woes. While this provides more control, it creates new problems. You’re now responsible for recruiting, managing, and covering the cost of specialized technical talent.
Many agencies turn to managed hosting providers to alleviate their maintenance burden.
Technically adept teams can absolutely handle straightforward server-level maintenance, security patches, and core updates; however, most still require some additional support when faced with:
The key difference lies in how managed hosting providers address these residual needs. Traditional hosting providers might still leave you waiting in support queues, while next-gen platforms automatically begin repairs.
You may think about attempting to solve the problem through monitoring tools.
Website monitoring tools layer on services like New Relic, Datadog, and UptimeRobot, hoping the better visibility will reduce firefighting.
While these tools provide valuable data, they primarily generate more alerts for your team to interpret and take action on. You’ve essentially traded one problem for another – instead of lacking information, you’re now drowning in it.
Imagine, instead of the chaotic process, you:
Copilots that can do these tasks are your first step towards using and creating a self-learning, auto-healing hosting platform.
They can use intelligent monitoring to detect and help resolve the most common and critical server issues.
The Old Way:
With Cloudways Copilot:
You can configure Cloudways Copilot to manage many facets of web hosting.
Host Health
Triggers when your entire server goes down, typically from:
Webstack Health
Disk & Inode Health
Warns before you hit critical limits:
Result: Instant problem detection!
Copilot continuously monitors your servers and applications for:
Unlike traditional monitoring tools that just tell you “something’s wrong,” Copilot identifies the specific issue.
For each problem detected, Copilot provides:
Instead of just “High CPU Usage” alert, Copilot tells you:
“Your WordPress site on Server X is experiencing high CPU due to a poorly optimized WooCommerce query in Plugin Y. Disable the plugin or contact the developer for an update.”
To be more specific, the example below shows Copilot detecting a DDOS attack, listing malicious IPs, and identifying the file that is being attacked. It then provides remediation steps to prevent the DDOS attack.
Investigation Summary
The investigation shows that much of the server load is driven by multiple concurrent Magento cron tasks and frequent POST requests to the xmlrpc.php endpoint. These factors have caused high CPU usage and intermittent HTTP 500 errors. It appears that the repeated bot visits to xmlrpc.php and resource-intensive Magento cron jobs are the likely cause of the problem.
Remediation Steps
To mitigate the issues related to the potential DDoS attack and improve server performance, please follow these steps:
By taking these actions, you can significantly reduce the strain on your server and improve its performance.”,
Support links:
https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/6009152-how-to-integrate-cloudflare-with-your-application
https://support.cloudways.com/en/articles/5120765-how-to-monitor-system-processes-using-htop-command
This is how Cloudways Copilot uses AI to identify hosting and server issues by comparing them to similar cases across the fleet, quickly suggesting the most effective remediation solutions with step-by-step instructions. This saves you time by providing immediate solutions without the need for manual detection, troubleshooting, or back-and-forth support tickets, preventing disappointment for your clients.
Image create by Cloudways, April 2025
At the end of the day, hosting headaches shouldn’t waste your agency’s most valuable resource: time. Every minute spent troubleshooting is a minute taken away from client work, business growth, or simply having a life outside of server emergencies.
Cloudways Copilot tackles this problem at its root by:
What’s coming next makes Cloudways Copilot even better:
Best of all? During our early access period, Cloudways Copilot is completely free. We’re currently onboarding users through our limited-access program – visit the Cloudways Copilot page and submit your details to secure your spot.
Image Credits
Featured Image: Image by Cloudways. Used with permission.
In-Post Image: Images by Cloudways. Used with permission.
Before graphic designer and illustrator Antoine Laurent came onto the creative scene, he was a carpenter that spent quite a lot of his spare time skateboarding. He was, and still is, enamoured by skate culture, street art and graffiti. Bring in clean lines and grids and you get a tight and traditional graphic design style with a bit more of an unusual edge, or as Antoine puts it: “a combination of precision and creative freedom”.
