This week’s second-quarter earnings calls featured several big brand bosses pointing to their companies’ ability not just to spend advertising dollars, but spend them well. Starbucks chief Brian Nicol, for example, devoted time during the coffee chain’s earnings call to praise his CMO Tressie Lieberman for her marshalling of its
Curry Barker’s Obsession took the box office by storm, becoming the highest-grossing film made under $1 million. But with such a humble budget, the team behind the terrifying horror had to get creative to get under audiences’ skin. That’s where this ingenious makeup hack came in. Using carefully placed shadows
Y Combinator’s Diana Hu recently interviewed Boris Cherny, the creator and head of Claude Code at Anthropic. Cherny said that Claude Code is more capable than is commonly understood, saying that prompt engineering is largely not important. Given that Claude doesn’t require “overthinking,” he suggested Claude Code users would be
As the largest agency holding companies enact sweeping layoffs and consolidate, Stagwell CEO Mark Penn sees new opportunity. “We’ve achieved something that nobody really has achieved in 50 or 100 years,” Penn told ADWEEK, “which is to form a real competitor company at scale.” Stagwell posted 6% net revenue growth
Google is rolling out a Search Console setting that lets you pull your content out of AI Overviews, AI Mode, and Discover’s AI features without leaving Search. That’s a choice we haven’t had before, and regulators in the UK now require Google to offer it. Whether to use it is
Synthetic audiences promise marketers faster customer research by simulating buyer responses using AI. But many models share the same blind spot: they rely on demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data that describe buyers, but not how they make decisions. I kept running into that gap while working on my book, “The
If you’re in any kind of creative circle, we’re certain you’ve come across an episode of Taboo on the Bus on your feed by London-based writer and content creator Zara McIntosh (A.K.A @whatzaraloves). The queen of physical media and thoughtful takes on pop culture, the creatives viral Tiktok series where
Google’s John Mueller and Martin Splitt discussed what happens when spammers abuse website search functions to create thousands of spammy search pages. They said that Google begins to treat those pages as hacked. Website Search Spam And Quality Issues Virtually every website has a search function, and something that’s not
The retail industry is facing a significant surge in legal scrutiny as “phantom discount” practices come under fire. In recent weeks, major global brands — including Lululemon and Nike — have been the subject of lawsuits alleging deceptive pricing strategies, where products are marketed with dubious “regular” prices that make
