It finally happened: The New York Times signed an AI licensing deal. Not with Perplexity, or Google — and definitely not with OpenAI or Microsoft — but with Amazon.
The agreement will allow Amazon products, like Alexa speakers, to use summaries and short excerpts from NYT stories and recipes, as well as to incorporate this content in the training of its proprietary AI models.
It’s a sign of the times: even The New York Times, long known for its staunch defense against illegal content scraping and its high-profile legal battle with OpenAI, has signaled that it’s open to an AI licensing deal — if the terms are right.
The deal, announced by NYT last Thursday, is akin to both Amazon and the publisher openly declaring they too are all-in on the AI race.
The New York Times is signaling to other AI tech companies, “We’re open to being at the table, if you’re willing to come to the table,” one former NYT executive told Digiday on condition of anonymity. “Until [this] announcement, they’ve been sort of hiding in the shadows. Now they’re saying, ‘we’re open for business under the right terms and conditions.’”
The same exec said they believe the agreement with Amazon represents a “new wave” of deals between large digital publishers and AI licensing deals to come. Digiday understands that at least one other publisher cut a licensing deal with Amazon last year, and that more will emerge in the coming months. But Amazon has kept its negotiations with publishers under lock and key.
Amazon’s courting of news publishers for potential AI licensing partnerships to feed quality content into a smarter version of Alexa, Amazon’s voice assistant product, was first reported last December. Alexa currently provides answers to news queries from sources like Reuters, Associated Press and The Wall Street Journal, but not in real time.
But The New York Times’ announcement was vague on whether its content would help power the new Alexa+. “Amazon’s use of editorial content from The Times could extend to the Alexa software found on its smart speakers,” it read.
The fact that The New York Times’ content will now be used to train Amazon’s AI models could strengthen its copyright case against OpenAI. It implies that using this content without a deal in place “may not be a fair use,” according to Aaron Rubin, partner in the Strategic Transactions & Licensing group at law firm Gunderson Dettmer.
“It also further establishes that there’s a market for licensing this content for model training purposes, so any party that trains its model with [The Times’] content without licensing it is undercutting that market,” he said.
The New York Times declined to answer questions about the differences between its differing associations with OpenAI and Amazon, and why it would sign with Amazon and sue OpenAI. Amazon also declined to comment.
Amazon may seem like an unlikely partner for The New York Times’ first AI licensing deal. The New York Times is arguably in a league of its own, with a large and growing subscription and digital advertising business. And Amazon’s large language model Nova isn’t exactly a household name – at least not as popular as OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and Meta’s LLama. (Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic.)
Naturally, without further detail being disclosed, it’s hard to say for sure. But Amazon uses its AI models primarily for voice products like Alexa, and for its Amazon shopping assistant Rufus – not text-based products like Google or OpenAI’s search products, said a publishing exec at a large digital publisher who requested anonymity. Whereas, Google’s AI Mode or ChatGPT “are both more likely to cannibalize material traffic,” for The New York Times, they said.
The New York Times has a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, so a partnership with either of those companies would’ve been quite the one-eighty. Perplexity has been actively pursuing deals with publishers, but for a wider range of publishers, such as its revenue share agreements with Time to Blavity.
Google would have made sense as an AI licensing partner for The New York Times, given it’s already signed large, multi-year deals with The New York Times and made an agreement in January with The Associated Press to bring its news to Google’s Gemini chatbot.
The New York Times isn’t the only publisher to offer a carrot in one hand and a stick in the other. News Corp signed a licensing deal with OpenAI in May 2024. Five months later, its Dow Jones and the New York Post businesses filed a lawsuit against Perplexity
In an earnings call in November 2024, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said the company would “seek to challenge AI companies misusing and abusing our trusted journalism.”
“We have indicated in the past that we would prefer to woo rather than sue artificial intelligence companies, hence the alliance with OpenAI, but we have reached a point where litigation is also essential,” he continued. “Perplexity… is selling products based on our journalism, and we are diligently preparing for further action against other companies that have ingested our archives and are synthesizing our intellectual property.” News Corp did not respond to a request for comment before publishing time.
Regardless, The New York Times is no longer in the increasingly short list of large digital publishers that haven’t signed an AI licensing deal yet. Bustle Digital Group, CNN and Bloomberg to name a few.
“I think that the bigger picture is that everyone’s open for business at the right price. The question is, what’s the right price?” said Brian Wieser, principal at Madison and Wall. “This is not the first deal of this nature to be cut and it sure won’t be the last.”
Jessica Davies contributed reporting.
The former American football player Matthew A Cherry’s last film was a huge success. Hair Love began with a Kickstarter campaign that set a new record for a short film on the platform and went on to win the Oscar for best animated short in 2020.
