Once the tile-like grid systems were set up, Kevin introduced printed elements to the identity, taking influence from the flour on bakers benches that stop dough sticking to surfaces. Creating a halftone image treatment for assets, the designer transformed Wims tasty images of baked goods into a set of “grainy textures that evoke the look of flour scattered on a surface”, he says. For the typographic elements that overlay these images on bakery signs, menus, coasters and posters, Kevin used a custom typeface MM Sign, developed in collaboration with Daniel Wenzel at Mockup.Maison. “Its clean, neutral letterforms provided a strong foundation for adding more expressive graphic elements”, Kevin adds.
The imagery wasn’t the only thing that has ties to the kitchen; the brand’s new logo neatly fits into the curved shape of a croissant. “People really seem to enjoy the croissant logo”, Kevin says, but he assures us, although it looks “straightforward”, this typographic solution actually took dozens of explorations and sketches to get right. From the very beginning of the project the designer was intrigued by “the symmetry in the word Wim”, and knew he wanted to do something with this visual trick. Although he wasn’t initially expecting an arrangement of letters that naturally formed a croissant, it’s now become a playful visual reference that’s become closely associated with the brand.
Now the ovens are up and running at Wim, the bakery has opened to much local fanfare and the designer often sees people around Zurich sporting the brand’s merchandise, shirts and tote bags that he designed for customers to get their hands on alongside baked goods. “It’s always fulfilling to see people wear your designs in everyday life”, he ends. “It shows that the merchandise is more than just a logo on a shirt; it’s a thoughtfully integrated part of the brand identity.”
Google’s martin Splitt and John Mueller discussed how long it takes for SEO to have an effect. Google’s John Mueller explained that there are different levels of optimization and that some have a more immediate effect than other more complex changes.
Some SEOs like to make blanket statements that SEO is all about links. Others boast that their SEO work can have dramatic effect in relatively little time. And it turns out that those kinds of statements really depend on the actual work that was done.
Google’s John Mueller said that a site starting out from virtually zero optimization to some basic optimization may see near immediate ranking changes in Google.
John Mueller started this part of the conversation:
“I guess another question that I sometimes hear with regards to hiring an SEO is, how long does it take for them to make visible changes?”
Martin Splitt responded:
“Yeah. How long does it take? I’m pretty sure it’s not instant. If you say it takes like a week or a couple of weeks to pick things up, is that the reasonable time horizon or is it longer?”
John answered with the really old “it depends” line which is kind of overdone. But in this case it really does depend on multiple factors related to the scale of the work being done which in turn influences how long it will take for Google to index and then recalculate rankings. He said if it’s something simple then it won’t take Google much time. But if it’s a lot of changes then it may take significantly longer.
John’s explanation:
“I think, to speak in SEO lingo, it depends. Some changes are easy to pick up quickly, like simple text changes on a page. They just have to be recrawled and reprocessed and that happens fairly quickly.
But, if you make bigger, more strategic changes on a website, then sometimes that just takes a long time.”
Mueller then says that a good SEO should monitor how the changes they made are affecting the rankings. This can be a little tricky because some changes will cause an immediate ranking boost that will last for a few days and then drop. My opinion, from my experience, is that an unshakeable top ranking is generally possible if there’s strong word of mouth and other external signals that tell Google that the content is trustworthy and high quality.
Here’s what John Mueller said:
“I think that’s something where a good SEO should be able to help monitor the progress along there. So it shouldn’t be that they go off and make changes and say, ‘Okay, now you have to keep paying me for the next year until we wait what happens.’ They should be able to tell you what is happening, what the progress is, give you some input on the different things that they’re doing regularly. But it is something that is more of a longer term thing.”
Mueller doesn’t go into details about what the hypothetical SEO is “doing regularly” but in my opinion it’s always helpful to be doing basic promotion that boils down to telling people that this content is out there, measuring how people respond to it, getting feedback about it and then making changes or improvement based on those changes.
For content sites, a great way to get immediate user feedback is to enable a moderated comment section in which only comments that are approved can show up. I have received a lot of positive feedback from readers on some of my content sites from what’s in the comments. It’s also useful to make it easy for users to contact the publisher from any page of the site, whether it’s an ecommerce site or an informational blog. User feedback is absolute gold.
Mueller continued his answer:
“I think if you have a website that has never done anything with SEO, probably you’ll see a nice big jump in the beginning as you ramp up and do whatever the best practices are. At some point, it’ll kind of be slow and regular more from there on.”
