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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

CBS News’ Face the Nation to Air Interviews Unedited

On Friday, CBS News’ Face the Nation announced that it will now broadcast its live or live-to-tape interviews in their entirety. The network, in a statement to TVNewser, said the new policy, which was in response to “audience feedback,” was implemented to provide “greater transparency in our interviews.” Excluded from this procedure are interviews that

Hannah Knox’s paintings of collars, zips and buttoned up cardigans tell stories about the human condition

“I focused on a few of my striped shirts, adjusting the garment for each new painting and I realised that if I folded the shirt (as you might find it in a shop or online) then it could fit exactly the format of the canvas,” says Hannah. Creating a trompe l’oeil effect and becoming a

Why You Need Sprints, Not Checklists

There’s a lot that goes into SEO. And, now, more broadly into being found online and online visibility overall, whether we’re talking about an organic result in a search engine, an AI Overview, or through a large language model (LLM). With SEO being a discipline that often takes a long time (compared to ads and

Shoppers expect fewer discounts this holiday season

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Three out of four U.S. shoppers expect to pay more, according to Gartner’s report, “2025 Holiday Advertising and Consumer Trends Marketing Must Address.” The report said one in four Americans plan to spend less overall during the 2025 holiday season, and 40% expect

The backlash to Lady Gaga’s new music video proves AI paranoia has gone too far

These days, knowing how to spot AI generated content is indeed getting trickier. And the upshot is that just about everything can be accused of being artificially generated – which has perhaps never been better demonstrated than by the ridiculous response to Lady Gaga’s new music video. Gaga just dropped the music video for The

Your Login Pages May Be Hurting Your SEO Performance

Google’s Search Relations team says generic login pages can confuse indexing and hurt rankings. When many private URLs all show the same bare login form, Google may treat them as duplicates and show the login page in search. In a recent “Search Off the Record” episode, John Mueller and Martin Splitt explained how this happens

LGBTQ+ site Outsports grows revenue and audience by over 50%

Many LGBTQ+ publishers saw a slowdown in ad spend earlier this year, but one publisher is emerging as an outlier, thanks to new ownership, more sales resources and its focus on sports coverage. Vox Media sold Outsports, which covers LGBTQ+ athletes, to Q.Digital last March in an “acqui-hire” deal (a non-cash transaction where Q.Digital took

Adapt or die? When total brand overhauls work, and when they don’t

For other big reinventions, big design resets were rooted in changes to brand context, as seen in the case with paper purveyor GF Smith’s rebrand. With the help of cause-led agency Templo, GF Smith sought a rebrand that would inject more colour, movement and personality into its identity. GF Smith’s global brand director, Ben Watkinson

AI Search Sends Users to 404 Pages Nearly 3X More Than Google

New research examining 16 million URLs aligns with Google’s predictions that hallucinated links will become an issue across AI platforms. An Ahrefs study shows that AI assistants send users to broken web pages nearly three times more often than Google Search. The data arrives six months after Google’s John Mueller raised awareness about this issue.

Noreen Gillespie Joins NBC News as SVP, Head of News Standards

Newest addition: NBC News announced that Noreen Gillespie is joining the news network as a senior vice president, head of news standards and practices. Reporting to Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News president, editorial, Gillespie was most recently a journalism director at Microsoft’s Trusted Technology Group. She has also held multiple roles at The Associated Press, including

Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry in Unreal Engine 5 actually looks amazing

The graphics card giant Nvidia unveiled RTX Mega Geometry back in February, highlighting its potential to enhance geometric detail in ray-traced applications by efficiently handling complex, highly-instanced geometry. The new tech has now been added to the RTX Branch of Unreal Engine 5.6, one of the best game development programs, and word is starting to

Let’s Look Inside An Answer Engine And See How GenAI Picks Winners

Ask a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot, and the answer appears in seconds. It feels effortless. But under the hood, there’s no magic. There’s a fight happening. This is the part of the pipeline where your content is in a knife fight with every other candidate. Every passage in the index wants to

Agility is the new foundation of marketing infrastructure

High inflation, recession fears and ongoing uncertainty are putting tremendous pressure on companies across industries. With marketing often viewed as discretionary, budgets now face unprecedented scrutiny from the C-suite. CMOs face tough choices: delivering indisputable, near-term ROI while advancing long-term brand and market share goals. Yet this perfect storm also allows savvy leaders to show

“I’m definitely a magpie!” Hugh Miller on joining Pentagram, collecting things, and the importance of subtlety

We chat to the acclaimed graphic designer and art director as he becomes Pentagram London’s newest partner.

8 GEO Strategies For Boosting AI Visibility in 2025

This post was sponsored by Writesonic. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. AI search now makes the first decision. When? Before a buyer hits your website. If you’re not part of the AI answer, you’re not part of the deal. In fact, 89% of B2B buyers use AI platforms like ChatGPT

DOJ’s Google search trial remedies fall flat for publishers

This week’s Media Briefing looks at what the DOJ’s anti-climatic ruling on the Google Search antitrust trial means for publishers. Many were disappointed, though some media execs said the fight for more publisher control wasn’t over. ‘A big win for Google’ After months of buildup, the Department of Justice’s behavioral remedies for Google, revealed on Sept.

007 First Light preview: Hitman-style stealth meets Uncharted action in new Bond adventure impresses

Since it was announced five years ago that IO Interactive would be making a James Bond game, it felt like a natural fit for the studio known for Hitman, a series known for having you visit glamorous locations around the world in a sharp suit, and very much with a licence to kill. But an

Google Quietly Raised Ad Prices, Court Orders More Transparency

Google raised ad prices incrementally through internal “pricing knobs” that advertisers couldn’t detect, according to federal court documents. Google raised ad prices 5-15% at a time using “pricing knobs” that made increases look like normal auction fluctuations. Google’s surveys showed advertisers noticed higher costs but didn’t realize Google was causing the increases. A

American Eagle Has No Regrets Over Signing Sydney Sweeney

American Eagle released its second-quarter earnings on Wednesday, and while the results weren’t exactly stellar (comp sales slid by 3%) those figures include only about a week’s worth of the cultural tidal wave generated by “Sydney Sweeney Has Great Jeans,” the campaign that broke the internet when it debuted on July 23. To gauge the

Nadav Kander’s new trio of photographic works are elemental wonders of contemplation

Nadav Kander is a Kentish Town-based photographer who is well known for his moody, atmospheric photographs. Scratch that, he’s the man behind some of my most beloved photographs of artists, such as David Lynch, Adam Pearson, Benicio Del Toro and other magnetic subjects, in which his photographic eye for light and darkness pulls powerful auras

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