Blueprint | The Gradient

Who Won, Who Cut and What Comes Next in Advertising

Featured Stories

The GRADIENT

Who Won, Who Cut and What Comes Next in Advertising

WPP is testing a buyer agent, but it’s bigger bet is on governance

Marketers are nervous about agentic media buying. WPP is betting governance is the answer. Which is why alongside the launch of its Buyer Agent for Video yesterday (June 18), it unveiled a coalition of premium media owners including Disney, Netflix, NBCUniversal, Paramount and Fox as well as standards bodies IAB Tech Lab and Prebid.org. It

4 things you won’t learn in design school (but you really need to know)

Most design courses are good at teaching you how to make the technical stuff, like software, principles, and processes. What they’re often less good at is teaching you how to work, or manage a client relationship, or grapple with feedback that doesn’t make much sense because it’s come from someone with no creative background. These

Deindexing Reports Keep Coming, Google Sees Nothing Unusual

For about two months, business owners and SEO professionals have reported that pages have been removed from Google’s index without a clear explanation. The reports started in late April and have continued into June. In many of those reports, the affected pages had neither a manual action nor a crawl error. They moved into “excluded”

The Content Framework That Worked In 2019 Is Now Working Against You

Taylor Borden, an editor at LinkedIn, emailed me last week with a question she’s putting to a handful of writers for a special edition of her newsletter, The Work Shift. The premise was backed by data that shows entrepreneurship on LinkedIn is up nearly 70% year over year, more than six in 10 of those

What customers tell friends that marketers miss

The most important step before writing a marketing headline is understanding what drives your customer. Across all the performance marketing campaigns I’ve optimized for travel, retail, construction, medical, and health brands, the same pattern holds. Get to know the customer first, and the results follow. In today’s automated media environment, ad platforms now handle most

Animator Dhrutika Khimani rejects digital tools and favours the tactility of hands on experimentation

“There is probably a digital way to recreate many of these textures, but having the pieces exist physically and have a life beyond the screen makes the work feel more real to me,” says Mumbai-based animator and illustrator Dhrutika Khimani. The textures in question are some of the most pleasant you’ll ever see – quaint

Google Research Shows How AI Spam Can Be Detected

Google researchers published a new paper detailing a new way to catch spammers who are using generative AI to flood Google’s platform with spam and overwhelm its quality filters. While the research is focused on identifying video content spam, the techniques described could give an idea of methods that Google could use for web content

OpenAI expands ads manager and CPC to U.K.

Just six weeks after OpenAI’s ads manager was made widely available in the U.S., the AI company has now expanded the product to the U.K., in beta. The move makes the U.K. the fifth market with access to the self-serve platform, joining the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The mechanics are the same as

These new headphones are based on a cutting edge tuning target, and they might just be worth every cent of their $899 price

The world of audiophile headphones has been a tad dull in 2026… then one of the premier brands releases a new ‘affordable’ headphone based on cutting-edge preference targets, and I’m officially no longer bored! Dan Clark Audio is shaking up the sub-$900 market with the Aeon Core, a striking pair of closed-back planar magnetic headphones.

AI Citation Share Ships, New Data Doubts LLMS.txt – SEO Pulse

Welcome to Pulse: this week’s updates touch how you measure AI visibility, what to expect from llms.txt, and where the agentic web heads next. Microsoft shipped new AI citation tools, fresh data landed on llms.txt, Google and two coalitions published agent specs, and the UK set new ranking rules for Google Search. Here’s what matters

7 Things That Hit This Week: Meta’s Next Stab at Commerce, New Hires at Sephora and Lowe’s, and Pinterest Goes Deep on AI

Plus, how much it costs to sponsor a retail upfront.

WAVES OF GRAIN ? Germany

This series explores wind-swept grain fields near Hamburg, revealing fluid patterns, soft textures and shifting forms that transform familiar landscapes into abstract studies of movement, light and rhythm.

We Need To Change Our Approach To AI Prompt Tracking

As an industry, we’re still learning and working out how to approach AI prompt tracking effectively. A lot of tools have evolved in a short space of time, approaching the problem in the same way we have rank tracking. Rank tracking has always had some level of variance, but the levels of personalization have been

The real martech problem is not technology

After years of investment in martech platforms, customer data tools, analytics systems, and AI, most marketing leaders still believe their technology is falling short. According to a new survey from eClerx, 78% of marketing leaders say their martech stacks do not support their business goals despite significant investment over the past several years. At the

Nguyen Gobber’s poster series turns live music into noisy visuals

Each poster design by Nguyen Gobber is unique to that specific event and made in direct response to the evening’s performance, meaning they range drastically in colour, character, tone and type. The process usually starts with Hoang and David listening to the music and noting down any triggered associations, which become the foundation of the

Google, Microsoft Back Draft AI Agent Discovery Spec

Eleven companies, including Google, Microsoft, GitHub, and Hugging Face, have published Agentic Resource Discovery (ARD). The open specification sets out how AI agents find and verify tools, skills, and other agents across the web. The contributors released the draft spec on June 17, along with reference implementations from several of them. ARD is licensed under

Omnicom Media rolls out research showing the need for CTV advertising to change its ways

Have you ever binge-watched a show on a streamer that carries advertising, only to see the same unskippable ad over and over again — to the point where you swear you’ll never buy that product because they’ve hounded you and interrupted your content experience? Omnicom, via its Omnicom Media and Omnicom Production arms, plans to

This viral indie fantasy RPG is pulling millions of views by turning every character into a piece of illustrated fine art – and building an entire game world inside a single, hand-painted tower

Sovereign Tower goes in the opposite direction to many new games, RPGs, and even the best indies, by dropping grand scale for a single stage – a magical tower – and just letting the wonderfully elegant art direction do all the work. Developer Wild Wits’ art director, Gobert, uses line art and colour to draw

OpenAI Brings Improved Health Responses To Free ChatGPT

OpenAI says GPT-5.5 Instant, the default model for free ChatGPT users, now performs comparably to its frontier Thinking models on health questions. The claim is based on the company’s own health evaluations. Health is one of the categories drawing the most scrutiny over AI-generated answers. For example, a Guardian investigation reported that some Google AI Overviews

DISTANT

Distant draws from tidal zones and rock formations that have become somehow disconnected, shifted into something more unsettling, a world where colour has moved just far enough to suggest another atmosphere entirely. Rock pools hold light that feels borrowed from somewhere else. The landscapes remain familiar, but the energy running through them has been altered.

Join Our Newsletter

For more professional opportunities join our newsletter.