The heartwarming story and beautiful animation broke stereotypical depictions of Black fathers and sparked a conversation about the beauty of Black hair. It even led to a spin-off TV series, Young Love, which debuted on Max in 2023.
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Character art for Melody and Harmony in Matthew A Cherry’s Time Signature (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Oh yeah, for sure. After a successful project – especially something like Hair Love winning an Oscar before I turned 40 – there’s a real pressure to top yourself. You want to show growth, prove that it wasn’t a fluke. And in that pursuit of perfection, I’ve definitely slowed myself down at times. There are projects I probably could’ve moved forward on that were solid, but I held back because they didn’t feel ‘better than the last thing’.
On top of that, I tend to jump around a bit – if one project gets tough or gets bad feedback, instead of powering through, I sometimes pivot to the next shiny idea. And right now, the industry’s just not as wide open as it was even a few years ago. Getting jobs, getting greenlights – it’s all harder. So yeah, the struggle to stay inspired, to stay steady, and to stay working is real. But it’s part of the creative journey.
Definitely. I lived both – played in the NFL and then transitioned to filmmaking – and I can tell you, the mindset overlap is huge. Sports and art are both about discipline, performance, vision, and emotion. But society often separates them, especially for young people.
With Time Signature, I want to show that creativity can be just as powerful and transformative as athletic success. And for Black kids especially, that’s a narrative we need more of.
In Time Signature, Melody discovers an unfinished piece of sheet music in her late grandmother’s piano (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Always. Animation has a way of cutting through all the noise and hitting straight to the heart. As for influences, I look up to Spike Lee for his fearlessness and his innovation – he’s always pushing the medium. Barry Jenkins inspires me with his patience and perseverance. It took almost ten years between Medicine for Melancholy and Moonlight, and he’s always carried himself with humility and grace.
Jordan Peele has also been a huge influence. Working at Monkeypaw and watching him evolve into a titan – while still lifting others up – has been powerful to see.
On the music side, Janet Jackson’s early innovation is something I really admire. Same with Outkast, Kendrick Lamar, Beyoncé, Jay-Z – all top-tier artists constantly evolving. That mix of discipline, vision and cultural resonance is something I strive for.
Hair Love was more grounded. Time Signature leans into magical realism – it’s about time travel, music, memory, and healing. I describe it as Coco meets Back to the Future, but rooted in Black culture and modern music. Animation gives us the freedom to fully explore those emotional and fantastical layers.
We haven’t really had that modern Black animated musical yet. Soul was beautiful, but the lead was a ghost for most of it. Princess and the Frog had a similar issue. We haven’t had a story where a Black girl gets to be fully herself – expressive, creative, emotional – for the entire film.
That’s what Time Signature is doing. And because it’s a proof of concept, we also see this short as a launchpad to a larger feature. We’re hoping this Kickstarter helps us build momentum and show studios what this could be at scale. These days, it helps to show you can do something on your own – it opens doors for bigger support.
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Coco meets Back to the Future, but rooted in Black culture – character art for Time Signature(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)Time Signature spans the 70s, 80s, 90s and is set in the late 2000s(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)We haven’t had a story where a Black girl gets to be fully herself for the entire film, Matthew says(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
Definitely. This one is about legacy and healing. About mothers and daughters. About creativity and generational dreams. Time Signature is meant to ask: how do we support young creatives? How do we make peace with the past to move forward in the present? And how do we celebrate Black girl brilliance without asking it to shrink or apologise? I hope it sparks those conversations – in families, in classrooms, in the industry.
Representation means putting a Black girl in the lead. Presence means making her feel real – giving her full agency, vulnerability, joy, and genius. Melody isn’t just a character to check a box – she’s the heart of the story. The music she creates, the choices she makes, the emotions she goes through – it’s all centered on her journey. That’s what we mean by presence. She’s not here to symbolise something. She’s here to be.
Yes, absolutely. There’s still a long way to go. And the rollback of DEI efforts is honestly disheartening. Animation is how kids form ideas about the world – who gets to be the hero, who gets to be magical, who gets to be loved. So when those doors start closing again, it’s not just about jobs – it’s about imagination and identity.
What we did with Hair Love and Young Love shows that there’s an audience hungry for authentic, joyful, nuanced Black stories. It’s frustrating to see that progress slowed, but it also makes independent projects like Time Signature that much more important. We have to keep creating and keep building our own tables when the system pulls chairs away.
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Matthew was determined to get the aesthetics right – not just in costume and setting, but in feel(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)Scenes include a 1970s prom night… (Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions) …and a concert in the 1980s(Image credit: Cherry Lane Productions)
We’re working with Marcus Williams, who was a huge part of Young Love. He’s incredibly versatile and culturally specific in his approach. One of the things we really pushed in Young Love was capturing the full spectrum of Black life – different hair textures, body types, skin tones – and Marcus brought that to life.
