Brand investment has always paid off in the long run. We’ve known this for decades. What’s changed is that AI now requires brand clarity for surfaceability. Which means there is a serious penalty and a new permanence for getting it wrong. I ran a thought experiment using Claude.ai with three real companies, each representing a …
Read more “AI rewards brand meaning and punishes everything else”
Everyone thinks their martech stack is a little broken. But how broken, exactly — and compared to whom? That’s what we, in partnership with Scott Brinker, editor of Chiefmartec, and MarketingOps.com, aim to find out with the 2026 State of Your Stack survey. Every year, marketers tell us what’s actually in their stacks, what’s working, …
I spent 20 years training as a high-level brand marketer at companies like IBM and Mastercard. By every traditional metric, I was successful. I had the titles, the budgets, the seats at the table. Yet for two decades, I was operating miles away from actual revenue. I wasn’t an architect of business growth. I was …
Read more “Marketing looks successful, but misses what matters”
When a client calls about a damaging search result, you might typically default to one of two responses: “we can suppress it” or “there’s nothing we can do.” Both skip the middle ground — where Google’s removal tools live. Google provides tools to remove or deindex content from search results. They’re underused, frequently misunderstood, and …
Read more “How Google’s removal tools work for SEO and reputation management by Erase Technologies”
Everyone is talking about AI search as if it’s already universal — as if we’ve collectively moved on, users have shifted and discovery has changed for everyone. But the reality is far less straightforward. While AI search is growing fast, it isn’t being adopted evenly. The gap is increasingly shaped by something we don’t often …
I once worked with an organization where the editorial team ruled the roost — and I do mean they ruled. This was a publishing company, so that made sense, to a point. But editorial didn’t just influence content. They had veto power over sales and marketing. I remember instances where advertising was pulled from one …
CreativeOps buyers are increasingly being offered a very attractive proposition: fewer tools, fewer handoffs, fewer vendor relationships and one cleaner operating environment across the production ecosystem. But is it just marketing misdirection? On the surface, the offer makes sense. Most creative and marketing ops leaders have spent years managing the opposite: too many point solutions, …
Read more “Are you buying simplicity or dependency in CreativeOps?”
In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a marketing question to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Question: What framework should a marketing team use to audit Generative AI outputs for brand voice consistency and copyright compliance before they reach …
Read more “A framework for auditing generative AI outputs pre-launch”
Seasonal campaigns can boost sales and deliver a strong ROI. The most successful ones improve with each season. From what I’ve seen, campaigns that bring together industry trends, consumer behavior and brand strategy tend to outperform those that focus on just one area. The challenge is that combining these inputs takes more time than most …
Read more “A 6-step AI workflow for building better seasonal campaigns”
Email does a lot more work than it usually gets credit for. In Sinch Mailgun’s latest Email Impact Report, 78% of respondents say email is either “very” or “extremely” important to their organization’s success, which tells you pretty quickly that this is still a core business channel. The problem is that importance and measurability are …
Read more “Email delivers ROI, but many teams still can’t prove it”