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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

Google’s New Merchant Listing Structured Data Improves SEO

Google made a major change to their Merchant Listing structured data requirements in addition to adding clarification on how to use structured data to indicate how long a sale prices will last. In total, there are three new additions but the biggest change by far is the addition of a new Category property. While it’s

CBS Mornings Grows Ahead of Holiday

CBS Mornings was the only morning show to see growth in total viewers and in the Adults 25-54 demo during the week leading up to America’s 250th Independence Day. CBS Mornings was joined in the growth territory by ABC News’ Good Morning America, which finished in the plus column in the advertiser-coveted demo. Meanwhile, GMA

Visual Identity for a Literary Festival

A visual identity inspired by the physical act of analog writing, where the letter, chance, and imperfection become the foundation of a contemporary visual language for literature.

The Application Gap Has Always Been There. We Just Kept Paying for It.

Learning the PESO Model® and implementing it are not synonymous. Shelly Verkamp explains how the Spin Sucks university partnership remedies the application gap. The post The Application Gap Has Always Been There. We Just Kept Paying for It. first appeared on Spin Sucks.

The Web Is Eating Itself And Your Metrics Look Fine

That is not a moral claim, and it is not a warning about getting caught. It is a description of a mechanism that several groups of researchers have now documented from different angles, and once you see how the pieces fit together, a good deal of confusing behavior in AI search stops being confusing. I

You’re using AI to scale the wrong part of GTM

AI has taken over go-to-market, and that’s not hyperbole. In Salesforce’s 2026 State of Sales report, 87% of sales organizations said they now use some form of AI for prospecting, forecasting, lead scoring, or drafting emails. More than half use it specifically to prospect. Marketing isn’t far behind. Open your inbox, and you can feel

Koto launches CCType foundry to create typefaces that meet the demands of modern brands

The foundry has launched with a clear framework and ambition from Koto – to fill a gap in the market for typefaces that are shaped by how brands are operating in 2026. “Koto comes at typography from the reality of execution,” says Jowey Roden, chief creative officer at Koto. “We’re not just looking at type in

YouTube Moves Ahead of Spotify As UK’s Top Podcast Service

YouTube has become the top podcast platform in the UK, surpassing Spotify for the first time on record, according to Edison Research. Among weekly podcast listeners aged 15 and over, 29% now cite YouTube as their preferred service, compared to 28% for Spotify. The one-point gap is quite small, and Edison describes the outcome as

Advertisers look for upside in Sky’s ITV deal

Sky’s deal for ITV looks set to fundamentally reshape the U.K. media industry. Two of the country’s biggest broadcast players will operate under the same umbrella with a combined business spanning 40 million viewers a month on subscription TV, multiple streaming services, and free-to-air broadcast. Advertisers have been conspicuously absent from the conversation, however —

Blender wants to make its first feature-length movie and share the process for free

When Flow won its best Animation Oscar in 2025, director Gints Zilbalodis’ predicted that Blender, the free animation software used to make the movie, would revolutionise filmmaking, allowing young creatives to make exciting films with limited resources. We’ve already seen signs of that happening with movies like Backrooms, which began as a Blender animation, but

Google Clarifies Smart Bidding Update After Advertiser Concerns

Google is clarifying its Smart Bidding update after advertisers questioned how budget-limited campaigns will behave beginning August 17. The original announcement around Smart Bidding changes was June 22. The update essentially changes how Target CPA and Target ROAS campaigns behave when they’re limited by budget. Today, many budget-limited campaigns outperform their bidding targets. Smart Bidding

NewsNation’s New York Bureau Forced to Evacuate Due to Potential Building Collapse

A New York office building undergoing a residential conversion had to be evacuated on Monday morning after two of its structural columns buckled. The ensuing emergency led city authorities to order additional evacuations of nearby buildings and shut down surrounding streets as a precautionary measure. Affected by this turmoil were staffers of NewsNation’s New York

5 Ways To Make Your Marketing Channels Work Together

Multi-channel marketing tends to sound more complicated than it needs to be. But we live in a world of “more”: more platforms, more campaigns, more assets, and more reporting to explain. The work expands, but the strategy behind each channel is not always clearly defined. Especially when you’re asked to do more at the speed

The CMS is becoming the AI operating system for brands

AI is changing what the CMS is expected to do. What used to be a publishing system is becoming the control layer for how brands are discovered, understood, personalized, and transacted across human and machine experiences. The CMS is now where brands provide structured context that AI systems use to discover, understand, validate, and recommend

More of a performance than a fixed system, Ronnie Scott’s new identity does a typographic dance

Dan’s new visual system for the venue started out by bringing two new typefaces to the brand: “Railroad Gothic, a bold, condensed font that gives impact, scale and structure and Century Condensed sits alongside as a more restrained secondary layer – inspired by the club’s elegant interiors and late-night hospitality,” he says. Jazz is a

5 Lessons From Running AI Agents Across Every Search

Last year, 2.5% of Writesonic’s leads came from AI search. As of March, 35% do. Samanyou Garg, Founder and CEO of Writesonic, showed the system behind that number in his Search Engine Journal webinar: agents surface what moved across every search platform, practitioners prioritize and act. “AI search didn’t necessarily kill SEO, but it turned

advertising has lost its way

At an IAB Europe forecast panel yesterday (July 7), Ian Whittaker — a former City equity analyst who now runs Liberty Sky Advisors — dropped the kind of line that tends to go quiet in a room full of ad execs: “Advertising has lost its way.” His reasoning is that four or five decades ago,

This TikTok-famous engraving pen turns wooden spoons into tiny artworks

If you don’t have room for one of the best laser cutting machines, or find the best Cricut craft machines too complex, then the answer is the Resparked Cordless Rechargeable Engraving Pen – and it’s reduced by 22% right now on Amazon, at £23.49. Why this one? It caught my eye because the same engraving

Is Your Content Strategy Recommending Competitors?

This post was sponsored by FirstPromoter. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. For years, software companies have published pages that rank the best tools in a category and place their own product at the top. The tactic was cheap and easy to scale, and for a long time it helped shape

Is This the End of Tech-Spec Marketing? ft. Hisense CMO Sarah Larsen

Consumer electronics marketing has a bad habit: It talks too much about the product and not enough about the person buying it. In this episode of Marketing Vanguard, Sarah Larsen, CMO at Hisense USA, joins Jenny Rooney to unpack why she’s throwing tech speak out the window and rebuilding marketing around sell-out, consumer behavior, and

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