We also have Ed Lee doing background and production design. He also worked on Young Love, and he’s incredible at capturing texture and era. Since Time Signature spans the 70s, 80s, 90s and is set in the late 2000s, it was really important to get those aesthetics right – not just in costume and setting, but in feel. Ed’s ability to create immersive, emotionally resonant environments has been key.
And my producing partner Monica Young is the backbone of this. Her taste level is impeccable, and she’s constantly pushing us to refine and elevate the work. She was a huge part of Hair Love, and continues to be one of the biggest driving forces in everything I do.
This excerpt is from B2B Marketing Fundamentals by Kate Mackie ©️2025 and is reproduced and adapted with permission from Kogan Page Ltd.
Building a consistent brand is increasingly important in B2B.
With so few buyers in the market at any one time, plus a growing number of people in the buying group, you need to build memorable brand signals that can be a shortcut in your buyer’s memory to what it is that makes you distinct.
This individual brand story will then be associated in their minds with your branded assets, freeing up space in communications for you to share deeper messages, e.g., specific product and service details.
It all starts with defining your brand story. What is it that makes you distinct?
This then needs to carry through all marketing communications, bringing your brand to life.
The purpose of a company is its reason for being: What it is that it does every day and what it aims to do across all stakeholder groups it serves.
It should be a statement that resonates with all employees and is the focus of how you deliver your products and services. It is a key part of the culture of the business and needs to be reflected in your brand, marketing, and communications.
It is also at the core of how you drive relevancy to the communities you operate within.
A business or brand purpose that resonates with your employees can be built into their own personal purpose. This alignment gives an even greater sense of belonging to those that work for the business.
There is a traditional Japanese concept, thought to have been first coined in the 7th century, called Ikigai, that is a framework used to enable individuals to find and build a sense of purpose.
It can also be translated to businesses, firms, and organizations, helping you fathom your north star.
Working this through will enable you to think about what it is that drives you and your audiences, aligns to your profession, and makes you money.
The overlap between passion, mission, profession, and vocation is where you need to focus as you develop your own unique purpose that gets to the heart of your own unique value proposition.
The positioning of your brand in the minds of your audience should reflect how your brand sits alongside your competitors, how and what it delivers for your customer alongside how it operates as a company.
It should be built on what your customers know about you, your products and services, and what they feel when they use or consume them.
An understanding of your position against your competitors is key. Looking at the variables relevant to your company, you can plot your position against your competitors by using an established 2×2 block model.
Plotting out variables that are relevant to your business will help you understand the competition and how they position themselves.
Variables might include price plotted against quality as a starting point – this will help you see the perception of you against your competitors as either low or high quality against low or high price.
You will be able to see if there are any gaps in the market you might be able to own – either through an extension of your product or service portfolio – or the development of new offerings for the market.
You need to ensure that your positioning is true to what you actually deliver as a company. Overclaiming or overpromising will only end up with a mismatched customer experience, which can undermine any trust you might have built.
The brand promise is key to developing the value proposition. It is the promise to the buyer or customer that is realized when they purchase your products or services.
It is your distinctive differentiator that details your brand position in terms that are relevant to the market, specifically your target audience, and is a key step in developing your messaging and narrative.
The messaging you create should be aligned to all elements of your brand and able to be used across brand marketing, but it should also be able to be applied to products or services and used as part of campaign assets. These written assets should include credible reasons to believe your claims and your position.
“Reasons to believe” can be a combination of case studies, use cases, data-led intelligence, and other proof points that add credence to the position you are taking in the market.
These insights should be built into your campaigns to back up the execution of the value proposition and should be fundamental to the content used to drive further consideration and purchase of your products and services.
Your brand, product, and campaign messaging should nest like Russian dolls and all align with each other, building throughout to a clear understanding of what each element means to the audience.
The brand messaging should be built for the long term and have durability, whereas your products and services will change more quickly with client and customer feedback.
The messaging and assets for your products and services should therefore be reviewed annually, adding in any new features, benefits, or additional proof points.
Campaign messaging is driven by the current macro context and will likely be themed around short-term delivery targets, so should be reviewed more regularly.
This gives you a useful review time frame that should be built into your impact studies with an ongoing understanding of performance against the targets set for the brand, product, or individual campaign metrics.
Communication across your full portfolio needs to be built around the brand promise, which hits at the heart of your business and is aligned to your purpose.
This will give you the best springboard for delivering authentic, creative executions that resonate with your audiences.
As marketers, we need to tell the story, weaving the proof points and case studies into a narrative that drives a desire to buy the products and services, even if the buyers are not in the market now.
This ensures that you continue to build and drive a connected memory for when the buyers are ready to buy and at the category entry point.