Martin Splitt expressed how this part about waiting and monitoring requires patience and Mueller agreed, saying:
“I think being patient is good. But you also need someone like an SEO as a partner to give you updates along the way and say, ‘Okay, we did all of these things,’ and they can list them out and tell you exactly what they did. ‘These things are going to take a while, and I can show you when Google crawls, we can follow along to see like what is happening there. Based on that, we can give you some idea of when to expect changes.’”
Google’s John Mueller explained that the time it takes for search optimizations to show results depends on the complexity of changes made, with simple updates being processed faster and large-scale changes requiring more time. He emphasized that good SEO isn’t just about making changes because it also involves tracking how those changes affect rankings, communicating progress clearly, and continuous work.
I suggested that user response to content is an important form of feedback because it helps site owners understand what is resonating well with users and where the site is falling short. User feedback, in my opinion, should be a part of the SEO process because Google tracks user behavior signals that indicate a site is trustworthy and relevant to users.
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Khosro
Product messaging works when it creates recognition — when the reader thinks, “this is for me.” That moment sparks belief and begins to shape how they see your product in the context of their world.
This is the desired outcome of effective marketing. The brain processes a familiar scenario faster than an abstract one. When a message mirrors the audience’s situation, belief takes less effort and occurs with less mental friction.
Vague messaging forces the audience to work. The brain scans for relevance fast, and anything complicated to interpret gets filtered out. One-size-fits-all phrasing only increases that friction.
When messaging feels hard to process, belief stalls. That friction gets subconsciously tied to lower trust. Specificity removes that strain by lowering the cognitive lift required to understand your message. In a competitive space, where every second of research matters, you’ll have to bypass writing for approval and instead write only for the audience.
A message only works when it matches the buyer’s frame — their priorities, concerns and perceptions. If it feels built for someone else, it might as well not exist.
Dig deeper: If your value prop sounds like everyone else’s, you’ve already lost
You have complete control over:
Use that control to your strategic advantage. These are the places where segmented messaging should be unapologetically specific and tailored directly to the target audience.
Each asset should mirror the recipient’s world. Speak in scenarios with real context, not statements. Reflect on a familiar pain, task or priority and show you fully understand their status quo. The goal is to eliminate the translation work in the reader’s mind. The faster they connect the dots, the faster belief forms.
Think of the entire chain: targeted ad, message-matched landing page, scenario-driven download, follow-up email that speaks the same language.
When done right, the message moves sequentially and compounds belief at every touchpoint. That is where you have to expand your messaging guidelines to respect the audiences you wish to attract.
The homepage and core website pages need to clarify the “what” of your product and answer the question of “who are you?” This is your anchor. From there, provide a path for people to go deeper in a way that reflects their context rather than your own.
Most homepage copy tries to say everything and ends up meaning nothing. It’s packed with once-innovative buzzwords that, through repetition, have turned into noise. Less is more in this situation. Be clear and concise first, and then guide users to relevance. That can take the form of:
Broader surfaces like your home page, LinkedIn profile and others require thoughtful architecture. When people see themselves, they move forward. When they don’t, they leave.
The decision to segment your message should come from the audience’s reality, not from internal assumptions or arbitrary personalization goals. Segmented messaging brings clarity, but it also brings organizational overhead. Not every surface needs to be broken apart, and not every campaign needs a unique narrative.
You change your messaging when:
You hold the message when:
Effective segmentation begins with recognizing when the context calls for it. Avoid fragmenting your messaging until you have a plan that supports clarity, cohesion and execution across the organization.
Failing to change your messaging where needed leads to vague value props, poor sales handoffs and weak campaign performance. But changing it too early — or without alignment — creates internal confusion and slows execution.
The balance lies in deciding where to segment meaningfully and how to maintain coherence as you do. Every detail matters.
Dig deeper: 5 tips for balancing ‘push’ and ‘pull’ in content marketing
ABM campaigns, outbound cadences and things like SDR talk tracks must speak the language of the segment. Remember, familiarity creates fluency. Every cold email is a test of belief. If the message fails to resonate instantly, the moment is gone.
Sales messaging must authentically create recognition. If it doesn’t, the result isn’t only internal inconsistency. The reality means lost deals, confused teams and brand erosion that compounds with every touchpoint.
