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The GRADIENT: Why Taste Is the New Moat

Why Bashel Lewis ditched a corporate career for the creator grind

It started with a standing desk and a Beyoncé lip sync. That was the viral video Bashel Lewis posted to his TikTok account in April that got him thinking about leaving his full time marketing gig at Nielsen to become a content creator. “Everyone from Universal to Hulu to every brand you could think —

Xencelabs new Pen Display 16 Lite drops by $50, now $749

Xencelabs is back with its Black Friday deals, and for illustrators and digital artists, they’re worth a serious look. For me, the standout deal is the new Pen Display 16 Lite with $50 off its price, now $799 $749; this OLED tablet was only released this month. The standard Pen Display 16 Bundle is also

Branded Clicks Fan Out, Longer Queries Hold

Advanced Web Ranking released its Q3 Google organic clickthrough report, tracking CTR changes by ranking position across query types and industries. The company compared July through September against April through June. The dataset is international, so the patterns reflect broad search behavior rather than a single region. Here’s what stands out in this quarter’s report.

Breaking the AI Hype Cycle, Coca-Cola Generates a Flop, and Spotify’s AI Slop Battle

AI is booming, VR is evolving, and AR is exploding into the real world — but most of it still feels underwhelming. On this week’s episode of TechMagic, host Lee Kebler welcomes Andrew Schwartz while host Cathy Hackl is away. Andrew is the director of metaverse engineering at Nike, and together, they unpack the realities

Pitch’s new AI tools remove the busywork from everyday deck design

Above: Room created in Pitch (Copyright © Pentagram 2025) There’s also a sense of democratisation at the centre of Pitch’s AI tools, somewhat levelling the playing field between self-employed individuals and bigger agencies. As Adam suggests, “Pitch helps solo creatives and small groups bat above their weight,” increasing their capacity, especially due to its rapid

Repositioning What SEO Success Looks Like

In SEO, we are at a turning point, and after more than a decade of chasing rankings and traffic volume, many of us are beginning to recognize the need to have a broader and more meaningful conversation about what “success” really means in SEO. This article reflects on how these conversations are evolving, why the

Salesforce adds observability to Agentforce, aiming to boost AI performance and trust

Salesforce is expanding the capabilities of its Agentforce 360 Platform with new observability tools designed to give organizations real-time visibility into AI agent performance. The update, announced today, aims to help companies scale their use of AI agents with greater confidence, transparency, and control. As AI-powered agents assume more customer-facing and operational roles, the need

Alan Lee’s illustrated Tolkien box set hits lowest-ever Black Friday price

If you’ve been waiting for the right moment to upgrade your Tolkien collection, this might be it. Amazon has quietly slashed the price of the Alan Lee Illustrated Box Set of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by 39%, bringing the four-book hardback collection down to a far more tempting $91.10. As someone

LLMs.txt Does Not Boost AI Citations, New Analysis Finds

A new analysis from SE Ranking suggests the llms.txt file isn’t delivering measurable benefits yet. After examining roughly 300,000 domains, the company found no relationship between having llms.txt and how often a domain is cited in major LLM answers. What The Data Says Adoption Is Thin SE Ranking’s crawl found llms.txt on 10.13% of domains.

Consumer confidence drops ahead of budget

Consumer confidence scores have fluctuated over the past year, with no clear direction of travel to indicate shifts in sentiment. Source

James Pearson-Howes on documenting 20 years of grime

The book’s designers, Alflie Allen and Max Marshall, brought grime’s fashion legacy to the tactile experience. James says: “I said I didn’t want to make a coffee table book as I thought that didn’t feel right for grime.” In consideration of how best to encapsulate the genre’s feel, James, Alfie, and Max came up with

The Role Of Brand Authority And E-E-A-T In The AI Search Era

AI-generated answers are spreading across search. Google and Bing are each presenting synthesized responses alongside regular results. These answers are not replacing traditional SERPs yet, but they are taking up attention. As they improve, they influence what people see first and what they trust most. The question is no longer whether they will change search,

The new consumer journey, according to the CMO of Assembly

Ask a dozen marketers, and some will say the customer journey has, in turn, collapsed, condensed, lengthened, looped, died and been born anew. What’s not up for debate is that it has fundamentally changed. That’s what Global CMO of Assembly Bria Bryant helped unpack when we met for a morning of shopping and shop talk.

Evercade EXP-R and VS-R drop by 20%, ideal for reliving your childhood gaming era

Evercade is rolling out its biggest Black Friday sale yet, including 20% off its Super Pocket handhelds, and if, like me, you grew up swapping floppy disks, blowing dust out of cartridges, or feeding 20p coins into arcade cabinets, this one’s going to hit you right in the retro feels. The excellent Evercade EXP-R handheld

New Data Finds Gap Between Google Rankings And LLM Citations

Large language models cite sources differently than Google ranks them. Search Atlas, an SEO software company, compared citations from OpenAI’s GPT, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity against Google search results. The analysis of 18,377 matched queries finds a gap between traditional search visibility and AI platform citations. Here’s an overview of the key differences Search Atlas

A Publisher Made Just $174 From AI Crawlers. It Could Change the Industry.

Three years since the debut of ChatGPT, 99% of publishers have yet to see a penny.

What’s on EartH? A look at the upcoming events at East London’s much-loved culture spot

Plenty plays out at EartH. Not only is it where Nicer Tuesdays has called home for the past few years, but it’s also home to London’s music and cultural scene. Once a former Art Deco cinema in Dalston, EartH reopened in 2018 by the team behind Village Underground, keeping much of the original character alongside

Tips To Boost Your Holiday PPC Performance (Get Ready Now)

Black Friday doesn’t sneak up on anyone, yet somehow it still catches advertisers off guard every year. Campaigns launch at the last minute, budgets aren’t ready, and tracking issues surface once performance starts to spike. If you’ve managed PPC through Q4, you know how quickly small mistakes can turn into costly ones. CPCs rise, competition

Adobe buys Semrush

Leading SEO platform Semrush is being acquired by software company Adobe. Adobe announced the acquisition today. The all-cash deal is valued at about $1.9 billion and is expected to close in the first half of 2026, pending regulatory and shareholder approvals. Semrush acquired Third Door Media, publisher of MarTech, in October 2024 What Semrush is

Apple’s AirPods Max 2 just dipped under $480

Since getting into the best budget audiophile headphones this year, I’ve slept on the AirPods Max a bit. But with a price drop to $479 over at Best Buy, for the new USB-C port model, I think it’s time to give them a little love. The thing is you can’t alter the Max’s sound, as

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