Storytelling is recognized as an important facet of the creative skillset – using stories and allegories to engage audiences, build connection, inspire different types of memory, and build links from how you feel to an association with your brand.
Stories resonate so well that a huge proportion of advertising – in both B2C and B2B – follows the pathway of the “three act structure“.
This is a structure used by playwrights and is often attributed to Aristotle but made popular by Syd Field in his 1979 book Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting.1
Think through any adverts you can remember, as it is an often-used concept from B2C, e.g., chewing gum …to much more complex B2B sales.
There are more similarities between B2C and B2B than we acknowledge. Storytelling crosses over and is common to the needs of all audiences.
Brands are as powerful, if not more so, in B2B as your audience is making what often feels like a bigger decision.
If you buy the wrong B2C product, you aren’t putting your livelihood on the line when you make your buying decision.
That is why a strong B2B brand will win every time, as it takes an incredibly confident buyer to look outside the most well-known providers, whose reputations have been built on years of delivery and execution in their specialist fields.
To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 25% discount code and free shipping to the U.S. and UK. Use promo code SEJ25 at koganpage.com here.
1 Field, S (1979, Revised Edition 2005) Screenplay: The foundations of screen-writing, Random House Publishing Group, US
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Featured Image: PureSolution/Shutterstock
A U.S. appeals court on Friday ruled unanimously in favor of Media Matters for America, a progressive media watchdog organization, blocking a Texas attorney general’s attempt to investigate the firm for its reporting about brand safety concerns on X.
Texas AG Ken Paxton opened an investigation into Media Matters in late November of 2023, after the organization published a report showing ads from major brands appearing next to antisemitic and white supremacist content on the social platform formerly known as Twitter.
Media Matters’ report sparked a wave of advertiser pullback, which angered X owner Elon Musk. Musk then sued Media Matters, alleging the group knowingly manipulated data to push a damaging narrative about brand safety on the platform.
On the same day that Musk filed suit, Texas’ Paxton kicked off a probe into Media Matters, alleging it “fraudulently manipulated data on X.com.”
A district court granted Media Matters a preliminary injunction, which blocked Paxton’s attempt to enforce a pre-litigation subpoena.
Now, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit affirmed an earlier decision from a district court to block Paxton’s subpoena attempt, calling the effort an “arguably bad-faith investigation.”
The court ruled on First Amendment grounds, determining that Media Matters’ statements about X constitute protected free speech.
“Paxton’s contention that Appellees’ conduct is not constitutionally protected because their articles were deliberately designed to mislead consumers about X is meritless,” the court wrote in a 34-page ruling issued today. “The record is utterly devoid of evidence to support such a claim.”
The court added that Media Matters’ “reporting on public issues are quintessential First Amendment activities.”
In response to the decision, Media Matters President and CEO Angelo Carusone said in a statement: “Elon Musk encouraged Republican state attorneys general to use their power to harass their critics and stifle reporting about X. Ken Paxton was one of those AGs who took up the call, and his attempt to use his office as an instrument for Musk’s censorship crusade has been defeated. Today’s decision is a victory for free speech.”
The Texas Attorney General’s Office did not respond to ADWEEK’s request for comment by press time.
Managing your mental health can already be a struggle. But now you’re playing catch up after tripping up at work. Shanice Mears offers ways to pick yourself up and look after yourself in this week’s Creative Career Conundrums.
Google’s Sundar Pichai said in an interview that AI Overviews sends more traffic to a wider set of websites, insisting that Google cares about the web ecosystem and that he expects AI Mode to continue to send more traffic to websites, a claim that the interviewer challenged.
There is a revolutionary change in how ecommerce that’s coming soon, where AI agents research and make purchase decisions on behalf of consumers. The interviewer brought up that some merchants have expressed concern that this will erode their ability to upsell or develop a customer relationship.
A customer relationship can be things like getting them to subscribe to an email or to receive text messages about sales, offer a coupon for a future purchase or to get them to come back and leave product reviews, all the ways that a human consumer interacts with a brand that an AI agent does not.
Sundar Pichai responded that AI agents present a good user experience and compared the AI agent in the middle between a customer and a merchant to a credit card company that sits in between the merchant and a customer, it’s a price that a merchant is willing to pay to increase business.
Pichai explained:
“I can literally see, envision 20 different ways this could work. Consumers could pay a subscription for agents, and their agents could rev share back. So you know, so that that is the CIO use case you’re talking about. That’s possible. We can’t rule that out. I don’t think we should underestimate, people may actually see more value participating in it.
I think this is, you know, it’s tough to predict, but I do think over time like you know like if you’re removing friction and improving user experience, it’s tough to bet against those in the long run, right? And so I think, in general if you’re lowering friction for it, you know, and and people are enjoying using it, somebody’s going to want to participate in it and grow their business.