You need to overdeliver with context that:
That means mapping pain to product in a way that feels obvious to foster comprehension. If a prospect has to ask, “How does this apply to me?” the message fails, and the value disappears.
This only works when marketing and sales are working in sync.
Sales shouldn’t improvise segment-specific stories from scratch, and marketing shouldn’t ship assets that read like internal brochures, applicable to anyone and everyone.
Each asset, whether a case study, cold email, leave-behind or explainer video, should aim to earn recognition from a specific portion of your total addressable market (TAM). That only happens when teams build, test and refine together.
Breaking messaging across segments requires structure. Start with a central narrative that defines the product and what it helps people accomplish. From there, build modular messaging by segment, industry, role and use case.
Chaos begins when messaging is ad hoc, improvised or misaligned across teams. This manifests as inconsistent emails, mismatched campaign copy, outdated decks and broken expectations between marketing and sales.
To break messaging without breaking your team, build your internal structure around three core elements:
Document everything. Train on it. Revisit it. Message chaos is rarely due to evil intent. It’s usually due to a lack of clarity, ownership or visible internal distribution.
When messaging lives in a centralized system and follows a modular structure like this, teams move faster and execute cleanly while learning and fine-tuning along the way. Everyone then knows how to speak with the same core conviction while adapting to the context of the moment.
This is how marketing teams can equip those in the organization to react confidently in real time without diluting the perceived value of the brand or product (or both).
Dig deeper: How to align sales and marketing for revenue growth
Great messaging works when belief multiplies across every surface your audience touches. When each asset feels made for them, trust builds — and trust drives decisions.
The multiplier effect comes from consistency across specificity. When each channel speaks the same language in the proper context, it compounds the message. That’s when campaigns convert faster, sales cycles shrink and brand perception shifts from noise to “I understand this.”
Contrary to popular habits, you won’t scale by sending a more general message to more people in your TAM. Strong messaging and positioning scale by helping the right people say yes faster because every touchpoint becomes a reinforcing mechanism instead of a mental reset you’ll have to recover from.
Remember that when the message misses the mark, it doesn’t land as neutral. More realistically, it risks creating the false perception that your product isn’t relevant.
That quiet disqualification happens fast and often without a second look. Strong segmentation with associated messaging can counter this by removing the ambiguity that turns curiosity into dismissal.
Clarity delivered specifically and purposefully creates cognitive momentum. Proper messaging segmentation is how you meet someone when they’re ready to listen with the exact message only they need to hear.
Contributing authors are invited to create content for MarTech and are chosen for their expertise and contribution to the search community. Our contributors work under the oversight of the editorial staff and contributions are checked for quality and relevance to our readers. MarTech is owned by Semrush. Contributor was not asked to make any direct or indirect mentions of Semrush. The opinions they express are their own.
The Sennheiser MKE 200 is a neat, compact directional mic that’s perfect for vlogging too.
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OpenAI has quietly added Shopify as a third-party search partner to help power their shopping search, which shows shopping-rich results. The addition of Shopify was not formally announced, but quietly tucked into OpenAI ChatGPT search documentation.
Aleyda Solís (LinkedIn profile) recently noticed that OpenAI had updated their Search documentation to add Shopify to the list of third party search providers.
She posted:
“Ecommerce sites: I’ve found that Shopify is listed along with Bing as a ChatGPT third-party search provider! OpenAI added Shopify along with Bing as a third-party search provider in their ChatGPT Search documentation on May 15, 2025; a couple of weeks after their enhanced shopping experience was announced on April 28.”
OpenAI shopping search is returning results from a variety of platforms. For example, a search for hunting dog supplies returns sites hosted on Shopify but also Turbify (formerly Yahoo Stores)
The rich results with images were sourced from Shopify and Amazon merchants for this specific query.
At least one of the shopping results listed in the Recommended Sellers is a merchant hosted on the Turbify ecommerce platform:
OpenAI recently rolled out shopping features for ChatGPT Search. Products are listed like search results and sometimes as rich results with images and other shopping related information like review stars.
ChatGPT Search uses images and structured metadata related to prices and product description, presumably Schema structured data although it’s not explicitly stated. ChatGPT may generate product titles, descriptions, and reviews based on the data received from third-party websites and sometimes may generate summarized reviews.
Merchants are ranked according to how the merchant data is received from third-party data providers, which at this point includes Bing and Shopify.
