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Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

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Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

Why ‘it’s just SEO’ could cost the industry billions

Search has managed to do something impressive. At the precise moment it should be becoming more important and valuable to clients, large parts of the industry have chosen to argue themselves into irrelevance. The real argument is about ownership. Who gets to define what search becomes next? Who gets the budget? Who gets to explain

What Not To Automate With AI: The SEO Deskilling Trap

When AI arrived in the marketing mainstream, it was accompanied by a persistent and scary narrative: The machines are coming for our jobs. On the surface, those fears might appear well-founded. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 43% of surveyed marketers said their organization had laid off marketing employees within the last year – a

Why DSW and other brands are pivoting to traditional marketing

The phrase “what’s old is new again” doesn’t just apply to cyclical trends like low-rise jeans and flip phones, but marketing budgets as well. Marketers are increasingly reconsidering more traditional and offline ad channels. Call it a pendulum swing in response to the rise of AI and digital saturation. As ad platforms roll out more

How does contemporary type design translate into the wider world? Type01’s Amber Weaver shares her wisdom

Amber Weaver, the founder of Type01 (a type-led creative media platform as well as font market Type Department and type magazine Typeone) joined us on stage at London’s Nicer Tuesdays to take us the through the Type01 universe, from its feminist origins and creation of the magazine, to the platform’s original typefaces. She also touched

Google Tests Dedicated AI Search Reports In Search Console

Google is beginning to test two new Search Console features. One is a toggle that lets you control whether your site appears in generative AI Search features. The other is dedicated performance reports showing when URLs from a site appear in generative AI features across Search and Discover. Both features are rolling out to a

OpenAI Needs Two CMOs Because It Has a Problem Marketing Can’t Solve

Here is a marketing riddle: Take one of the best B2B brand builders alive, give him a big title, a near-trillion-dollar company to market, and the most famous product on earth to sell. Why would that be a disaster waiting to happen? Welcome to Colin Fleming’s new job at OpenAI. Fleming is the real deal.

Will Nvidia RTX Spark laptops end the Mac vs Windows debate for creatives?

Mac vs Windows is a debate that continues to polarise creatives. This was apparent in the comments section here on Creative Bloq when we asked over a year ago why graphic designers use Macs. Apple‘s switch from Intel to its own silicon with the M1 chip in late 2020 has helped maintain a view that

Microsoft Web IQ Gives AI Agents Bing Grounding APIs

Microsoft announced Web IQ, a set of grounding APIs that let AI agents pull information from Bing’s search index. The company calls Web IQ “a search engine for AI systems.” Where Bing helps people find web pages, Web IQ helps AI agents find information they can use while reasoning through a task. What Web IQ

Why your best campaign may not deserve more budget

It’s one of the best “problems” you can have in paid media. You’re running a campaign that delivers on every front. Cost per acquisition is strong. Return on ad spend is exceptional. Lead quality meets expectations. Average order value is exactly where it should be. Then the ask comes in: Double the budget and keep the

Two Halves, One Operating System Problem

Google just announced what we’ve been calling visibility engineering at Spin Sucks for almost a year. That validates the work. It does not close the gap. There are actually two visibility gaps — the external one (do AI systems see your brand?) and the internal one (do the people who sign your budget connect the

How To Fix Google Ads Smart Bidding With A Primary vs. Secondary Conversion Framework

Many Google Ads accounts have a conversion tracking problem that is disguised as a strategy problem. The ad account in this case has every action labeled as a “conversion.” The conversions are form fills, key button clicks, page views, cart adds, and checkouts started, which are all flowing into the same column, and all weighted

How publishers are modeling a future with less Google traffic

Publishing execs aren’t convinced if — or when — Google Zero will happen, but they’re preparing for the worst anyway: a future where Google search stops driving traffic to their sites, and becomes a destination for information. The threat of this zero-click future feels more real after Google’s last developer conference, where execs announced sweeping,

“At 28, you are absolutely not too old for this industry”

You don’t love the work your agency produces and you’re starting to feel like the clock is ticking on finding your way into something new. But hold your horses! In this week’s Creative Career Conundrums Kat Wong explains why its never too late to roll the career dice again.

Treating Reviews As Business Infrastructure, Not Marketing, Drives Real Business Results

Most business owners assume that higher star ratings are linked to better business outcomes. A peer-reviewed study tested that assumption directly. Researchers Eddie Inyang and Juliana White surveyed 251 U.S. small-business owners on online reputation management, Google star ratings, and business performance. Notably, Google star ratings alone didn’t predict performance. What was associated with performance

The Trade Desk Appoints Nate Olmstead CFO After a Year of Executive Turnover

On Monday, The Trade Desk announced Nate Olmstead will be the company’s chief financial officer. Olmstead is the company’s fourth finance chief in roughly a year. The company said Olmstead will join the The Trade Desk on July 9 and report to CEO Jeff Green. Olmstead’s hire comes as the adtech company looks to steady

Edifier T5s review: a subwoofer that puts quality above volume

Why you can trust Creative Bloq Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. I love me some good speakers. And recently, Edifier have been bringing out a lot of those. I’ve reviewed the S880D MkII just

Google CEO Sundar Pichai Downplays Google Zero Concerns

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google has spent 25 years learning how to measure user satisfaction in Search, including engagement, sessions, return behavior, and bounce-backs, saying that those metrics help Google improve AI Search. When asked about the concept of Google Search traffic dwindling to zero, the Google Zero scenario, Pichai insisted that the reality

Agentforce needed a content layer, so Salesforce is buying Contentful

Salesforce today signed a definitive agreement to acquire Contentful, planning to use the composable content platform alongside its Data 360 and Agentforce platforms to deliver personalized, AI-assembled experiences at scale across channels. Many enterprises are relying on static, channel-specific content. With Contentful on board, Salesforce wants to help these organizations move to dynamic content orchestration

The Open Standard That Gives AI Systems A Structured View Of Your Business

AI systems are now answering questions about your business. The problem is that they are often getting it wrong. Consider the typical situation. A brand’s products, services, expertise, locations, leadership, and relationships are distributed across dozens of pages. An AI model retrieves fragments from those pages, stitches them together probabilistically, and generates an answer. The

Dentsu has undergone a shift in top management on a global scale

Dentsu has undergone a shift in top management on a global scale, with new global CEO Takeshi Sano in charge of an agency holding company that sits just under the Big Three — Publicis, Omnicom and WPP — but has taken its lumps over the last few years as it tries to stay ahead of

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