And like would brands want to be in retailers? Why don’t they sell directly today? Why don’t they sell directly today? Why won’t they do that? Because retailers provide value in the middle.
Why do merchants take credit cards? There are many parts like and you find equilibrium because merchants take credit cards because they see more business as part of taking credit cards than not, right. And which justifies the increased cost of taking credit cards and may not be the perfect analogy. But I think there are all these kinds of effects going around.”
The interviewer began talking about the web ecosystem, calling attention to the the “downstream” effect of AI Search and AI search agents on information providers and other sites on the web.
Pichai started his answer by doing something he did in another interview about this same question where he deflected the question about web content by talking about video content.
He also made the claim that Google isn’t killing the web ecosystem and cited that the number of web pages in Google’s index has grown by 45% over the past two years, claiming it’s not AI generated content.
He said:
“I do think people are consuming a lot more information and the web is one specific format. So we should talk about the web, but zooming back out, …there are new platforms like YouTube and others too. So I think people are just consuming a lot more information, right? So it feels like like an expansionary moment. I think there are more creators. People are putting out more content, you know, and so people are generally doing a lot more. Maybe people have a little extra time in their hands. And so it’s a combination of all that.
On the web, look things have been interesting and you know we’ve had these conversations for a while, you know, obviously in 2015 there was this famous, the web is dead. You know, I always have it somewhere around, you know, which I look at it once in a while. Predictions, it’s existed for a while.
I think web is evolving pretty profoundly. When we crawl, when we look at the number of pages available to us, that number has gone up by 45% in the last two years alone. So that’s a staggering thing to think about.”
The interviewer challenged Pichai’s claim by asking if Google is detecting whether that increase in web pages is because they’re AI generated.
Pichai was caught by surprise by that question and struggled to find the answer and then finally responded that Google has many techniques for understanding the quality of web pages, including whether it was machine generated.
He doubled down on his statement that the web ecosystem is growing and then he started drifting off-topic, then he returned to the topic.
He continued:
“That doesn’t explain the trend we are seeing. So, generally there are more web pages. At an underlying level, so I think that’s an interesting phenomenom. I think everybody as a creator, like you do at The Verge, I think today if you’re doing stuff you have to do it in a cross-platform, cross-format way. So I think things are becoming more dynamic cross-format.
I think another thing people are underestimating with AI is AI will make it zero-friction to move from one format to another, because our models are multi-modal.
So I think this notion, the static moment of, you produce content by format, whereas I think machines can help translate it from, almost like different languages and they can go seamlessly between. I think it’s one of the incredible opportunities to be unlocked.
I think people are producing a lot of content, and I see consumers consuming a lot of content. We see it in our products. Others are seeing it too. So that’s probably how I would answer at the highest level.”
Related: The Data Behind Google’s AI Overviews: What Sundar Pichai Won’t Tell You
The interviewer asked Pichai what his response is to people who say that AI Overviews is crushing their business.
Pichai answered:
“AI mode is going to have sources and you know, we’re very committed as a direction, as a product direction, part of why people come to Google is to experience that breadth of the web and and go in the direction they want to, right?
So I view us as giving more context. Yes, there are certain questions which may get answers, but overall that’s the pattern we see today. And if anything over the last year, it’s clear to us the breadth of where we are sending people to is increasing. And, so I expect that to be true with AI Mode as well.”
The interviewer immediately responded by noting that if everything Pichai said was true, people would be less angry with him.
Pichai dismissed the question, saying:
“You’re always going to have areas where people are robustly debating value exchanges, etc. … No one sends traffic to the web the way we do.”
See also: Google’s AI Overviews Slammed By News Publishers
What do you think? Are Google’s AI features prioritizing sending traffic to web sites?
Watch the Sundar Pichai interview here:
Featured image is screenshot from video
Managing a customer’s experience throughout their complex journey is challenging. Interests and behaviors do not work in straight lines, and too often, the insights we capture are out of date before we share them. With customers demanding ever-more relevant and timely interventions, marketing teams are simply losing the connection.
Traditional campaign influence makes it difficult to explain the nuances of how marketing impacts contacts and leads as they progress through different stages of their journeys. Rigid data structures hinder the agile analysis of marketing performance and severely limit marketing’s ability to track engagement across multiple lifecycles simultaneously.
This results in incomplete data, missed marketing insights and a struggle to demonstrate the value of marketing efforts. Key challenges include:
We established a framework that moves beyond traditional limitations, integrating components designed to provide clarity and control over every stage of the lead lifecycle.
