“We created Crany-Frame and Crany-Hairline,” Daniel says, “these fonts then serve as our base scaffolding, never seen in design, but instead we apply decoration to them to produce new typefaces for each content strand.” This act is one that allows the identity to breath, grow and flow, and is developed upon a custom, node-based system that transforms the typeface it into a type generation tool in its own right. “We used this tool to design the variants for different content strands,” he continues, building a toolset rather than specific letterforms that could evolve within the context or content in which it’s sitting. “That became a big part of the process: designing systems that designers could actually use, not just look at,” he adds, “again it was a wider conversation/concept around the future and how designers and machines can work together.”
Following this progressive approach to design, each supporting element of the identity, be it the typeface or custom colour palette generator, is designed with what Daniel describes as a “chaos element”; an intentional glitch that conceptually embodies the brand’s concept. “It’s a microstatement about the nature of the future, that it can be anticipated, but never fully known,” Daniel says. In essence, this gives life to the creative system – providing the space necessary to create an unexpected tone of contrasts, digital and human, systematic and spontaneous.
The binary nature was necessary not only to reflect the platform’s interrogation of present and future but also to create a distinctive vibe. “The demands on the typeface are pretty simple – it needed to set an atmosphere,” Daniel says. “The typefaces you see on the website and social essentially only exist in the moment,” he details, “as a string of parameters to create a general style that we use to create live animating versions of the font generated on the fly.”
This ability equally offered the flexibility required to evolve alongside the creative scene, and indeed, the brand itself. “The whole idea was to make something open enough to keep building on,” Daniel says,. “We’ve already got tools in place to generate new weights, shapes and animated variants and the tool itself still has a ton of unused functionality,” growing as new demands emerge. “It’s less about version numbers and more about ongoing movement,” Daniel ends, “the system’s alive – that’s the point.”
One thing that rarely gets enough attention in SEO is how user behavior, trends, and sentiment toward a brand shape performance.
It doesn’t just apply to traffic from new queries. It also affects how many people choose to click on your brand in search results.
When something shifts outside of SEO, like a wave of negative press, seasonal change, or a shift in consumer preferences, it can lead to more or fewer branded searches.
It can also bring new associations with your brand, such as a rise in negative reviews or more online mentions that carry a clear tone. These can be early signs that something is changing. Often, the change hasn’t shown up anywhere else yet.
This is why SEO can act like a canary in the coal mine. It can surface early warning signs before customer satisfaction scores drop or sales start to slide.
Organic search data can reveal early cracks in brand trust, preference, or product satisfaction.
Search is one of the few places where people show exactly what they are thinking. They do it without filters, without needing to contact anyone, and without revealing who they are.
This makes it very different from leaving a review or speaking to a customer service team.
Search gives users a way to explore concerns, check claims, or validate ideas in private. That makes SEO data more private and potentially more honest than surveys or social media.
When people begin to doubt your brand, consider alternatives, or worry about price or quality, those feelings often show up in search before they show up anywhere else.
If people are asking whether your brand is legitimate or if your deliveries arrive on time, these are not throwaway questions. They are signs that something might be going wrong. These moments often come before complaints appear in reviews or support tickets.
Search behavior is usually the first place to spot a shift in public opinion. SEO data updates all the time, which means you get a live read on how your brand is landing with users. You can spot changes even if your rankings or revenue haven’t moved yet.
This is even more important now that people use AI and LLM tools more often. These models can show outdated or negative content that still lingers online. This affects how your brand appears across a wider landscape than just Google Search.
SEO has often been judged on traffic and rankings, but not all signals are about performance. Some are predictive. They show up in how users frame queries, stack questions, and explore comparisons.
These behaviors reflect how they move through the search journey to find what they need.
Here are a few signs that can point to growing brand problems:
If fewer people are searching for your brand name over time, it might mean you’re losing relevance or being overtaken by competitors.
Sometimes, it’s just seasonal. Sometimes, it’s the result of a big push from a rival. Either way, it’s worth a closer look and worth talking about across teams.
Search engines have long been aware of sentiment. You can see this in how Google highlights review terms like “refund,” “problem,” or “delivery issue.”
