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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 Answers Questions About Search Console’s Branded Queries Filter

Google Search Central announced that Search Console’s branded queries filter is now available to all eligible sites, causing many SEOs to ask questions about it and Google’s John Mueller stepped in to answer them. Google’s branded queries filter is a way to analyze branded search queries that are driving traffic from the search listings. Branded

Ulta Beauty is going to be on TikTok Shop

Ulta Beauty will soon launch on TikTok Shop. “We are pleased to announce today an expanded strategic integration with TikTok,” Ulta Beauty CEO Kecia Steelman said during Thursday’s earnings call last week. “Next week, we will launch Ulta Beauty on TikTok Shop, where guests can purchase immediately as they engage with content from Ulta Beauty

Lydia Chodosh probes design rules through archiving and cataloguing

“For me, design is about interrogating the process by which knowledge is acquired and transmitted across time,” says the designer Lydia Chodosh. Exploring our use of language, her work is all about uncovering how we accumulate information, a point of interest the designer has developed over her varied interdisciplinary career. Lydia began her journey studying

How AI Automation Turns Static Travel Pages Into Living Content & Experiences

For most of the past 20 years, growing travel marketing meant producing more and more output. This happened because success depended on building additional landing pages for new destinations, publishing steady streams of blog posts to capture long-tail searches, translating and localizing content to enter international markets, and manually refining campaigns to squeeze small gains

Disney Cruise Line Ad Delivers a Powerfully Quiet Moment During Oscars

A lifelong, healthy parent-child bond is one of life’s magical pleasures, and Disney Cruise Line is tapping into that feeling with its latest ad campaign. “Midnight Magic,” which debuted during tonight’s 98th Annual Academy Awards telecast on ABC, is inspired by the experiences of real Disney Cruise guests. It depicts a father and son sharing

Check out the concept art for stunning Unreal Engine 5 horror game Ritual Tides

Unreal Engine 5 is allowing indie developers to achieve AAA-level graphical fidelity on much smaller budgets, and that can mean some chillingly realistic-looking horror (also see our pick of the best game development software). Vertpaint has just released the first gameplay trailer for its upcoming first-person horror Ritual Tides, and it’s also shared concept art

The Shortcut Behind Some AI Optimization Tools

On March 3, 2026, OpenAI pushed GPT-5.3 Instant to all ChatGPT users, free and paid, with no fanfare about what else might have changed beneath the surface. Within days, SEO and AI search practitioners began documenting something unexpected: The internal metadata that had allowed third-party tools to observe ChatGPT’s query fan-out behavior (the sub-queries the

When AI decisions create customer friction

I was traveling for work and used my credit card in two different states within 24 hours. That wasn’t typical for me, but it made sense given the route I was driving. Apparently, the combination of multiple states and an unusual purchase pattern was enough to trigger my credit card to be declined at the

Scenes from Greenland :: Behance

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Google Says Hundreds Of Their Crawlers Are Not Documented

Google’s Gary Illyes and Martin Splitt published a podcast about Googlebot, explaining that it’s not just one standalone thing but hundreds of crawlers across different products and services, most of which are not publicly documented. What Googlebot Is Gary clarifies that the name “Googlebot” is a historical name originating from the early days when Google

Ritual Labs builds AI model for earlier creative development

The traditional campaign production model is becoming obsolete as the incessant need for short-form content grows and as companies look to generative AI to fill the gaps. Marketers have latched onto promises that AI technology will cut down on production time, cut costs and help scale operations. Every agency, production company and holdco has an

Bráulio Amado on why there is unlimited inspiration in the world, if only we become “crazy enough to look for it”

In this hilarious, long form lecture from Bráulio Amado at Nicer Tuesdays New York (performed for the very last time and recorded for the first), the designer and illustrator takes us through his career to date. Braulio gives the crowd an incredible insight into a decade’s worth of poster designs for Good Room, revealing how

Merchant Center Expands, Google Clarifies Smart Bidding, State Of PPC Report – PPC Pulse

Welcome to this week’s PPC Pulse. Updates focus on Merchant Center access for agencies, bidding strategy, and how PPC marketers are adapting to industry changes. Google expanded access to Merchant Center for Agencies, moving the product from pilot into general availability in the United States and Canada. At the same time, a recent Ads Decoded

OpenAI is Testing An Ads Manager, As Its New Ads Business Fights Growing Pains

OpenAI’s ChatGPT ads program is starting to take shape. The company has begun testing an Ads Manager with a small group of partners and is gathering feedback, an OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to ADWEEK. The Ads Manager is a dashboard that lets marketers run, monitor, and optimize campaigns in real time. The spokesperson also confirmed that

This Unreal Engine 5 game brings Ancient Egyptian art to life

Unreal Engine 5 has been to bring vast 3D open worlds to life. Now one indie developer is using the software to breathe live into 2D decorative art. Fresco is an Ancient Egypt-themed action-adventure game where the artwork on the walls isn’t merely decoration to create an atmospheric setting – they’re playable environments. The upcoming

AI Mode Data, Ask Maps & Branded Queries Go Live – SEO Pulse

Welcome to the week’s Pulse: updates affect how AI Mode links work, how local discovery works in Maps, and what you can do in Search Console. Here’s what matters for you and your work. Google AI Mode Self-Citations Tripled, With More Organic Links SE Ranking published its third report on Google AI Mode citations, showing

Breaking free from data prison with a roadmap to unified customer insights

We know the pressure of being told to “break down silos” while new ones seem to pop up every time a new channel or tool is added to the stack. It’s a persistent reality in this role that technology often moves faster than our ability to connect it. At the March 2026 MarTech Conference, the

RENAULT R17 :: Behance

What’s Right For Your Business?

Digital marketing usually gets discussed as one bucket in companies. It shows up in planning decks as a single line item, even though what sits underneath it is far more nuanced. SEO and PPC both live inside that bucket, but they don’t behave the same way once you start making real business decisions around them.

Middle East war clouds global ad spending outlook

The ad spending numbers for 2026 looked good until the war in the Middle East made them provisional. Not because they were optimistic or vacuous about ad spending this year but because they were built on assumptions about a world that existed two weeks ago – one where the biggest variables were tariffs, AI and

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