Standard lifecycle tracking relies on a single status field, which creates a rigid, one-way view of lead progression. However, buyers frequently engage with multiple products and campaigns and revisit various stages of the process numerous times. Without comprehensive historical data, marketing teams miss valuable insights and the ability to conduct meaningful trend analysis.
By creating a custom object, the lifecycle object, campaigns, leads, contacts, accounts and opportunities are brought together in a single framework to enable multi-journey tracking. That makes it possible to:
The result is deeper analysis, more accurate reporting, and the ability to understand and optimize every step of the customer journey, from lead to opportunity to close.
Effective data linkage between a lead and an opportunity too often relies on sales teams adding relevant connector information. However, they are, understandably, frequently reluctant to add extra steps to their already demanding workflows.
Even when fully committed, sales teams can only tag campaigns and individuals they know. That inevitably leads to incomplete data and missed marketing insights.
To close the gap between marketing engagement and measurable business outcomes, we’ve developed:
In addition, our custom UI enhancements within Salesforce ensure sales teams get relevant insights in a manageable and actionable format. These solutions drive better collaboration between sales and marketing teams, ensuring less time on administrative tasks and more time actively driving revenue.
Salesforce’s standard campaign influence often operates like a “black box.” That makes its reported numbers difficult to explain and leaves reports vulnerable to scrutiny. Such opacity can undermine confidence in marketing’s contributions.
We move beyond this limitation by covering more lifecycle stages and considering a wider range of asset influences. Critically, we demystify the data. Every attribution point can be explained and drilled into, providing the confidence to stand firmly behind your numbers. This process also significantly enhances trust with your teams and stakeholders.
Dig deeper: How smarter campaign modeling and automation drive real marketing ROI
The challenges outlined above are not theoretical. They’re a daily reality for many organizations. One global technology brand, for example, struggled to determine the impact of specific marketing efforts on revenue confidently. Despite heavy investment in technology, achieving reliable, actionable reporting remained elusive.
To address this, we began by mapping their data flows — from initial capture through processing to final storage — documenting every platform involved. That revealed systemic issues: broken data connections, widespread duplication and inconsistent data structures that prevented a unified view. Reporting had become a manual, time-consuming effort that involved stitching together disconnected sources.
We responded with a comprehensive system map to streamline platform roles, identify redundancies and guide consistent data capture across profile and behavioral dimensions. Relevant insights were surfaced within their reporting platform to support automation and clarity. As a result, the organization moved from uncertainty to confidence, finally demonstrating the true impact of its marketing efforts.
Managing the complexity of multiple lifecycles means moving beyond traditional limitations. This requires:
Together, these components form an integrated methodology that replaces traditional influence models’ black box with transparency, comprehensive data capture, and actionable insights at every stage. The result is more than operational efficiency. It’s the confidence to:
Dig deeper: How advanced customer journey analytics is shaping the future of engagement
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.
At D&AD Festival last week I saw a range of talks, but one of the standouts for me was a talk by MassiveMusic on the power of sound.
In this talk Ed Trotter (head of business development, Europe) and Rick Sellars (head of creative direction, EMEA) took the audience through an audio journey of sonic branding, from an early jingle for Wheaties, taking in Intel’s The Wave, SEGA’s startup sound and going all the way through to the likes of Disney Plus and Netflix.
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(Image credit: Future)
(Image credit: Future)
Tiktok Outro Sound 2022 – YouTube
BURGER KING® France – Les Masters – YouTube
The Sound of Leffe | Case Film – YouTube
(Image credit: Future)
Search is changing. I hate saying that (again) because it feels cliche at this point. But, cliche or not, it is true and it is seismic.
With the rollout of AI Overviews, Bing Copilot, and conversational search interfaces like ChatGPT and Perplexity, SEO is no longer just about traditional rankings; it’s about representation and visibility.
Instead of obsessing over page 1 and traffic numbers, WordPress site owners need to start focusing on whether they’re represented in the answers users actually see and if that visibility is resulting in revenue.
The old rankings system itself is mattering less and less because AI-driven search features aren’t just scraping a list of URLs. They’re synthesizing content, extracting key insights, and delivering summary answers.
If your content isn’t built for that kind of visibility, it may as well not exist.
Google doesn’t even look like Google anymore. Since the March core update, AI Overviews have more than doubled in appearance, and this trend shows no signs of slowing. This is our new reality, and it’s only going to accelerate.
WordPress is already a flexible, powerful platform, but out of the box, it’s not optimized for how AI-driven search works today.
In this guide, I’ll show you how to future-proof your WordPress site by aligning your structure, content, and technical setup with what large language models actually understand and cite.
Before we talk about how to do it right, let’s talk about the strategy that’s finally running out of road.
For literal decades, site owners have spun up content sites that were never designed for people, only for ad revenue. These sites weren’t meant to inform or help – just rank well enough to earn the click and display the ad.