Originally from Normandy and now based in Paris, the designer’s more unconventional background usually leads him straight into hands-on research when tackling a project. Reminiscent of his days spent constructing or building, the designer is very tactile, always “sketching, exploring paper archives or creating collages, before moving into the digital stage”, he tells It’s Nice That. His practice has always been grounded in the kinds of materials we use and how we use them. His aim with all these tangible tools and techniques? To create visuals that are “strong, clear and timeless” for identities, illustrations and graphic assets, both on the page and on screen.
The designer’s portfolio tends to veer toward the fashion and the cultural sector. He finds inspiration for this kind of design work in “1950s and 1970s design, architectural photography, and Parisian libraries and archives”. Aiming to balance his more striking visuals with clear and timeless communication, Antoine hopes to make work that quietly captures people’s attention in a “world where imagery is omnipresent”.
The new AI Mode is rewriting the rules of search. Are you ready?
Google’s AI-generated answers are starting to dominate the SERPs, pushing traditional results further down the page. If your business relies on organic traffic, you can’t afford to ignore this shift.
Join us on June 25, 2025, for an expert-led webinar sponsored by Conductor. Get actionable strategies from Nick Gallagher, SEO Lead at Conductor, to help you adapt fast and stay ahead of the curve.
Traditional SEO tactics are no longer enough. Understanding how AI Mode works and knowing how to respond could be the difference between steady growth and a sharp drop in traffic.
Don’t let AI Mode catch you off guard.
Register today to secure your spot. Can’t make it live? Sign up anyway, and we’ll send you the full recording.
Brands have fully embraced social media content and are pushing the boundaries on Instagram, TikTok, Meta, YouTube and other platforms to drive engagement, mainly in the form of social actions. Influencer marketing has evolved from broad-based brand awareness efforts centered around an influencer’s network into a powerful tool for precision-targeted engagement and revenue generation.
Yet with engaged audiences at the core, are brands missing an opportunity to harness this social magic and extend reach and engagement outside platforms? Marketers must develop strategies to maximize momentum from their influencer-driven social activity, integrating and extending across channels. Creative data applications that combine social behavior, purchase transactions and robust identity signals can be the engine to power a broader social-driven strategy revolution across channels.
Strong influencer content delivers brand moments, sparking curiosity, emotion and influence. It creates impactful connections on the social platform. However, it can be fleeting unless brands identify and activate against the consumers engaging with the content. This is possible through social signal data captured compliantly from followers of accounts, hashtags, handles and more.
The world of social signal data is often activated on the platform where it originated. However, there are robust sources available in-market that aggregate social data in exciting ways, by category, specific brand, celebrity or influencer. Providers also look at followers, or those who engage with specific hashtags or trending topics. These insights can be delivered deterministically or modeled against, similar to the lookalike approach on platforms, to target like-minded consumers. These data sources can then be enriched outside of the platform with additional consumer behaviors, demographics and identity keys. The result is an audience that can mimic the composition of a social campaign, but with significantly broader reach.
Consider how a leading coffee chain brand, partnering with an influencer for promotion of a new coffee drink product via content creation, can harness that creator’s audience and content on social platforms. For example, YouTube content created by a Gen Z influencer will be shared on their TikTok and Instagram pages, as well as the brand’s accounts.
The deeper opportunity is to create audiences for additional targeting off those channel and creator followers, or even off similar influencer followers or competitive brand followers. This results in a variety of socially driven segments that can help a brand deliver messaging and creative from the influencer partnership across platforms like DV360, Netflix, Spotify or Amazon.
This extension of social momentum through a data-driven approach opens up new ways for brands to connect with already engaged consumers across their media mix with additional touchpoints. These touchpoints reinforce the initial spark, building familiarity and trust through the power of channels like TV, digital, direct mail and more, delivering messaging until they’re ready to purchase.
This is full-funnel influence — inspired by social, delivered anywhere.
