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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

How Oakley's Post Apocalyptic Comic Is Blueprinting Its Next Era Of Real World Design

Oakley leans on serialized post-apocalyptic storytelling to frame its next era of real-world product design.

Zevia and Cardi B turn subtext into the campaign

Zevia's largest campaign to date, "Real Talk Interpreter," puts Cardi B in everyday situations where she translates polite language into what people actually mean. The work spans streaming TV, video, social, retail, and a participatory layer inviting people to submit phrases through Instagram and TikTok.

Creator strategy reaches the C-suite

Accenture's planned acquisition of Whalar and the current industry conversation around it show how quickly creator marketing is moving from a campaign specialty into enterprise growth strategy.

Sam Campbell and Joe Pelling discuss the creative approach to Make That Movie

It’s Nice That: First off, can you tell us about your background working together, and how partnering on Make That Movie came about? What led to you wanting to make this type of show? Joe Pelling: I met Sam after seeing his Edinburgh show in 2017. I think our mutual friend Charlie Perkins introduced us

ChatGPT Access Tied To 9% Drop In Traditional Search

A recent look at U.S. desktop browsing shows ChatGPT directed people to outside websites in 5.2% of sessions, compared to 31.1% for Google searches. The paper, conducted by Bocconi University researchers, examines Comscore clickstream data to gain insight into how broader access to ChatGPT has impacted traditional search. What The Data Shows When people click

Lessons from Ally Bank’s early sports marketing bet

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts • Spotify If Ally Bank CMO Andrea Brimmer had to rebuild her sports marketing playbook, she’d change two things: lock in longer-term partnerships from the start and invest more aggressively in emerging media. It’s not that her own sports playbook didn’t work, but investing in sports marketing sooner would have made it

Dodge Apple’s price hike on the MacBook Neo – Amazon just sliced £100 off the 512GB version

The Apple MacBook Neo was a storming success on its March release this year. But then a shortage of chips meant that Apple hiked up the excellent starting price by £100. Today, there’s a slew of deals that have taken the popular budget Apple laptop back down to the original asking price. The 256GB model

Google’s Marvin Clarifies AI Search and Qualified Future Conversions

Google Ads Liaison Ginny Marvin addressed several advertiser questions about AI Search, Qualified Future Conversions (QFC), and YouTube Creator Partnerships in the latest edition of the Ads Decoded newsletter and accompanying video. The community Q&A followed Google Marketing Live and focused on topics that have generated ongoing questions from advertisers, including AI Search eligibility, long-term

MLS Is Ready for Its Through Pass From the World Cup

Did you know that various major watch parties in cities such as Los Angeles and Seattle during this year’s FIFA World Cup have been organized by the MLS? Radhika Duggal, Major League Soccer’s chief marketing officer, told ADWEEK that, in conjunction with FIFA and Fox Sports, the MLS created watch parties as a strategic effort

Evergreen Content Is Over – The Individual Is The Only Strategy Left

Everywhere I look, the most interesting work in publishing and search is not coming from the big publisher titles. It is coming from individuals. Do individuals now hold all the power, and is the future of content to be found on Substack? When I spoke with Harry Clarkson-Bennett recently about publishers surviving AI, I put

5 questions to ask AI vendors before you buy anything

There are many ways to use AI in marketing, and it feels like for every smart initiative, 10 AI vendors have cropped up with a tool to address it. At the beginning of this wave, I took more calls and answered more emails than I do these days. Over time, I realized I was asking

Figma’s Loredana Crisan talks taste, last-minute decisions and the art of prioritisation

RA: When Claude Design launched, there was a lot of talk about what it meant for Figma. Do you think tools like this challenge your place in the industry? LC: We certainly believe that AI raises the floor. And we’re adding AI to Figma, but we’re adding it in a way that has a different

Google Search Hits All-Time Usage Record During World Cup

Nick Fox, Google’s senior vice president of Knowledge & Information, said that Google Search reached its highest usage ever on July 7, coinciding with Argentina’s comeback victory over Egypt at the World Cup. In the post, Fox wrote: “Google Search broke all prior usage records and saw its highest usage in history right after Argentina

How streaming World Cup creators built a new broadcast blueprint

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup nears its conclusion, a parallel broadcast has emerged alongside the official TV feed: creator-led livestreams from inside the stadiums and FIFA fan zones on Twitch and YouTube. This creator coverage isn’t color on top of the main feed — it’s a new broadcast layer built around community, drawing in

How to build a digital painting from the ground up using Photoshop and Blender

This illustration is a personal piece representing a queen out on a walk with her two beloved pets. I started this illustration in Blender to experiment with architecture and mood before exporting it to Photoshop to draw the different characters. I then started rendering, starting with the queen and creatures and working my way from

The Agentic Web Is Splitting Into Two Bets: Identity And Capability

The protocol layer of the agentic web is splitting into two bets, and most websites have already placed one of them without knowing it. The first bet is about identity: a file called llms.txt that tells AI models who you are and what your content covers. The second is about capability: a browser standard called

Minneapolis-Based Retail Media Veterans Launch Networking Nonprofit

A new nonprofit aims to fill an educational gap in commerce media. Commerce Media Meetup, which started as a casual get together in Minneapolis, has formalized as a nonprofit. The group organizes educational networking events for Minneapolis and Chicago-based commerce media professionals, with plans to expand to Atlanta and Boston. By forming a nonprofit, founders

The WebMCP Tools You Expose To Agents Can Be Used To Hijack Them

Add WebMCP to your website, and you hand visiting AI agents a set of named tools to call. Those same tools can be used to turn the agents against the people who sent them. Chrome’s developer site now carries the security guidance for WebMCP, and much of it is written for the websites exposing the

If your martech stack could talk, what would it say?

A typical CMO writes most martech postmortems from their own perspective. I’ve sat in those rooms for 30 years, and the story rarely changes. The platform underdelivered, the ROI never showed, or the vendor oversold the demo. The tools take the blame, but the stack never gets to answer. This time, I’m going to let

This browser-based generative tool allows musicians to create their own visualisers with trippy geometry

The Mlink Tool is chocker with simple features, such as randomising colours and shapes, affecting the speed of animations, creating shuddering rows of columns or melting blobs. It’s all got this really endearing early MS Paint feeling to it, with simple gradients and mischievous geometry. It’s like if the shape tool had an acid trip.

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