Unfortunately, WordPress made this model wildly scalable. It almost instantly became the go-to tool for anyone who wanted to launch dozens (or hundreds) of sites fast, slap on some AdSense, and rake in passive income – money for nothing and your clicks for free.
That model worked very well for a very long time. But (thankfully), that time has come to an end.
AI Overviews and answer engines aren’t surfacing this kind of content anymore. Traffic is drying up. Cost per mille (CPM) is down. And trust – not volume – is the currency that search engines now prioritize.
Even if you’re trying to brute-force the model with paid placements or “citation strategies,” you’re competing with brands that have earned their authority over the years.
To be clear, WordPress is not and was never the problem. The problem is that people use it to scale the wrong kind of content.
If your content is created for algorithms instead of actual people, AI is going to pass you by. This new era of search doesn’t reward valueless content factories. It rewards clarity, “usefulness,” and trust.
Nothing in the rest of this article is going to fix that dying business model. If that’s what you’re here for, you’re already too late.
If, however, you’re focused on publishing something valuable – something worth reading, referencing, or citing – then please, keep reading.
WordPress is the most widely used content management system (CMS) for a reason. It’s flexible, extensible, and powerful when you use it right.
However, default settings and bloated themes won’t cut it in an AI-first environment. You have to optimize with clarity in mind.
Let’s start with your theme. Choose one that uses semantic HTML properly: , , , and a clear heading hierarchy.
Avoid themes and builders that generate “div soup.” Large language models rely on clean HTML to interpret relationships between elements. If your layout is a maze of
s and JavaScript, the model may miss the point entirely.
If the theme you love isn’t perfect, that’s fine. You can usually fix the markup with a child theme, custom template, or a little dev help. It’s worth the investment.
Pop-ups, tabs, and accordions might be fine for user experience, but they can obscure content from LLMs and crawlers.
If the content isn’t easily accessible in the rendered HTML – without requiring clicks, hovers, or JavaScript triggers to reveal – it may not be indexed or understood properly.
This can mean key product specs, FAQs, or long-form content go unnoticed by AI-driven search systems.
Compounding the problem is clutter in the Document Object Model (DOM).
Even if something is visually hidden from users, it might still pollute your document structure with unnecessary markup.
Minimize noisy widgets, auto-playing carousels, script-heavy embeds, or bloated third-party integrations that distract from your core content.
These can dilute the signal-to-noise ratio for both search engines and users.
If your theme or page builder leans too heavily on these elements, consider simplifying the layout or reworking how key content is presented.
Replacing JavaScript-heavy tabs with inline content or anchor-linked jump sections is one simple, crawler-friendly improvement that preserves UX while supporting AI discoverability.
WordPress SEO plugins are most often associated with schema, and schema markup is helpful, but its value has shifted in the era of AI-driven search.
Today’s large language models don’t need schema to understand your content. But that doesn’t mean schema is obsolete.
In fact, it can act as a helpful guidepost – especially on sites with less-than-perfect HTML structure (which, let’s be honest, describes most websites).
It helps surface key facts and relationships more reliably, and in some cases, makes the difference between getting cited and getting skipped.
Modern SEO tools do more than just generate structured data. They help you manage metadata, highlight cornerstone content, and surface author information – all of which play a role in how AI systems assess trust and authority.
Just don’t make the mistake of thinking you can “add E-E-A-T” with a plugin toggle. John Mueller has said as much at Search Central Live NYC in March of this year.
What author schema can do, however, is help search engines and LLMs connect your content to your wider body of work. That continuity is where E-E-A-T becomes real.
Finally, consider adding a WordPress SEO plugin that can generate a Table of Contents.
While it’s useful for readers, it also gives LLMs a clearer understanding of your page’s hierarchy, helping them extract, summarize, and cite your content more accurately.
Whether you’re creating posts in the Block Editor, Classic Editor, or using a visual page builder like Elementor or Beaver Builder, the way you structure your content matters more than ever.
AI doesn’t crawl content like a bot. It digests it like a reader. To get cited in an AI Overview or answer box, your content needs to be easy to parse and ready to lift.
Start by using clear section headings (your H2s and H3s) and keeping each paragraph focused on a single idea.
If you’re explaining steps, use numbered lists. If you’re comparing options, try a table. The more predictable your structure, the easier it is for a language model to extract and summarize it.
And don’t bury your best insight in paragraph seven – put your core point near the top. LLMs are just like people: They get distracted. Leading with a clear summary or TL;DR increases your odds of inclusion.
Finally, don’t forget language cues. Words like “Step 1,” “Key takeaway,” or “In summary” help AI interpret your structure and purpose. These phrases aren’t just good writing; they’re machine-readable signals that highlight what matters.
