For decades, marketing leaders guided buyers through a neat sequence from awareness to purchase. Today, that linear funnel model is breaking down. Buyers now chart their own course — jumping between channels, self-educating via digital content and often engaging sales late, if at all. As buyers became harder to corral into a predictable path, marketers …
Read more “Why today’s buyer journey no longer fits the funnel”
We’ve updated our page on RCS with data showing an increase in RCS usage for Black Friday 2025 compared to the previous year. By adding support for RCS (rich communication services) to iPhones with its iOS 18 update in the fall of 2024, Apple gave U.S. marketers a larger audience to engage with new tools …
Read more “Mobile marketing with RCS: What you need to know”
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: What’s the biggest shift in marketing tech and media beyond AI — and how should marketers adapt right now? The most …
Read more “Why privacy, not AI, is the biggest marketing shift to watch”
Scott Brinker and Frans Riemersma’s “Martech for 2026” keynote opened with a wall of logos — AI agents everywhere. Content production agents deployed by 70% of marketing teams. Customer service chatbots are now commonplace. McKinsey projections show that by 2028, roughly $750 billion in consumer spend will flow through AI-powered search, with 20%–50% of traditional …
Read more “How to level up your AI maturity from tools to transformation”
Many industries benefit greatly from strategic marketing yet are often held back by regulatory or compliance requirements. Financial services, healthcare, legal, insurance, engineering, energy and environmental management, cybersecurity and similar sectors are often viewed as dry, overly stoic or difficult places to employ creative tactics — though that isn’t true at all. Before teams can …
Read more “Rethinking marketing creativity in compliance-heavy industries”
When the Content Marketing Institute surveyed marketers last year, content strategy felt stuck in neutral — steady, but uninspired. This year? Marketers are making real moves. In its latest survey, 97% of marketers say they now have a content strategy in place. Among them, 13% report significant gains in performance and ROI, while nearly half …
Read more “Marketers see big gains from content strategy overhaul”
Despite generating more data than ever before, marketing teams continue to struggle with making their data accessible and usable. The persistent issues of data silos and integration continue to hinder teams in their efforts to make more informed decisions. Nearly two-thirds of the respondents to MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack survey said they suffered …
Read more “Amazon takes aim at data silos and lengthy workflows with Quick Suite”
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, strategy isn’t becoming less important — it’s becoming indispensable. WPP’s move to produce ads with AI may make execution faster and cheaper, but it also highlights a more profound shift. As AI takes over tasks, the need for real strategic thinking only intensifies. We’ve seen industry upheavals before …
Read more “When everyone has AI, thinking becomes the differentiator”
Words are a quiet kind of magic. However, they’re often treated like commodities rather than recognized for the power they hold. Words are a vehicle for connection, for understanding and for inspiration. A single change in phrasing can turn flat marketing speak into something that grabs attention, shifts perspectives and drives action. Below are the …
In a move that could clean up one of programmatic advertising’s messier processes, IAB Tech Lab has released version 1.0 of its proposed Deals API for public comment. The new spec introduces a standardized way for supply-side platforms (SSPs) and demand-side platforms (DSPs) to sync deal data—cutting down on the manual errors that often derail …
Read more “IAB Tech Lab proposes Deals API for programmatic advertising”