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Who Won, Who Cut and What Comes Next in Advertising

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The GRADIENT

Who Won, Who Cut and What Comes Next in Advertising

What AI Visibility Means for Marketers

TL;DR AI Visibility has changed the role of marketing and comms pros across paid, earned, owned, and shared media. It’s no longer just about optimizing for SEO with keywords—now we have to create content that AI finds credible enough to cite by ensuring our four streams work as a system, boosting credibility. Here’s what communications

Rank And AI Citation Aren’t The Same Number

The length gap is real and well-documented, with some measurements describing ChatGPT prompts running an order of magnitude longer than a typical Google query by character count. None of that tells you what to do on Monday. The part that should change how you read your own reporting is not the length of the input;

How to sustain creative testing without adding headcount

Your performance marketing metrics scream for help. Ad fatigue sets in across your social channels, and algorithms demand fresh visual assets. If you don’t feed them immediately, acquisition costs spike. This is the velocity trap of B2C marketing. Winning today requires a relentless volume of creative experimentation, yet building a massive in-house team to handle

Like a sad Lana Del Rey song, Louise Laborie’s comics illustrate a quiet, neon Americana

Paris-based comic book author Louise Laborie’s illustrated worlds ooze with quiet sadness. The creator of the graphic novels Rock‘n’roll Suicide and Morgane Fox is an expert in adapting a familiar, cozy melancholic Americana through neon light spilling out onto streets and headlights twinkling like firebugs on a vast, dark highway. It’s all down to the

Is Google Fixing B2B Marketing?

This post was sponsored by Expert Callers. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. Why did my inbound traffic drop suddenly? Are B2B leads dropping everywhere? Is AI Overviews hurting B2B leads? For two decades, the logic was simple: more traffic meant more leads, more leads meant more revenue. In 2026, that logic

The new World Cup SEO playbook

This week’s Media Briefing looks at why the World Cup is no longer the easy search traffic win it once was, and how publishers are adjusting their strategies to pull people in. The new World Cup playbook The World Cup used to be a guaranteed search traffic bonanza for publishers. In the age of AI

This controller is a cheat code for digital artists – and only $84.99

Father’s Day gifts can often fall into the same boring and bland categories – slippers, a new mug, a whimsical BBQ apron, a screwdriver set, blah blah. But if you want to get your tech-savvy dad something he might actually use, let me introduce you to TourBox. This company specialises in custom software controllers designed

Google Must Give Notice Before Significant Ranking Changes

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority has introduced two new conduct requirements for Google’s general search services, one covering how organic results are ranked and another covering search data portability. Under the fair ranking requirement, Google must rank organic results using objective and non-discriminatory criteria, including in AI Overviews, but not sponsored results. It also

Automotive Illustration Collection

Cars have been one of the recurring themes throughout my illustration career. Whether I’m creating artwork for a luxury car show on the shores of Lake Como or visualising emerging technologies such as hydrogen-powered vehicles and clean energy infrastructure, it’s a subject I never tire of exploring. Here is a selection of automotive illustrations from

The Integrated Search Brief That Aligns SEO, PPC & Content In The AI Search Era

No matter what their goal-based starting point, SEO, PPC, and content teams often work with different priorities and from different inputs. Channel and content resource work separation isn’t new, but the pressure has increased as search results have become even more complex. Depending on the query, Google can include AI Overviews, text ads, shopping results,

Adobe brings GEO to CX Enterprise with Adobe Brand Visibility

Adobe today announced a new solution to help businesses to ensure their brand is visible, trusted, and chosen across AI surfaces. Called Adobe Brand Visibility, the product is part of Adobe CX Enterprise, an agentic AI system built to simplify how businesses manage the customer lifecycle, from acquisition to prospect engagement, to driving conversion and

Studio Nari wordmark gives Threads a voice of its own

The wordmark cements itself in the physical due to its angular, sculpted form, based on the strategic concept underpinning the new brand, which Nari calls the “Trending Chisel”. Lauren explains: “We became interested in how culture moves through emphasis, highlights and fragments of conversation, and wanted to translate that behaviour directly into the wordmark and

Bing Rolls Out AI Citation Share In Webmaster Tools

Microsoft is adding four new features to the Bing Webmaster Tools AI Performance dashboard preview: Intents, Topics, Citation Share, and Compare. All four are beginning to roll out globally. Three of the features were previewed at SEO Week. This is the official preview rollout. What’s New Citation Share shows your site’s percentage of all citations

Future of TV Briefing: Fox finds its programmatic identify in Roku

Netflix’s M&A activity, Paramount’s WBD deal status, Bravo’s upfront attraction and more Fox + Roku Well, that’s one way to modernize an advertising business. In acquiring Roku, Fox stands to shore up two of its biggest weaknesses in today’s TV – and increasingly streaming – ad market: a dearth of first-party data and a fledgling

Shameless or honest? Epic divides Unreal Engine users with AI concept art

Epic has slowly been integrating AI for some time now, but for many creatives, it’s still a touchy subject. From scepticism to outright hatred, many have continued to express their dislike for the game company’s embrace of AI tools, despite Epic’s positive transparency around the controversial topic. Doubling down despite the backlash, Epic recently shared

Better AI Outputs & SEO Results

Most SEO teams already use AI to write content. Almost none of them can explain the system behind it. In a recent SEJ webinar, Darrell Tyler, Senior Manager of Organic Growth at CallRail, shared a stat from his own conversations across the industry: roughly 85% of the SEOs he talks to use AI for content,

Shortlist Revealed for ADWEEK Media Plan of the Year 2026

ADWEEK can reveal the finalists for the 2026 ADWEEK Media Plan of the Year awards. For over 20 years, these awards spotlight the media strategy behind the most recognizable campaigns […]

The 4 PR and Marketing Metrics that Matter for AI Visibility

Gini Dietrich reveals the 4 metrics that matter for AI visibility in 2026—and why impressions, reach, and AVEs won’t survive your next budget meeting. The post The 4 PR and Marketing Metrics that Matter for AI Visibility first appeared on Spin Sucks.

Which Protocol Spec Matters For Your Website

If you run a small merchant business and you have been searching for “agentic commerce protocol specification for small merchants,” you are looking for the wrong document. The right answer lives in your platform admin panel rather than in the spec. Agentic commerce protocols, ACP from OpenAI and Stripe, and UCP from Google and Shopify,

3 direct mail lessons for evaluating agentic commerce

Walk into any CMO’s office this quarter, and you’ll find a stack of vendor proposals built on 12-month payback periods, with vendors quite confident about year one and a little less sure about year three. This is where a successful pilot turns into technical and operational debt. The agentic commerce pitches start to blur together.

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