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Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

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Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

Making art with charcoal lit my imagination on fire – here’s how

Dust off your charcoal and grab your sense of fun, because we’re about to go on an adventure to reclaim your artistic spontaneity and intuitive creativity! I’ve been a passionate creator of monsters and otherworldly beings since I was old enough to pick up a crayon. While I’m a mild-mannered graphic designer by day, I

What To Expect AT NESS 2025: Surviving The AI-First Era

This post was sponsored by NESS. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own. For anyone who isn’t paying attention to news SEO because they feel it isn’t their relevant niche – think again. The foundations of SEO are underpinned by publishing content. Therefore, news SEO is relevant to all SEO. We are

Think like a product manager, grow like a CMO

As B2B marketers, we’ve spent the last decades optimizing channels, refining nurture streams and automating campaigns. But something’s shifted in this new AI-powered GTM world. Growth is no longer just a distribution game. It’s a product game. The most effective marketing teams today don’t just run campaigns. They operate more like product managers than traditional

Jacob Hutchinson merges structured layouts with the soft imperfections of old stamps and vinyl stickers

Stamp silhouettes, sketchbook grids and vinyl stickers are often the frame for Jacob Hutchinson’s intricate design work. The Sheffield-born creative has always been drawn to the tactility of this kind of vintage print ephemera, and the soft imperfections that come with it – he’s perpetually scanning in old printed matter “to preserve those imperfections,” he

AI Overviews Use FastSearch, Not Links

A sharp-eyed search marketer discovered the reason why Google’s AI Overviews showed spammy web pages. The recent Memorandum Opinion in the Google antitrust case featured a passage that offers a clue as to why that happened and speculates how it reflects Google’s move away from links as a prominent ranking factor. Ryan Jones, founder of

Creators credit increased pay transparency for higher rates in 2025

Sponsorship rates are on the rise in 2025, and creators say a newfound culture of pay transparency is helping fuel the jump. Creators’ sponsorship rates have climbed — sometimes doubling in the past year — with marketers calling it a natural market correction amid advertisers’ rising demand for creator inventory. But four creators told Digiday that

I’m stunned to see the Bambu Lab X1 Carbon Combo down to just $999

If you’re into 3D printing, then I’m willing to bet you’re already familiar with Bambu Lab and its incredibly premium products. This morning, I was stunned to discover that the company’s X1 Carbon printer has hit its lowest price ever for the combo model (which includes an AMS), down to just $999.99 over at Best

How Do I Nail A PPC Job Interview For Google & Meta Ads?

It is a wild job market right now, and if you’re applying for a PPC role, you’re probably feeling the pressure to stand out in interviews that are increasingly demanding and often unclear in their expectations. Whether you’re interviewing for a specialist, manager, or hybrid media role, one thing is certain: You need to be

CBS News’ Face the Nation to Air Interviews Unedited

On Friday, CBS News’ Face the Nation announced that it will now broadcast its live or live-to-tape interviews in their entirety. The network, in a statement to TVNewser, said the new policy, which was in response to “audience feedback,” was implemented to provide “greater transparency in our interviews.” Excluded from this procedure are interviews that

Hannah Knox’s paintings of collars, zips and buttoned up cardigans tell stories about the human condition

“I focused on a few of my striped shirts, adjusting the garment for each new painting and I realised that if I folded the shirt (as you might find it in a shop or online) then it could fit exactly the format of the canvas,” says Hannah. Creating a trompe l’oeil effect and becoming a

Why You Need Sprints, Not Checklists

There’s a lot that goes into SEO. And, now, more broadly into being found online and online visibility overall, whether we’re talking about an organic result in a search engine, an AI Overview, or through a large language model (LLM). With SEO being a discipline that often takes a long time (compared to ads and

Shoppers expect fewer discounts this holiday season

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Three out of four U.S. shoppers expect to pay more, according to Gartner’s report, “2025 Holiday Advertising and Consumer Trends Marketing Must Address.” The report said one in four Americans plan to spend less overall during the 2025 holiday season, and 40% expect

The backlash to Lady Gaga’s new music video proves AI paranoia has gone too far

These days, knowing how to spot AI generated content is indeed getting trickier. And the upshot is that just about everything can be accused of being artificially generated – which has perhaps never been better demonstrated than by the ridiculous response to Lady Gaga’s new music video. Gaga just dropped the music video for The

Your Login Pages May Be Hurting Your SEO Performance

Google’s Search Relations team says generic login pages can confuse indexing and hurt rankings. When many private URLs all show the same bare login form, Google may treat them as duplicates and show the login page in search. In a recent “Search Off the Record” episode, John Mueller and Martin Splitt explained how this happens

LGBTQ+ site Outsports grows revenue and audience by over 50%

Many LGBTQ+ publishers saw a slowdown in ad spend earlier this year, but one publisher is emerging as an outlier, thanks to new ownership, more sales resources and its focus on sports coverage. Vox Media sold Outsports, which covers LGBTQ+ athletes, to Q.Digital last March in an “acqui-hire” deal (a non-cash transaction where Q.Digital took

Adapt or die? When total brand overhauls work, and when they don’t

For other big reinventions, big design resets were rooted in changes to brand context, as seen in the case with paper purveyor GF Smith’s rebrand. With the help of cause-led agency Templo, GF Smith sought a rebrand that would inject more colour, movement and personality into its identity. GF Smith’s global brand director, Ben Watkinson

AI Search Sends Users to 404 Pages Nearly 3X More Than Google

New research examining 16 million URLs aligns with Google’s predictions that hallucinated links will become an issue across AI platforms. An Ahrefs study shows that AI assistants send users to broken web pages nearly three times more often than Google Search. The data arrives six months after Google’s John Mueller raised awareness about this issue.

Noreen Gillespie Joins NBC News as SVP, Head of News Standards

Newest addition: NBC News announced that Noreen Gillespie is joining the news network as a senior vice president, head of news standards and practices. Reporting to Rebecca Blumenstein, NBC News president, editorial, Gillespie was most recently a journalism director at Microsoft’s Trusted Technology Group. She has also held multiple roles at The Associated Press, including

Nvidia’s RTX Mega Geometry in Unreal Engine 5 actually looks amazing

The graphics card giant Nvidia unveiled RTX Mega Geometry back in February, highlighting its potential to enhance geometric detail in ray-traced applications by efficiently handling complex, highly-instanced geometry. The new tech has now been added to the RTX Branch of Unreal Engine 5.6, one of the best game development programs, and word is starting to

Let’s Look Inside An Answer Engine And See How GenAI Picks Winners

Ask a question in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Copilot, and the answer appears in seconds. It feels effortless. But under the hood, there’s no magic. There’s a fight happening. This is the part of the pipeline where your content is in a knife fight with every other candidate. Every passage in the index wants to

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