If more users are typing these words alongside your brand, it can suggest rising frustration. Often, this happens before customer service sees a spike or before review scores drop.
Users asking whether your brand is trustworthy or if it’s a scam are not always doing so out of curiosity. Sometimes, they are actively trying to avoid making a mistake.
These moments are decision points, and they can cause people to switch to a competitor who has fewer trust issues in search.
If your branded listings are getting fewer clicks and you haven’t changed your paid strategy, something might be off.
It could be that negative news, poor reviews, or competitor ads are winning attention. It could also mean users know your brand but are now choosing to avoid it.
Google’s “People Also Ask” feature reacts to the wider search landscape. If questions like “Is this brand legit?” or “Does this product work?” start appearing next to your listings, it’s a reflection of growing uncertainty.
These shifts often point to new concerns that haven’t yet reached your team.
Most brands use a familiar mix of tools to track performance. These usually include sales numbers, social mentions, customer service logs, and net promoter scores. These are helpful, but they only show what’s already happened.
SEO data is different. It captures what users are wondering right now. It reflects unfiltered curiosity or concern. People don’t always leave feedback, but they often search when something feels wrong. That’s what makes search such a powerful signal.
Even the best social listening tools only rely on what users are willing to share in public. Search data shows what users are trying to understand privately. This gives you an early edge.
If you treat SEO as only a rankings or traffic tool, you miss a wider opportunity. That approach is becoming less useful in modern search, especially with the rise of AI. Search is evolving, and so is how users engage with it.
Organic search can show the small cracks in perception long before those cracks grow into bigger problems.
This layer is often ignored because it doesn’t sit neatly in a performance dashboard, but it can be one of the most valuable tools for protecting a brand’s reputation.
Spotting the signals is only the first step. To get real value, you need a way to feed this information back to the right teams.
In most companies, SEO insights stay with the marketing or content teams, but PR should be looped in so they can act fast or use the data to shape their response.
Customer support should know what users are searching for so they can update scripts or prepare for new types of complaints.
Product teams can look at whether confusing searches are tied to real product issues. Brand and customer experience teams can adjust messaging on high-impact pages.
SEO isn’t just about growth. It’s a lens into what your audience is thinking and feeling. When used properly, it can surface early signs of trouble before they appear in sales, reviews, or tickets.
Brands that treat SEO as a signal, not just a channel, can spot problems early, act faster, and protect what matters most.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Natalya Kosarevich/Shutterstock
If there’s one thing keeping Zola’s new CMO up at night, it’s search — or rather the messy reinvention of it.
Barely two weeks into the role, Briana Severson is already navigating a marketing minefield, where the old playbook is fading fast and the new one is still being written.
“Were someone to ask me to sum up what’s on my mind as a marketer these days, it would be search,” said Severson.
AI is uprooting the original search bargain — slowly but surely shifting it away from the familiar model where search engines crawled publisher content, served up snippets and rewarded publishers with traffic they could monetize. Now, the exchange is starting to fray. AI-powered search still feeds on publisher content but it keeps users on its ecosystem, cutting off the referral traffic that once made the whole thing worthwhile.
Naturally, that has big implications for a brand like Zola. Wedding planning almost always starts with search — for venues, for sites, for budgets. It’s a foundation moment, and it’s a long been where Zola shines. The brand showed up early in the journey — whether through organic results or paid placements — and had a good shot at turning those queries into customers.
But that visibility, and the predictability it brought, is fading — especially among Gen Z couples now entering the wedding planning stage. As Severson explained: “Gen Z is searching in a very different way compared to how millennials search. A lot of that arguably stems from an increased reliance on human perspectives and an increased distrust of brands being brands.”
Rather than overhaul Zola’s search strategy in response, Severson is investing in creators. Younger couples aren’t sifting through Google searches; they’re scrolling TikToks, watching Instagram testimonials and curating Pinterest boards.
“We are very invested in showing up on those platforms where that new search is happening, and we’re working with influencers of all sizes in particular to tell the story of their wedding in those places,” said Severson.