WordPress gives you powerful tools to communicate credibility – if you’re taking advantage of them.
E-E-A-T (which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) isn’t just an acronym; it’s the bar AI systems use to decide whether your content is worth citing.
WordPress gives you plenty of opportunities to show you’re the real deal.
Start by making your authors visible. Include a bio, credentials, and a link to an author archive.
If your theme doesn’t support it, add a plugin or customize the layout.
Schema markup for authors helps, too, but remember, it doesn’t magically give you E-E-A-T. What it does is help LLMs connect your byline to your broader body of work across the web.
From there, build out internal signals of authority. Link your content together in meaningful ways.
Surface cornerstone pieces that demonstrate depth on a topic. These internal relationships show both users and machines that your site knows what it’s talking about.
Finally, keep it fresh. Outdated content is less likely to be included in AI answers.
Regular content audits, scheduled refreshes, and clear update timestamps all help signal to LLMs (and humans) that you’re active and credible.
At this point, it should be clear that WordPress can absolutely thrive in an AI-first search environment – but only if you treat it like a platform, not a shortcut.
Success with AI Overviews, answer engines, and conversational search doesn’t come from tricking algorithms. It comes from helping language models truly understand what your content is about – and why you’re the one worth citing.
That means focusing on structure. On clarity. On authorship. On consistency. That means building not just for Google’s crawler, but for the models that generate answers people actually read.
So, yes, SEO has changed. If you’re using WordPress, you’re already holding the right tool. Now, it’s just a matter of wielding it well.
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Featured Image: Roman Samborskyi/Shutterstock
Accenture Song is in for change, as its leader and creative power, David Droga, steps upstairs to the parent company Accenture’s corner office as vice chair. Droga, considered by many to be one of the last of a generation of creative agency leaders, is being replaced by Ndidi Oteh, who’s been running Accenture Song’s Americas unit for the last 17 months but is a longtime Accenture vet.
The immediate question is how will Droga’s absence from Song affect that company’s creative chops? For one, Nick Law, a creative exec who joined Song a little over three years after a career at R/GA, Publicis and Apple, becomes creative strategy and experience lead following his stint as creative chairperson.
Droga told the Wall Street Journal he’s “happy to catch my breath, because I’ve been sprinting since I was 18.” He was not made available for comment, nor was Oteh.
Some thoughts on what his ascendancy means:
In some ways, the skillset and rolodex Droga brought to the job isn’t as necessary in today’s Accenture Song, which has evolved its focus from the creative elements of marketing to a more CRM and customer-data focus. Which makes sense for a company that’s primarily a consultancy.
As Giacomo Lee, editor in chief of ERP Today, wrote back in December about the company, “Accenture Interactive’s rebranding to Accenture Song in 2022 is more than just a rebrand job, and a clear pointer to Accenture’s ambitions in CRM and customer data.” He cited the acquisitions of Unlimited (a customer engagement agency), Mindcurv, (a German digital experience and data analytics company) and The Lumery, an Australian martech consultancy), among others.
Although Droga could hardly be blamed for it, one need not look much farther than the marketing fail that was Jaguar’s rebrand, which not only never showed the car it was trying to markets, but was also deemed out of touch with its garish colors and androgynous figures. The resulting fallout led the luxury auto brand to begin looking for a new creative agency. If anything, it falls on Law’s shoulders — but he just got a promotion, so the buck didn’t stop with him either. Accenture Song remains the owner of Droga5 and a host of other creative shops, including some that fall under Unlimited’s wing. To balance the possible loss of Jaguar, Accenture Song did pick up creative duties for British window maker Velux Group. Not exacly the same cachet client – but maybe that’s not a priority for Accenture.
“The big question to be asked is what value Accenture places on creativity… and wasn’t that always the question?” posed Chris Mele, who leads creative and design shop Siberia. “It’s one thing to keep it going when you have an undisputed legend waving that flag, but what will it look like three years from his exit, and will clients that value creative excellence give them a look?”
All the press coverage Droga’s move got cited revenue growth from $12.5 billion in 2021 to $19 billion last year, which is an uptick any agency holding company would envy. And Ndidi Oteh gets to oversee that, given her 13 years of experience at Accenture.
She may not be a household name in the agency community today, but she most likely will be. For now, her reputation is said to be collaborative, according to that same press coverage. And besides hiccups like the Jaguar disaster, by most measures, Accenture Song is still chugging along in a competitive world.
“I do think Accenture has done a really great job integrating companies that do exceptional, creative and design work – for us seeing Work & Co acquired was eye opening,” said Siberia’s Mele.
But another agency CEO who declined to speak for attribution, described Droga as the Chuck Norris of the agency world — and that without him, Accenture Song is in danger of becoming “a rudderless environment.”
https://digiday.com/?p=579676