Ecommerce stores that aren’t on Shopify can apply to have their products included in OpenAI’s shopping results. Stores that want to opt in must not be opted out of OpenAI’s web crawler, OAI-SearchBot .
Featured Image by Shutterstock/kung_tom
WPP has been flirting with the idea of becoming an “AI-driven platform business” for some time – mostly in earnings calls and on strategy decks. Now, with a new CEO incoming, the holdco might finally be ready to turn the tagline into a throughline.
That job now falls to Cindy Rose, a longtime Microsoft executive and current chief of operating officer of its global enterprise business. She’ll take over from Mark Read on September 1st (though Read will stick around until the year’s end).
When she does, she won’t be walking in blind. Rose has been a non-executive director on WPP’s board since 2019, so she knows the scale of the ambition, and the sprawl she’s inheriting.
“Cindy has supported the digital transformation of large enterprises around the world – including embracing AI to create new customer experiences, business models and revenue streams,” Philip Jansen, chair of WPP.
Translation: she’s built for the kind of transformation WPP keeps promising.
It’s the same line of thinking Kirk McDonald, former CEO of GroupM North America, floated back in 2022: the idea that the modern agency would look more like an enterprise platform than a service shop. Whether CMOs ever fully buy into that is still a stretch, but the fact that is even a conversation speaks volumes about where the holdco business is headed. And it’s why WPP’s board is betting on someone who’s played that enterprise game before.
“Her expertise in this landscape will be hugely valuable to WPP as the industry navigates fundamental changes and macroeconomic uncertainty,” said Jansen. “Cindy’s appointment follows a thorough selection process that considered both internal and external candidates.”
A British-American law graduate with a track record running the operations of major corporations, Rose is an outsider to the advertising world — but an insider at WPP, where she’s been a non-executive director for six years.
“This isn’t a situation where someone external is going to come in and find loads of skeletons. She knows what she’s getting into,” said Ruben Schreurs, CEO of Ebiquity.
Following managing director roles at Vodafone and Disney, Rose worked for tech giant Microsoft for nine years, serving as its U.K. CEO between 2016 and 2020.
“I think she brings a really interesting background – entertainment, tech, data – which ticks all the boxes,” said Ryan Kangisser, managing partner at media consultancy Mediasense.
Revenue at Microsoft’s British arm surged during her tenure, rising from £2.14 billion ($2.9 billion) in 2018 to £2.85 billion ($3.87 billon) in 2019 and £4.03bILLION ($5.47 billion) in 2020, according to tax records published by the U.K.’s Companies House. That role saw her dubbed “the most powerful woman in the British tech sector” by the business press, before she was promoted first to Western European president and later the COO role at its global enterprise business, in 2023.
“It’s tough to leave such an extraordinary organization, especially now in the middle innings of the AI transition,” she wrote in a Linkedin post addressed to her Microsoft colleagues. “But some opportunities are so special and unique that you just have to go for it.”
This isn’t just about the names on her CV. Rose’s past as an operations chief marks her out from the ranks of holdco leaders that have graduated from agency CEO positions.
Despite years of agency consolidation and internal mergers, WPP remains in operational upheaval. Its overhaul of GroupM (now WPP Media) and AI market stall were themselves only unveiled some six weeks ago.
From that perspective, bringing on an operations-minded chief to finish the job makes more sense than hiring another would-be visionary. “I think it’ll be an interesting injection of new thinking in this industry,” said Kangisser.
Schreurs suggested that operations would remain part of Rose’s focus once she formally takes the reins in the autumn. “The agency networks are looking for ways to streamline, and that happens through consolidation and through automation. My guess is that that will be a key part of her focus,” he said.
But Rose’s announcement comes following a bruising period for WPP. Just yesterday, the company released a dire trading update cutting its expected 2025 organic revenue from -3% to -5%; Read cited “intensifying” macroeconomic headwinds and lack of new business pitches. And last month, Barclays downgraded its rating to “underweight”, illustrating investors’ ebbing confidence in the group’s prospect.
Much of this pain has been felt at WPP’s media arm, the once-reliable engine that’s now sputtering. It’s been in the firing line, losing marquee accounts like Mars and Coca-Cola over the last 18 months. It’s been a reminder that even the most lucrative parts of the business aren’t immune when the market shifts.
“It feels like a really solid fit, but she’s obviously got her work cut out,” concluded Kangisser.