Case in point: the recent wedding of creator Jaz Smith and her fiancé Kevin Callari. Over the course of the day, Smith posted more than 20 TikTok videos, flooding feeds with moments from the celebration. Zola was woven into that story as the partner for the couple’s wedding paper.
More partnerships like this are already in the pipeline, and they’ll form the foundation of what Severson called Zola’s “creative creator program”. Details are still light, as she’s only just settling into the role but the goal is clear: build a trusted roster of creators who can speak to the brand’s role in the lead-up to one of life’s biggest moments.
Some creators will have massive followings, others will be more niche. What matters is that Zola shows up throughout the full wedding journey, from planning and paper to parties and honeymoons.
“Finding more of those types of partnerships, both organically and in an influencer partnership context, is really central to our strategy,” said Severson.
Marketers have been mulling this shift for a while — that search doesn’t start with a query box anymore. It just took AI to make the move. Suddenly, anyone could produce articles, images and videos, flooding the web with content. While that unlocked scale, it also triggered a crisis of trust. People started tuning out over-optimized, lifeless content. In this new era of search, creators have emerged as the signal in the noise, offering one thing algorithms can’t fake: authenticity.
“For all these reasons, it’s becoming increasingly important to have a good product that people talk about and are loyal to,” said Severson. “That means marketing will become a lot less reliant on the brands themselves doing the heavy lifting from a marketing perspective.”
It’s why creators are permeating into more facets of marketing, from affiliate to outdoor advertising, the upfront negotiations to programmatic.
“It’s no surprise that the “socialverse” is spilling beyond social. The lines between online and offline are blurred,” said Steph Ross, vp of social and influencer at Born Social. “Formerly ‘social-only’ creators are now becoming major players across the advertising landscape. If we’re watching TV while scrolling our phones, seeing those same creators on both screens just makes sense; it brings cultural moments full circle and meets audiences where they are.”
In an increasingly digital creative world full of influencer endorsements and AI ads, it’s refreshing to see a campaign that embraces traditional art mediums. Among my favourite recent examples is Corona’s ‘Fisherman Storytellers’ campaign, featuring a stunning handcrafted book that tells immersive tales of the sea.
While Corona is known for creating some of the best billboard ads, this tactile work demonstrates how thoughtful campaigns can carry just as much resonance as a typical OOH campaign. Featuring intricate artwork, illustrations and mixed media creativity, this beautiful book embraces the spirit of storytelling, demonstrating its powerful place in advertising.
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(Image credit: Corona/Black Madre)
(Image credit: Corona/Black Madre)
(Image credit: Future)
Google has shared new details about how it designed and built AI Mode.
In a blog post, the company reveals the user research, design challenges, and testing that shaped its advanced AI search experience.
These insights may help you understand how Google creates AI-powered search tools. The details show Google’s shift from traditional keyword searches to natural language conversations.
Google built AI Mode in response to the ways people were using AI Overviews.
Google’s research showed a disconnect between what searchers wanted and what was available.
Claudia Smith, UX Research Director at Google, explains:
“People saw the value in AI Overviews, but they didn’t know when they’d appear. They wanted them to be more predictable.”
The research also found people started asking longer questions. Traditional search wasn’t built to handle these types of queries well.
This shift in search behavior led to a question that drove AI Mode’s creation, explains Product Management Director Soufi Esmaeilzadeh:
“How do you reimagine a Search gen AI experience? What would that look like?”
Google’s UX research team identified the most important use cases as: exploratory advice, how-to guides, and local shopping assistance.
This insight helped the team understand what people wanted from AI-powered search.
Esmaeilzadeh explained the difference:
“Instead of relying on keywords, you can now pose complex questions in plain language, mirroring how you’d naturally express yourself.”
According to Esmaeilzadeh, early feedback suggests that the team’s approach was successful:
“They appreciate us not just finding information, but actively helping them organize and understand it in a highly consumable way, with help from our most intelligent AI models.”
While Google presents an optimistic development story, industry experts are raising valid concerns.
John Shehata, founder of NewzDash, reports that sites are already “losing anywhere from 25 to 32% of all their traffic because of the new AI Overviews.” For news publishers, health queries show 26% AI Overview penetration.
