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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

Walmart warns it may have to raise prices due to fuel costs

Higher fuel prices due to the war with Iran are putting pressure on Walmart’s customers and supply chain, and could lead to higher price tags on the shelf. Consumers may face higher retail prices in the coming months due to higher-than-planned fuel costs in global distribution and fulfillment operations and the rising cost of food

The Click’s clever university branding puts the ‘I’ in identity, individual and Imperial College London

The work began as a conversation: “The primary objective was to create a brand for all – something everyone at Imperial would want to engage with and belong to, from students to academics to commercial partners, across every faculty,” says Bobby. “Just as important: portraying the cross-learning, collaboration and innovation at the heart of Imperial’s

Here’s What You Need To Know

WordPress released version 7.0, codenamed Armstrong, bringing changes that make it easier for users and developers to control the look and user experience of websites, and a refresh of the admin page that makes the entire CMS behave more like modern publishing software. WordPress 7.0’s AI integration may grab a significant amount of attention at

Stephen Colbert’s Late Show Finale Is His Biggest Weeknight Episode Ever

Stephen Colbert is saving the best for last. Historic numbers are in for the final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, as it averaged 6.74 million total viewers on Thursday, according to Nielsen’s preliminary live fast national ratings. With those totals, Colbert delivered the most-watched weeknight episode in the show’s nearly 11-year history.

Rugrats is the retro game revival no one saw coming

Rugrats might not be the franchise you most think of when it comes to retro gaming, but Nickelodeon’s classic flagship show from the ’90s has had a broad incursion into video games. The intrepid toddlers appeared in 3D polygons in the original Search for Reptar and as 2D sprites in handheld titles. Now you can

When Marketing Leaders Can’t Explain Search Performance

Search marketing produces an enormous amount of performance data, but many marketing leaders still struggle to explain what those results mean for the business. SEO and paid search reports often focus on visibility, clicks, and conversion metrics. And, in many cases, data sources for that information don’t match up, as I explored in my previous

What Intuit’s layoffs mean for Mailchimp customers

Intuit’s announcement this week that it will cut approximately 3,000 jobs — 17% of its global workforce — landed hard across the tech industry. But for the 11 million businesses that use Mailchimp for email marketing, the real question is simpler: Should I stay or should I go? The answer, based on Mailchimp’s product releases,

apax architecture

From the Greek hapax, meaning ‘occurring only once’. apax is the new name for A+A architects, and a promise of architecture that never exists above ground.

Google I/O Didn’t End SEO. The Risk Is Somewhere Else

The loudest reactions after Google I/O 2026 were that Search had been replaced overnight. Google’s messaging went the other way, insisting that AI Search still depends on the web and existing SEO fundamentals. The reality sits between those two positions, and the risk most people are naming is the wrong one. TechCrunch claimed “Google Search

How loyalty programs power lifecycle marketing strategies

This Unpacked guide, sponsored by SheerID, explores how loyalty is no longer earned through rewards alone; it’s built through relevance, transparency and sustained commitment to understanding customers over time. Shifts in consumer behavior — specifically the desire for data privacy and instant, personalized recognition — and AI’s acceleration of the buying process are making traditional

Max Lancaster’s Bunny And I is a delicate documentary on schizophrenia that swaps spectacle for sensitivity

Firstly, Max photographed Bunny in a straight-forward fashion, but quietly, sensitively. Later on in the project, he decided to create patchworks out of the printed photos, representing the several versions and peculiarities of Bunny. The photos don’t veer into movie cliche depictions of split personalities or extreme mental instability. What Max found in his bloodline

WordPress 7.0 Could Trigger Rush To Steal AI API Keys

Oliver Sild, founder of Patchstack WordPress security company, shared concerns about the security of AI API keys in WordPress 7.0, sharing that there “will be an absolute rush by hackers to steal API keys.” To underline this point, an actual security bug was discovered in WordPress 7.0 that exposes API keys. AI API Keys Are

As the AI Battle Rages, Yusuf Mehdi Becomes the Latest Microsoft Veteran to Walk

Microsoft chief consumer marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi, whose tenure with the company reaches back to the era of desktops and dialup, will leave the company in June 2027. Mehdi announced his departure in a post on LinkedIn. “After 35 extraordinary years at Microsoft,” he wrote, “I’ve decided the time is right to begin planning for

D&AD Pencils 2026 winners reveal a geographic shift in global creativity

The winners of the D&AD Pencils 2026 have been announced, recognising excellence and innovation in commercial creativity across a massive 46 categories, from craft to animation and advertising. Some 573 awards were bestowed this year, including 52 coveted Yellow Pencils, along with two White Pencils celebrating creative work designed for social good and two Future

3 Unrelated Stories About AI & Writing Tell The Same Story

I stumbled upon three separate articles about writing and AI in the same week, each from a completely different angle, and all describing the same thing. A novelist turned MIT writing lecturer confronting students who outsourced their essays to AI. A new Graphite study showing AI-generated articles now make up roughly half of all new

The AI marketing advantage hiding in your metadata

Creative may win the awards, media gets the moolah, but metadata is what helps AI marketing actually work. Metadata is already important today as the currency for organic search. When I say metadata, I mean everything from schema markup and product-feed attributes to image descriptors, DAM tags, provenance signals, and the taxonomies that hold it

Google Launches Core Update Amid I/O AI Search Overhaul – SEO Pulse

Welcome to the week’s Pulse: This week’s updates touch rankings, the Search interface, AI Mode behavior, and Google’s guidance around AI agents. Google launched a core update, announced what it called the biggest upgrade to the Search box in over 25 years, released first-party AI Mode usage data, and sent mixed signals on llms.txt from

Agentic buying is closer than you think and further than you hope

Autonomous agent-to-agent trading could hit scale within six to 12 months. But there’s a catch: the industry’s standards need to keep pace with the technology. That’s what Jamie Allen, Nvidia’s director of AI for sports, ad tech and streaming media told me earlier this week when we caught up. From his vantage point — Nvidia

Zander Raymond’s improvised collages are made from daily debris and things you might find in the bin

In artist and designer Zander Raymond’s studio, a lot of things are left lying around. Found materials, tools, images, stickers and paper waste all amass into a large pile of daily debris that has become one of the creatives most precious resources for his pursuits in collage. Drawing from this archive of commonplace things: lined

LLM Guidance Doesn’t Transfer The Way SEO Guidance Did

For roughly two decades, the SEO discipline operated on a quiet assumption that turned out to be one of its most valuable features. Guidance from one search engine traveled. If Google said sitemaps mattered, Bing said sitemaps mattered. If Bing said structured data deserved real effort, Google said the same. Practitioners optimized for Google with

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