There are so many photographers who play around with the form, from ambient textures such as long exposure, to bokeh, to alternative photographers who use “camera-less” techniques such as cyanotypes. But what London-based photographer and printmaker Riya Panwar does goes even further – she asks the question “can photography become a living organism?”. Drawn to processes that feel alive, Riya chooses canvases in the forms of apples, leaves and soil. Creating shadowy printed scenes on plants and fruit, Riya questions the relationship between human creation and natural creation, using thought-provoking photographic processes to bake experiences of her life onto nature. “My work doesn’t focus on documenting the natural world, it collaborates with it. I am part of that nature, just as you are,” says Riya. “There is a symbiotic interdependence that must be acknowledged, where soil, plants, bacteria, fungi, and even time itself become co-creators in the work.”
Riya is inspired by a community built around the London Alternative Photography Collective, who encourage experimentation in the form. “Nature and sustainability guide my approach, not as visual trends, but as mindsets,” says Riya. “They don’t always appear instantly or visibly; they arrive slowly, when the vision aligns.” Riya can take the cliché of an eye and transpose it into the body of a leaf, giving it a new lease of life, an act of humanisation that is nearly impossible to dismiss. With this, the canvas becomes difficult to ignore as a living form, and even if the material degrades, the work lives on in the ritualistic approach. One project that encapsulates this is Germination, which reflects on the idea of growth, literally and metaphorically. In other words, how long it takes to “become good”. Whereas many see the final product – the canvas that has turned lush and green, Riya sees what came before: the hesitation, the patience, the quiet unfolding. This isn’t photography in the strictest sense, where the final product is all that matters, it’s photography literally rooted in the process.
TikTok has denied a Reuters report claiming it’s building a standalone U.S. app with a separate algorithm.
NBCU’s upcoming Big Game is scoring big ad dollars.
According to several media buyers familiar with negotiations, NBCUniversal’s Super Bowl inventory is already climbing to $8 million for a 30-second unit.
Earlier this year, multiple outlets reported that NBCU was initially asking for around $7 million for a 30-second spot in Super Bowl 60, airing on February 8, 2026. However, due to demand, the company has already reached its cap for the number of spots that were available for advertisers to buy during the upfront season.
Three buyers confirmed to ADWEEK that NBCU is now looking for $8 million for a 30-second ad and an $8 million match across its other sports properties, including offerings like the NBA and the 2026 Winter Olympics.
In addition to the Super Bowl on Feb. 8, NBCU entered this year’s upfront touting a February that also includes the Winter Olympics (starts Feb. 6) and the NBA All-Star Game (weekend of Feb. 13), with all of those tentpoles receiving “a lot of interest,” Karen Kovacs, NBCU’s president of advertising and partnerships, previously told ADWEEK.
“There will be a fair number of clients—a pretty decent chunk of clients—that are paying $8 million a spot and matching that dollar volume in other sports with NBC,” one buyer said, speaking on the condition of anonymity.
According to a second buyer, NBCU is creating a list of advertisers that want to get in on its offer, and if advertisers are willing to pay more than $8 million for an ad and an $8 million match, they’ll be higher on that list.
For Super Bowl 59, Fox also initially priced ads around $7 million for 30-second units. However, after Fox had a successful upfront, more than 10 advertisers dropped out of the game due to a variety of difficulties, including the California wildfires. The openings led to a waiting list of advertisers willing to pay $8 million to get in the Big Game—a game that notably became the most-viewed Super Bowl ever. Fox also reportedly required a spending match across its portfolio for waitlisted advertisers.
However, this year’s demand caused NBCU to reach the $8 million figure more quickly than expected. A third buyer noted that the company is already in discussions with the NFL for additional inventory, something which Fox added last year as well.
NBCU did not respond to a request for comment by press time. The NFL declined to comment.
Fox currently holds the record for Super Bowl ad revenue. With the help of its $8 million ad units for Super Bowl 59, the company announced in February that it reached $800 million in gross revenue from advertising sales across its platforms.
Okay, it’s happened. I’m fully getting that Prime Day itch that comes after a couple of days of covering it – I want to actually buy something. I’ve had my head turned by many different products, but I’m reluctant to actually spend any money because, well, I don’t really have any.
So I’m being sensible and sticking to a budget of $20. Obviously in the world of many of these shouty deals posts, this won’t get me very far, so I’m making sure it counts by buying something that will actually add value to my life. I’ve narrowed it down to the following. (I wish, though I could afford some of these kitchen design classics… Or a Nintendo Switch, come to that)