Mordy Oberstein, founder of Unify Brand Marketing, analyzed Google’s I/O demonstration and found the examples weren’t as complex as presented. He shows how Google combined readily available information rather than showcasing advanced AI reasoning.
Google’s claims about improved user engagement have not been verified. During a recent press session, Google executives claimed AI search delivers “more qualified clicks” but admitted they have “no data to share” on these quality improvements.
Further, Google’s reporting systems don’t differentiate between clicks from traditional search, AI overviews, and AI mode. This makes independent verification impossible.
Shehata believes that the fundamental relationship between search and publishers is changing:
“The original model was Google: ‘Hey, we will show one or two lines from your article, and then we will give you back the traffic. You can monetize it over there.’ This agreement is broken now.”
For SEO professionals and content marketers, Google’s insights reveal important changes ahead.
The shift from keyword targeting to conversational queries means content strategies need to focus on directly answering user questions rather than optimizing for specific terms.
The focus on exploratory advice, how-to content, and local help shows these content types may become more important in AI Mode results.
Shehata recommends that publishers focus on content with “deep analysis of a situation or an event” rather than commodity news that’s “available on hundreds and thousands of sites.”
He also notes a shift in success metrics: “Visibility, not traffic, is the new metric” because “in the new world, we will get less traffic.”
Esmaeilzadeh said significant work continues:
“We’re proud of the progress we’ve made, but we know there’s still a lot of work to do, and this user-centric approach will help us get there.”
Google confirmed that more AI Mode features shown at I/O 2025 will roll out in the coming weeks and months. This suggests the interface will keep evolving based on user feedback and usage patterns.
You know you can buy groceries and soap at Walmart, but what about saunas, dentures, and dancing shoes?
That’s the premise of Walmart’s new ad starring actor Walton Goggins. The ad touts how Walmart sells half a billion products, including some quirky ones used by Goggins himself. There are the shoes that Goggins uses for clogging, a real-life skill that he showed off while hosting Saturday Night Live in May. He also needed bear spray while on a hike, and a set of new teeth just because.
“Who knew?”—set to The Who’s hit “Who Are You” repeats throughout the spot.
The ad is part of a bigger initiative that started in January with a brand refresh, including a new logo. The newest iteration of the work is called “Walmart. Who knew?” to inform people that there are tons of products the retail giant sells that they might not have been aware of.
“It’s for everyone who’s been shopping with us for years—and for those who think they know what we’re all about,” Walmart wrote in a blog post.
Walmart wanted to work with Goggins because his unexpected charm would help bring home the retailer’s message, a company spokesperson said.
For a separate Spanish-language ad, Walmart tapped actress Stephanie Beatriz at a gender reveal party gone wrong.
Walmart has steadily expanded the products it sells by investing in its third-party marketplace that allows merchants to sell products directly on Walmart’s website and app—similar to Amazon’s program.
Walmart has also invested in its loyalty program, called Walmart+, and added services like one-hour delivery for customers. The retailer has also beefed up its technology investments by adding technology like generative AI and augmented reality to its stores and website.
Joana is a Portuguese graphic designer and art director with a soft spot for social goodness. She is currently studying for an MA in Graphic Design and Editorial Projects at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto.
I managed to scrape right past the dream-crushing, soul-sucking creative industry I always read about – which is a privilege, but also a fate more accessible than ever. All we need to do is scroll far enough to reach the people we want to surround ourselves with, so why wouldn’t we?
For this corner of the community (or internet, for the sake of my argument), identity and connection hold as much value as output. Take this: sometimes I’m scrolling and find myself thinking “I could never come up with something like that!”. And I’m right! I couldn’t. Our work is rooted in our lived experiences; not as a trend any more, but as the norm. I didn’t come up with it because it doesn’t belong to me, and that’s a liberating thought for an over-achiever.
Scrolling, however, becomes overwhelming often. What we share is inherently creative and bleeds into online personas, with designers becoming niche online content creators and the rest of us left to wonder when our portfolios stopped being enough. It’s a conundrum, really – when did comparison become competition? Is my sense of joyfulness from a second ago performative? And if not, why am I feeling so behind?
