OpenAI is officially in the ad business. And not just any ads — super-premium, top-shelf, $60-CPM ads. That’s the pricing territory of live NFL broadcasts, way above Meta’s sub-$20 CPM and miles from your average programmatic placement. The pitch? ChatGPT isn’t like Google or social media. It’s a new kind of environment, where advertisers reach …
Marketing has long worked on the assumption that there are two paths to understand people and markets — often described as “nuance versus numbers.” Nuance wants to know how people feel, how brands are conceptualized and understood, what unknown drivers cause human behavior and what drives business success. Numbers want to know exactly how big …
Read more “You no longer have to choose between insight and impact”
Marketing organizations are racing to adopt AI while simultaneously trying to contain it. About 76.6% of marketers now have AI policies in place, up from 55.3% just a year earlier, per the Association of National Advertisers’ January 2026 survey (registration required). Investment is also surging. Nearly 89% plan to increase AI spending, and two-thirds would …
Read more “AI governance without strategy is setting marketing teams up to fail”
Every few years, loyalty comes under renewed scrutiny. Customers are described as fickle. Switching costs are low. Attention spans are shrinking. The story is familiar: loyalty is no longer realistic in a digital, price-sensitive world. That framing is convenient and mostly wrong. Loyalty didn’t disappear. Brands diluted it — slowly, deliberately and often unintentionally — …
Read more “Loyalty didn’t disappear. Brands traded it away.”
In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Question: Why is webinar email copy often ineffective, and what proven frameworks can marketers use to write promotional emails that actually convert? …
Read more “How to write promotional emails that actually convert”
AI is changing how people discover, compare and choose — across every industry. But not every industry is equally vulnerable. New research from BCG maps where large language models (LLMs) are likely to disrupt the consumer journey, and it breaks the landscape into four clear archetypes: Breached, Undefended, Contested and Secured. Each one tells a …
Read more “Find out if AI-driven disruption is coming for your industry”
The email inbox is undergoing an AI-driven remodel that changes the way subscribers use it, how they view and manage their email and their relationships with the people who send them messages. Instead of serving as a static source of messages that require clicks to deliver their information payloads, the inbox will be the next …
Read more “AI is rebuilding the inbox, and email marketers can’t control it”
Last quarter, I watched a marketing team spend $180,000 on an attribution platform they’d been lobbying for all year. The demos were impressive. The business case was approved. The contract was signed. Three months later, they still couldn’t get reliable data from it. No one had mapped which systems needed to connect to it, who …
Read more “The $2 million martech procurement mistake hiding in plain sight”
HubSpot wrapped up 2025 with a batch of updates that feel very “operational” in the best way: more control over your data, clearer insights into how your segments are performing and practical AI improvements that reduce noise (and wasted credits). Below are the December 13 updates we think are most worth your time, organized into …
Many global scaling efforts underperform or fail not because of talent gaps, but because their operating models break down. When multishore teams are onboarded through data dumps and treated as order-takers, quality suffers and onshore leaders become bottlenecks of review and micromanagement. Launching multishore teams on a production-ready framework is an operational shift toward competence-based …
Read more “How to turn multishore teams into trusted partners”