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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 organic search is becoming a brand trust channel

If you’re an organic search marketer, you know the industry has been fundamentally disrupted over the last two years. As a community, we continue to debate short-term tactics rather than pivot toward a holistic strategy aligned with general marketing principles. Despite the frustrating landscape, we must stop focusing on outdated hacks and shift our thinking

陈粒十年音乐作品集 :: Behance

《陈粒十年音乐作品集》被设计成一份可以“陈列”的声音档案盒，是一次把“时间”变回“物”的工作。“十年”在流媒体里往往只是一个滚动列表，但当它落在实体黑胶上，它会突然拥有体积、重量与需要被安放的秩序。这份作品集将 11 张专辑汇编为15 张黑胶，并配套一本收录影集与歌词的画册及一张超过 1 米长的歌曲清单。它并非一份简单的纪念周边，而是把陈粒十年的创作从散落的播放历史，收拢为一套可翻阅、可抽取、可归位的系统。

Google AI Mode Cites Itself More Often, With More Organic Links

Google’s self-referencing in AI Mode has risen to more than three times its level nine months ago, according to a new SE Ranking report analyzing 1.3 million citations. Google now accounts for 17% of all AI Mode citations, more than YouTube, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Indeed, and Zillow combined. When YouTube is included, Google-owned properties make

Why Gen Alpha–focused brand is giving equity to teen creators

As influencer marketing evolves beyond one-off paid posts, brands are finding new ways to build relationships that last and go deeper than a hashtag-sponsored post. On this week’s episode of the Glossy Beauty Podcast, Pop editor Sara Spruch-Feiner is joined by Kimberly Ho, founder and CEO of Evereden, to discuss why her $100 million Gen

How Lily Kong’s series Sweet Escape reignited her intuitive approach to illustration

At the mid-point of 2024, illustrator and graphic designer Lily Kong made a conscious decision to slow down – to rekindle parts of her practice that were more intuitive and iterative. She began to revisit drawing as a tool to mark personal memories and interpret her innermost feelings, and from this came her series Sweet

The 10 Best PPC Ad Networks

Choosing the right pay-per-click (PPC) ad network is a core strategy impacting the success of your advertising program. Each network reaches distinct audiences, offers different ad formats, and suits different campaign objectives, from capturing high-intent search demand to driving awareness through video and social feeds. With AI-powered automation now embedded across most major platforms, understanding

The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green Dropped $148M on Company Stock

Jeff Green, CEO of The Trade Desk, purchased roughly $148 million worth of the company’s stock earlier this week, according to a Form 4 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The purchases, made between March 2 and March 4 at prices ranging from about $23 to $25 a share, represent a rare open-market

Cinema 4D is coming to iPad – and it’s bringing an AI 3D generator with it

After AI image and video generators, 3D model generators appear to be the next battleground for creative software. A day after the launch of Autodesk’s Wonder 3D with text-to-3D and image-to-3D tools, major rival Maxon has announced that it’s adding 3D model generation to Cinema 4D, one of our picks at the best 3D modelling

AIO Citations Diverge From Rankings, Bing Rewrites Rules – SEO Pulse

Welcome to SEO Pulse: this week’s updates affect how AI Overviews select sources, how far AI search has expanded across industries, and what two search engines now say about optimizing for AI. Here’s what matters for you and your work. AI Overview Citations From Top-Ranking Pages Drop To 38% Ranking in Google’s top 10 is

Why your outreach fails before prospects even read it

I sit and stare at the screen, a blank page and a blinking cursor, trying to figure out the best way to word-smith my message to a target account. I stare and think about what I can say that will cut through the noise, disrupt the pattern and get him to respond. My go-to strategy

ONCE Magazine :: Behance

ONCE As a true football fan, I genuinely enjoyed designing this project. ONCE is a magazine built around eleven articles exploring football culture through aesthetics, fashion and visual narratives. The identity takes direct inspiration from the geometric construction of the ball, specifically the pentagons and hexagons that from its surface. These angular shapes were translated into

What SMEC’s Data Reveals About AI Max Performance

Since Google introduced AI Max for Search campaigns, most of the discussion has focused on Google’s own benchmarks. Those benchmarks suggest advertisers can expect meaningful conversion growth without major efficiency changes. But like many platform statistics, they leave open questions about how the feature behaves inside mature accounts. To get a clearer view, Mike Ryan,

The future, according Epsilon, will be an orchestrated ecosystem

No one AI model class will do the best advertising for marketers without the skills of others. The future, according to Publicis Group-owned Epsilon, will be a carefully orchestrated ecosystem – a team of specialists not a single genius. Steve Nowlan, svp of decision sciences at Epsilon whose PhD is from Carnegie Mellon and whose

Heated Rivalry’s cinematographer shares the visual secrets behind the hit series

It’s Nice That (INT): How did you first hear about the Heated Rivalry gig, and why was it one you personally wanted to work on? Jackson Parrell (JP): I first heard about it from Jacob. We’re both Canadian, and it’s a small-ish scene. I didn’t know the name at that point, he just said it

NanoClaw Creator Loses SEO Battle To Impostor Website

The creator of NanoClaw, an open source AI agent platform with over 18,000 GitHub stars, says Google is ranking a fake website above his project’s real site. In tests conducted on March 5, an impostor site ranked at the top of Google for the project’s own name. The real website, nanoclaw.dev, did not appear in

Beehiiv Names Calendly Leader Darren Chait As Its First CMO

Beehiiv has hired Darren Chait as its first chief marketing officer, bringing on the former Calendly growth executive as the newsletter platform pushes deeper into the creator economy, according to its chief executive Tyler Denk. Chait, who officially began the role on Monday, will oversee positioning, demand generation, and marketing operations as Beehiiv expands beyond

This game shows ‘AI-generated’ and ‘handcrafted’ don’t have to be contradictions

The use of generative AI in video game development causes massive controversy. Players keep saying they don’t want it, and yet the use of AI continues to increase rapidly. But does it have to be slop? At South by Southwest (SXSW) this week, Brazilian studio ARVORE revealed a game that they think shows ‘handcrafted’ and

MarComm Doesn’t Have a Skills Gap, It Has a Judgment Gap

The judgment gap stalls smart teams. Travis Claytor shows how strategy, not speed or volume, drives confident decisions and real outcomes. The post MarComm Doesn’t Have a Skills Gap, It Has a Judgment Gap first appeared on Spin Sucks.

The Verified Source Pack Agents Trust First

Structured data helped machines interpret pages. It reduced ambiguity. It made entities and attributes legible to crawlers that were otherwise guessing. Agents change the job because they do not just interpret pages. They decide, summarize, recommend, and sometimes execute. That means they need more than “this page is about X.” They need “this is the

Showing up in the age of AI search

We know the pressure of watching organic traffic dip while AI overviews take center stage. It’s a common hurdle right now, but a recent panel at the MarTech Conference — moderated by Janet Driscoll Miller, president and CEO at Marketing Mojo — highlighted that visibility isn’t disappearing; it’s just moving. Sara Resnick, global lead of

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