Choosing to believe in a progressive creative industry for everyone is not sustainable if I’m naive (I got rent to pay!) – so, for now, I’ll allow myself these doubts and apply that thinking to how I navigate it: with softness, but strategically. Online and offline. The rest will follow. And I’ll stop the doomscrolling.
WordPress security company Patchstack announced a new security tier called managed Vulnerability Disclosure Program platform (mVDP), which offers both human and advanced AI plugin reviews to help plugin developers keep their software resistant to vulnerabilities and provide greater trustworthiness.
One of the biggest problems with WordPress is vulnerabilities from third-party plugins. An enormous amount of plugins are discovered with vulnerabilities every day and it doesn’t matter if the developer is a one-person shop or a large multinational organization, vulnerabilities happen and when they do user trust goes down, especially if it happens on an ongoing basis.
PatchStack offers a way for software developers to build trust with their users with two tiers of protection, a free and a paid tier that help plugin developers focus on creating high quality plugins that are free from vulnerabilities.
With more and more software being generated by AI, we’re seeing a significant increase in new vulnerabilities and an equal increase in AI-generated security reports, which makes managing the security of plugins more important than ever.
Patchstack offers a standard managed VDP and a new Security Suite that costs $70/month.
According to the announcement, the new paid tier comes with the following benefits:
“$40 worth of AI tokens for code security reviews per month
Team management feature with 5 seats included
Discussion board for direct communication with the reporting researchers
AI code review and human research
The new Security Suite tier combines the best of both worlds. Your plugins will receive boosted visibility (100% AXP bonus) in the Patchstack Alliance ethical hackers community, which encourages security researchers to report significantly more bugs and help plugins fix more vulnerabilities faster.
Additionally, our AI code review tool can scan through your entire codebase to find WordPress-specific security issues and highlight potential improvements. We are currently launching this in beta, but we’ll have much many releases to share in the coming months.”
Security Suite customers will receive security recommendations from their internal security experts, helping developers be proactive about building safe to use WordPress plugins.
Read more at Patchstack:
NEW: Patchstack AI code review tool and Security Suite for plugin vendors
Featured Image by Shutterstock/STILLFX
Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with hundreds of teams using CRMs, and I’d sum up
the experience like this: technology moves fast. Humans? Not so much.
We’re busy, messy, skeptical creatures of habit. Marry that with today’s constant change, and
you’ve got a perfect storm for adoption issues, where tools are purchased with good intentions
but struggle to reach full potential.
Thankfully, there are some simple ways to blend platform features with a behavioral nudges to
improve adoption, understanding, and ultimately, performance.
In the video above, I walk through five simple, practical ways you can boost your
team’s CRM adoption (specifically within HubSpot) but these ideas can be adapted for almost
any modern CRM platform.
Below is a quick breakdown of each tip to help you drive better outcomes from your investment.
Instead of directing users to training portals or cluttered shared drives, bring the resources into
the platform itself (less context switching).
Using dashboards, you can create an internal learning center with embedded videos,
documentation and even slide decks from previous training sessions or summits. This keeps
onboarding content accessible and eliminates the friction of toggling between tabs or tools.
Plus, it builds the habit of logging into HubSpot regularly.
Dig deeper: Is your CRM lying to you? The hidden costs of dirty B2B data
Misunderstandings around lifecycle stages, deal pipelines and lead statuses are one of the
most common sources of friction in CRM usage.
That’s why we recommend building a “Definitions and Stages” dashboard. Use it to visualize
how your company defines lead stages, where prospects sit in the funnel and which fields or
properties matter most. Embed buyer journey diagrams, helpful explainer videos or short blurbs
right into the dashboard.
Think of this like your internal playbook — one that removes ambiguity and ensures everyone’s
speaking the same language.
One of the fastest ways to frustrate your team? Ask them to fill in 37 fields that may or may not
apply to their deal.
Instead, show the right information at the right time by using conditional properties. If a user
selects “Referral” as a lead source, surface only the fields that apply to that choice. This creates
a dynamic, context-aware experience that removes clutter and makes data entry feel more
purposeful.