To achieve real impact, marketers need to strike a balance: influence that scales and converts. That’s where the fusion of social and transactional data becomes a game changer. By combining engagement insights from social media with real-world purchase transaction data and demographic attributes, marketers can build nuanced target audiences that reflect both interest and a strong likelihood to purchase.
The coffee chain brand can identify audiences who are following and engaging with the influencer content, while also layering in attributes like those with coffee purchase propensities. It’s this precision that turns brand engagement and awareness into real action.
Acknowledging the need for this precision, Alliant has expanded its custom audience capabilities to help advertisers amplify the impact of influencer and social media campaigns across channels. By combining robust social engagement signals, transactional data and demographic attributes, marketers can accurately target high-value consumers with greater control and extend the influence of social campaigns and direct mail channels.
In addition to custom audiences, a syndicated set of social propensity audiences can enable advertisers to reach highly targeted consumers based on their activities, engagement and interests across YouTube, TikTok, Twitch, Instagram, X and LinkedIn.
In an environment where consumers are harder to reach, inundated by content and searching for brand authenticity, a hybrid of smart social and smart data strategy is key. Social media data, when layered with transactional and first-party insights, offers an opportunity to connect with consumers on a more personal level — through the voices they trust, in the channels they frequent and with the products they care about.
The future of influencer and social marketing is about more than popularity. It’s an audience-driven revolution that integrates genuine storytelling and powerful data-driven human connections — everywhere.
Sponsored by Alliant
Google is offering voluntary buyouts to employees across several of its core U.S.-based teams, including Search, Ads, engineering, marketing, and research.
The offer provides eligible employees with at least 14 weeks of severance and is available through July 1, according to reporting from The Verge and The Information.
The buyouts are limited to employees in the U.S. who report into Google’s Core Systems division, and exclude staff at DeepMind, Google Cloud, YouTube, and central ad sales.
While Google has conducted layoffs in other departments earlier this year, the current program is being positioned differently.
It’s entirely voluntary and framed as an opportunity for employees to step away if their goals or performance no longer align with Google’s direction.
In a memo obtained by Business Insider, Jen Fitzpatrick, the Senior Vice President of Core Systems, explained the reasoning behind the move:
“The Voluntary Exit Program may be a fit for Core Googlers who aren’t feeling excited about and aligned with Core’s mission and goals, or those who are having difficulty meeting the demands of their role.”
Fitzpatrick added:
“This isn’t about reducing the number of people in Core. We will use this opportunity to create internal mobility and fresh growth opportunities.”
While the message downplays the idea of forced exits, this move bears a resemblance to earlier reorganizations.
In January, Google began with internal reshuffling in its Platforms and Devices division, which later led to confirmed layoffs affecting Pixel, Nest, Android, and Assistant teams. Whether the current buyouts will lead to further cuts remains to be seen.
Alongside the exit program, Google is updating its hybrid work policy.
All U.S.-based Core employees who live within 50 miles of an approved return site are being asked to transfer back to an office and follow the standard three-day in-office schedule.
Fitzpatrick noted that while remote flexibility is still supported, in-person presence is viewed as critical to collaboration and innovation.
Fitzpatrick wrote:
“When it comes to connection, collaboration, and moving quickly to innovate together, there’s just no substitute for coming together in person.”
These changes are positioned as part of a cultural shift toward spending more time in the office and aligning around shared goals.
This move comes as Google deploys its AI strategy across multiple business units. Over the past year, the company has:
This shows AI is driving changes both internally and externally.
Fitzpatrick’s memo opens by framing the current moment as a “transformational” shift for Google:
“AI is reshaping everything—our products, our tools, the way we work, how we innovate, and so on.”
While Google insists this isn’t about cutting jobs, the voluntary exit program and mandatory RTO policies make a couple of things clear. Google is fine-tuning who builds its products and how they do it.
Google wants its teams engaged, in-office, and ready to build the next generation of AI-driven tools.
