Martech is a team sport, and no one wins it alone. Success depends on coordination across internal teams and external partners. A customer success manager, or CSM, is one of the most important — and often underutilized — partners for marketing technology practitioners. They play a critical role in shaping the vendor-client relationship and long-term …
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U.S. B2B marketers are dealing with a paradox: they’re spending more than anyone else, but feeling less certain about the return. Over half (55%) of U.S. marketers reported budget increases in 2026, while 37% were asked to make cuts — most of them under 10%, according to 10Fold’s “The 2026 Marketing Budget Blueprint, Part II.” …
Read more “US B2B marketers have the biggest budgets and the lowest confidence”
Your analytics team is spending hours connecting the dots across your offline and online campaigns. Your attribution approach is predominantly last-touch or when it’s more sophisticated, it’s a black box you can’t quite explain to stakeholders. You question whether your marketing mix model (MMM) is providing the right recommendations. You trust your incrementality tests, but …
Read more “AI could unlock $30B for marketers, if we fix measurement first”
B2B marketers usually treat Super Bowl week like a black hole for engagement. The assumption? Everyone’s distracted, inboxes are crowded and it’s safer to go quiet and wait it out. But new data from HubSpot turns that logic on its head. After analyzing marketing activity and buyer behavior during the past three Super Bowls (2024–2026), …
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Every year, Spotify Wrapped reminds marketers of an uncomfortable truth: AI isn’t just supporting marketing anymore — it’s often the star of the show. What started as automation and personalization has evolved into AI systems that plan, execute, optimize and measure performance in real time. From dynamic ad creative to media buying and attribution, AI …
Trust is the secret sauce for building customer relationships that actually last. Think of it as the soil where your customer lifetime value grows—and that’s the metric that really matters for your bottom line. At the end of the day, the more your customers trust you, the more profitable you’re going to be. You need …
Read more “Trust can’t be automated, and that’s why it matters”
TransUnion this week signed a definitive agreement to acquire RealNetworks’ mobile division. The acquisition will help expand TransUnion’s Trusted Call Solutions suite by offering protection of text messaging and expanding the company’s footprint in the E.U., where RealNetworks has a strong foothold. To understand the strategy at work here, you likely need only look at …
Read more “TransUnion looks to bring trust back to mobile communications channels”
Throughout 2025, no topics seemed to be connected at the hip quite like data and AI. As AI users and businesses started to plan for moving beyond popular LLMs and into real-world deployments of AI and agents, the importance of accurate, well-governed data as the foundation for AI became clear. In 2026, adding context to …
How do you create brand meaning that’s algorithm-proof? By creating moments so meaningful that when the customer’s need returns, the brand does too, without any algorithmic assistance. I call it appreciated generosity. In a marketing world increasingly optimized by AI, personalization engines and predictive systems, it’s tempting to believe relevance can be engineered entirely through …
Read more “The brand moments algorithms will never understand”
Most marketing ROI reports don’t fail because marketing underperformed. They fail because they answer questions executives aren’t asking. Marketing has no shortage of data. Dashboards overflow with impressions, clicks, engagement rates and conversion metrics. Yet many CMOs, VPs and directors of marketing still face the same uncomfortable question in the boardroom: “How is marketing actually …
Read more “How to demonstrate marketing ROI in a way the C-suite trusts”