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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

Why your best campaign may not deserve more budget

It’s one of the best “problems” you can have in paid media. You’re running a campaign that delivers on every front. Cost per acquisition is strong. Return on ad spend is exceptional. Lead quality meets expectations. Average order value is exactly where it should be. Then the ask comes in: Double the budget and keep the

Two Halves, One Operating System Problem

Google just announced what we’ve been calling visibility engineering at Spin Sucks for almost a year. That validates the work. It does not close the gap. There are actually two visibility gaps — the external one (do AI systems see your brand?) and the internal one (do the people who sign your budget connect the

How To Fix Google Ads Smart Bidding With A Primary vs. Secondary Conversion Framework

Many Google Ads accounts have a conversion tracking problem that is disguised as a strategy problem. The ad account in this case has every action labeled as a “conversion.” The conversions are form fills, key button clicks, page views, cart adds, and checkouts started, which are all flowing into the same column, and all weighted

How publishers are modeling a future with less Google traffic

Publishing execs aren’t convinced if — or when — Google Zero will happen, but they’re preparing for the worst anyway: a future where Google search stops driving traffic to their sites, and becomes a destination for information. The threat of this zero-click future feels more real after Google’s last developer conference, where execs announced sweeping,

“At 28, you are absolutely not too old for this industry”

You don’t love the work your agency produces and you’re starting to feel like the clock is ticking on finding your way into something new. But hold your horses! In this week’s Creative Career Conundrums Kat Wong explains why its never too late to roll the career dice again.

Treating Reviews As Business Infrastructure, Not Marketing, Drives Real Business Results

Most business owners assume that higher star ratings are linked to better business outcomes. A peer-reviewed study tested that assumption directly. Researchers Eddie Inyang and Juliana White surveyed 251 U.S. small-business owners on online reputation management, Google star ratings, and business performance. Notably, Google star ratings alone didn’t predict performance. What was associated with performance

The Trade Desk Appoints Nate Olmstead CFO After a Year of Executive Turnover

On Monday, The Trade Desk announced Nate Olmstead will be the company’s chief financial officer. Olmstead is the company’s fourth finance chief in roughly a year. The company said Olmstead will join the The Trade Desk on July 9 and report to CEO Jeff Green. Olmstead’s hire comes as the adtech company looks to steady

Edifier T5s review: a subwoofer that puts quality above volume

Why you can trust Creative Bloq Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. I love me some good speakers. And recently, Edifier have been bringing out a lot of those. I’ve reviewed the S880D MkII just

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Downplays Google Zero Concerns

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google has spent 25 years learning how to measure user satisfaction in Search, including engagement, sessions, return behavior, and bounce-backs, saying that those metrics help Google improve AI Search. When asked about the concept of Google Search traffic dwindling to zero, the Google Zero scenario, Pichai insisted that the reality

Agentforce needed a content layer, so Salesforce is buying Contentful

Salesforce today signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, planning to use the composable content platform alongside its Data 360 and Agentforce platforms to deliver personalized, AI-assembled experiences at scale across channels. Many enterprises are relying on static, channel-specific content. With Contentful on board, Salesforce wants to help these organizations move to dynamic content orchestration

The Open Standard That Gives AI Systems A Structured View Of Your Business

AI systems are now answering questions about your business. The problem is that they are often getting it wrong. Consider the typical situation. A brand’s products, services, expertise, locations, leadership, and relationships are distributed across dozens of pages. An AI model retrieves fragments from those pages, stitches them together probabilistically, and generates an answer. The

Dentsu has undergone a shift in top management on a global scale

Dentsu has undergone a shift in top management on a global scale, with new global CEO Takeshi Sano in charge of an agency holding company that sits just under the Big Three — Publicis, Omnicom and WPP — but has taken its lumps over the last few years as it tries to stay ahead of

Los Campesinos!’ 20-year archive of silly band T-shirt designs is a sweaty journey through indie rock aesthetics

It’s Nice That (INT): Can you guys introduce Los Campesinos! for anyone in our audience who may not know about you. Gareth Campesino (GC): Depending on who you ask, Los Camp! are either the UK’s first and only emo band, a bastion of principled independence and better than ever, or simply “still going!?”. Whichever way

The CFAA Case That Decides Whether AI Agents Can Visit Your Website

Amazon sued Perplexity over its Comet browser shopping on Amazon under user authorization. On March 10, 2026, a federal judge in the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction blocking Comet from accessing Amazon’s logged-in pages. Roughly a week later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals paused the injunction pending Perplexity’s appeal. On May

Hires and Promotions at OpenAI, CNN, Chloé and More

This week has been another revolving door of chief marketing officer (CMO) hires and departures. We’ve rounded up the U.S. and global marketing leadership moves you need to know about for the week ending May 29. – OpenAI has hired ServiceNow‘s Colin Fleming as CMO for its business unit, a move that signals the company

This incredibly lifelike 3D character design blends Netflix inspiration with real history

Melvin Okoronkwo is a 3D character artist specialising in realistic humans and detailed hair. He enjoys bringing characters to life from concept illustrations using the best 3D modelling software. Below, he explains the inspiration and process behind the strikingly realistic 3D model, Lady Kököchin. “The main inspiration for this piece was the TV show Marco

Is Performance Max Actually Better Than Running Separate Campaigns?

Our next Ask A PPC tackles a question many advertisers are wrestling with right now: “Is Performance Max actually better than running separate campaigns?” Usually, this question shows up after an account has already run Search campaigns and is wondering if consolidating search themes into a Performance Max campaign is the way to go. I’ve

The marketer’s new playbook for AI-powered competitive intelligence

If you’re like most brand teams I talk to, you’ve got a system for keeping tabs on the competition — dashboards, weekly reports, and someone scrolling competitor social feeds every few days. It feels organized. It feels like staying informed. But watching competitors and understanding what their moves mean are two different jobs. I’ve sat

White-Collar Will Be Fully Automated In 18 Months – So What Makes You Different?

Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has predicted that most professional white-collar work will be fully automated by August 2027. Marketing. Accounting. Legal. Project management. He named them. The day before, I’d been reading about Jensen Huang’s commencement address at Carnegie Mellon, where he told 5,800 graduates at one of the country’s top engineering schools

Publishers are starting to make meaningful AI licensing deals

Publishers are quietly cutting six-figure AI licensing deals on Snowflake, as the data giant positions itself as matchmaker-in-chief between locked-down news content and enterprises keen to plug reliable publisher content into their own internal AI tools via retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). For publishers, the cloud platform’s Cortex Knowledge Extensions act as a monetized RAG pipe: a

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