For marketers and SEO professionals, this restructuring could foreshadow faster product rollouts, rapidly evolving search experiences, and continued automation in advertising tools.
Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
This is TVNewser’s basic cable network ranker and cable news report for the week of June 2, 2025.
The three cable news networks can feel good about their respective performances, especially during primetime. Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN all experienced week-to-week gains in total viewers and the Adults 25-54 demo.
MSNBC and CNN recorded double-digit gains in primetime in both measured categories and had across-the-board gains during total day. President Donald Trump‘s feud with Elon Musk clearly played well for these two networks as they captured additional viewers during a relatively slow news period.
Meanwhile, Fox News finished the week as the only network with a week-to-week decline in either of the dayparts. However, FNC still finished ahead of its cable rivals as well as the NBC and CBS broadcast networks in weekday primetime total viewers.
NETWORKS:
According to Nielsen Live Plus, same-day data, FNC averaged 2.378 million total viewers and 256,000 A25-54 viewers during primetime. The network saw a +4% rise in total viewers and a +7% rise in the demo compared to the week prior.
Fox News averaged 1.460 million total viewers and 177,000 A25-54 viewers in total day viewing. Week-to-week it was down -1% in the former category, but up +1% in the latter.
FNC moved back to first place in total primetime viewers and climbed from fourth to third in the primetime demo among all basic cable networks. In total day, it remained No. 1 in total viewers and climbed from No. 3 to No. 2 the demo demo.
MSNBC’s primetime lineup averaged 965,000 total viewers and 92,000 viewers in the A25-54 demo for respective gains of +34% and +42% in both measured categories.
During total day, MSNBC averaged 584,000 total viewers and 57,000 demo viewers for respective gains of +16% and +21% relative to the prior week.
Among all basic cable networks, MSNBC jumped from fifth to third in total primetime viewers and climbed from No. 24 to No. 16 in the demo. During total day, it landed in second place in total viewers and 12th place in the demo.
CNN averaged 619,000 total viewers and 108,000 A25-54 viewers during primetime for gains of +66% in the former category and +77% in the latter. The network’s live airing of George Clooney‘s Tony-nominated play Good Night, and Good Luck on June 7 provided a boost, bringing in 2.011 million total viewers and 223,000 demo viewers.
In total day, the network averaged 391,000 total viewers and 66,000 demo viewers for respective gains of +27% and +35% in those measured categories.
In relation to all the cable networks, CNN climbed from 14th to fifth place, and jumped from No. 27 to No. 9 in the demo. It moved sixth to fifth place during total day, and leaped from No. 16 to No. 8 in the demo.
When looking at these networks’ performance during the same period a year ago (the week of June 3):
PROGRAMMING:
Fox News held 14 out of the Top 15 spots of the most-watched cable news shows of the week in total viewers, with The Five (3.432 million viewers at 5 p.m. ET) leading the way. MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show (2.118 million viewers at 9 p.m. ET on Monday) finished at No. 7.
The Five (347,000 viewers) also landed in first place among A25-54 viewers, with FNC once again occupiying 14 out of the 15 top spots. The Rachel Maddow Show (212,000 viewers) came in at No. 9.
Prime Time
Fox News MSNBC CNN • Total Viewers: 2,378,000 965,000 619,000 • A25-54: 256,000 92,000 108,000
Total Day
Fox News MSNBC CNN • Total Viewers: 1,460,000 584,000 391,000 • A25-54: 177,000 57,000 66,000
Week 6-2-25 Cable Ranker by Adweek on Scribd
We gave Procreate Dreams a rare five-star review when it was released back in 2023, which quickly earned it a place in our pick of the best animation software. The 2D animation app is great value, and its intuitive interface makes it an appealing option for beginners.
Nevertheless, as a young iPad app, it inevitably has some limitations, and many users have a long list of asks for features that they would like to see added. The good news is that at least two of the most common requests are coming in Procreate Dreams 2.
You may like