You can do this on any object in HubSpot — deals, contacts, companies — and even prefill
default values to maintain consistency.
Dig deeper: How to apply your lead scoring strategy in HubSpot and Monday.com
Data overwhelm is real. When every contact record or deal view includes every possible
property, your users are more likely to ignore important fields than engage with them.
To solve this, configure record layouts and property cards based on what’s most relevant to
your users based on role or group. For example, a sales rep might only need to see fields
related to deal status, while a customer success manager might need access to renewal and
onboarding details.
HubSpot allows for conditional visibility within record views. You can even empower users to
personalize their own layouts without affecting the rest of the org, giving them a sense of
ownership without chaos.
We all know clean data matters — but adoption improves when users can see the cost of
inaction.
Build a simple cleanup dashboard with reports like:
Use this dashboard in team meetings or 1:1s to spark conversation and action. The goal isn’t to shame, but to empower: show each team member what’s within their control and let them take ownership of improving the data.
This also builds the connection between daily usage and bigger-picture results. Clean records = clearer forecasts, better reporting and fewer surprises.
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.
The world of branding is constantly developing, and no agency knows that quite like JKR. Founded in 1990, Jones Knowles Ritchie has been at the epicentre of branding excellence for decades, shaping leading design as we know it, but as consumer tastes evolve and technology rapidly advances, today’s creative sphere is more variable than ever.
Ahead of this year’s Brand Impact Awards, I sat down with JKR’s executive creative directors, Stuart Radford and Ricardo Bezerra, to explore the evolution of branding. Together, we discussed how social media has influenced the industry, how brands need to embrace evolution, and what it takes to create iconic brands in 2025.
(Image credit: JKR)
Stuart: When Blur and Oasis were battling for Britpop supremacy, branding was a very different beast. It was all about visual identity: logos, straplines, and strict brand guidelines ruled. The goal? Recognition and recall. The best brands were clever, playing with negative space and visual puns to deliver that elusive “smile in the mind.” Smart? Absolutely. Emotional? Not really.
Fast forward to today, and branding is an entirely different game. It’s no longer just about what you see – it’s about what you feel. The focus has shifted to emotional consistency across every touchpoint, both physical and digital. We now live in a world of expressive identities, emotive tone of voice, and immersive brand experiences. Brands aren’t static logos anymore; they’re living, breathing stories. Our ideas must carry further and meet more complex emotional needs rather than just raising a one-off smile.”
Where brands once controlled their narrative, now the audience decides whether or not to believe it
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Stuart: Let’s skip the ongoing AI debate for now. Instead, let’s focus on how technology is reshaping branding and design.
We’re in a new era. Technology has turned the design world into a playground of possibility. Many of the old constraints – format, consistency, and scale – have fallen away. Generative tools now allow us to build identities that aren’t fixed but adaptive, with multiple expressions. In-house teams aren’t just implementing a brand anymore, they’re actively creating and interpreting it.
Variable fonts make typography more expressive. Real-time data visualisation turns raw numbers into grounded, evocative stories. Algorithms enable tailored, responsive experiences. And AI? It opens up endless possibilities, many of which we’re only beginning to grasp.
What makes this moment especially exciting is the timing. Much of this technology is still relatively new, which means the opportunity to do something original and distinctive is very real. But there’s a catch: it only works if the tech is used with purpose.
The bottom line? Technology, when used with intent, can elevate a brand from forgettable to unforgettable. But it must always serve the story – never distract from it.
Riacardo: A standout brand is one that has the ability to be itself, or as we say at JKR, to be distinctive, everywhere and at all times.
We live in a highly competitive market where businesses have to move fast to keep up with people’s evolving needs. In that context, it’s easy for brand managers to lose sight of what makes their brand truly unique. A brand shapes the way a business connects with people – through its product or service, its relationships, its culture, and its symbols.
So, what makes a brand stand out today is its ability to be consistent across everything you can see and feel. Every business decision, whether it’s tactical or strategic, serves as an opportunity to move the brand forward, always considering how people interact with it over time and across touchpoints. To make this happen, branding and design must work hand in hand.
(Image credit: Future)
