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The GRADIENT: Why Taste Is the New Moat

Adrienne Salinger on returning to her groundbreaking photo series, Teenagers in Their Bedrooms

INT: So, how did you shoot these photos? AS: I used a 4×5-view camera and a wide angle 90mm lens. Brands don’t matter on view cameras. I printed all the photographs myself (at that time) 30”x40”. I allowed myself between two and four exposures for each teenager. I did this for a couple reasons. One

Apple To Lean On Google Gemini For Siri Overhaul

Apple is reportedly paying Google to build a custom Gemini AI model that will power a major Siri upgrade targeted for spring 2026, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The custom Gemini model is expected to run on Apple’s Private Cloud Compute infrastructure. Neither Apple nor Google has officially announced the partnership. What’s Being Reported Bloomberg

How to turn holiday shoppers into loyal friends, not one-time buyers

The holidays bring a flood of one-time shoppers — and a chance to turn them into long-term customers. Most brands focus on discounts and points, but genuine loyalty comes from connection, not coupons. Here’s how to build relationships that last beyond the holiday rush — using a lesson from an unlikely loyalty experiment. The postcard

MacBook Pro 14 M5 review: the new best portable Mac for creatives

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. Opening up a new MacBook Pro is always exciting. Especially as every year now we get a new processor too. For 2025 Apple

GEO Platform Shutdown Sparks Industry Debate Over AI Search

Benjamin Houy shut down Lorelight, a generative engine optimization (GEO) platform designed to track brand visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, after concluding most brands don’t need a specialized tool for AI search visibility. Houy writes that, after reviewing hundreds of AI answers, the brands mentioned most often share familiar traits: quality content, mentions in

BBC Studios appoints top marketer as interim CEO of brand division

Shelley Macintyre will replace former CEO of brands and licensing Nicki Sheard who joins fashion brand Me+Em as chief commercial officer. BBC Studios has promoted the brand’s lead marketer Shelley Macintyre to interim CEO of brands and licensing as its former CEO Nicki Sheard heads to luxury fashion brand Me+Em. From 1 December, Sheard will

Sherif Apampa’s sensitive design practice tackles “Nigerian culture, boyhood and innocence”

Sherif Apampa is one of those creatives that’s balancing it all. The Abuja-based artist and designer has an expansive practice in the arts and entertainment industry. From his independent studio Our Forever Youth Studio, to his graphic journal Gods Own Country, Sherif’s work documents his homeland of Nigeria, with bold and beautiful image making across

Is It Better To Refresh Content Or Create New Pages?

This week’s Ask An SEO asks a classic content conundrum: “Are content refreshes still an effective tactic, or is it better to create new pages altogether?” Yes, content refreshes are still an effective tactic in cases such as: Product releases where you only continue to sell the new product (new colors or sizes and other

Dentsu has always been an enigma relative to its primary rivals

There’s a certain irony when an agency holding company is winning clients but its global CEO puts the majority of its agency holdings into play for possible sale. In fact, to some it may be downright puzzling. Such is the case with Dentsu, the Japanese-owned holdco that’s always been a bit of an enigma relative

Heinz’s new tomato soup campaign is… souper

Heinz has created some wonderfully memorable campaigns over the years, with prints of old adverts dating back over 100 years (perhaps we need to add some of them to our best print ads roundup). The latest campaign from the King of soups focuses on Heinz Tomato Soup and shows three watercolour portraits of people relaxing

AI Is Breaking The Economics Of Content

What does it say about the economics of content when the most visible site on the web loses significant traffic? A status report by Wikipedia shows a significant decline in human page views over the last few months as a result of generative AI, “especially with search engines providing answers directly to searchers” [1]. Image Credit:

Le Sserafim and Their Peers Are Flipping the Script on US K-Pop Brand Deals

K-pop is having a moment in the U.S., and brands want to share the mic. Live touring revenue from the genre jumped 79% year over year in the first half of 2025, according to Billboard, with supergroups like Stray Kids and Ateez selling out American stadiums. K-pop artists also dominated the charts, claiming half of

If creativity is a delicate ecosystem, how do we keep things in balance? Emmi Salonen’s new book explores creative burnout

On her travels Emmi sought out two things: conversations with makers – from craftspeople on the Marquesas Islands to creatives in Ethiopia – and plenty of time in nature, where she became increasingly aware that everything is “interconnected and interdependent”, she says. Eventually, when the designer found herself back in Finland, she began to form

Trust In AI Shopping Is Limited As Shoppers Verify On Websites

A new IAB and Talk Shoppe study finds AI is accelerating discovery and comparisons, but it’s not the last stop. Here are the key points before we get into the details: AI pushes people to verify details on retailer sites, search, reviews, and forums rather than replacing those steps. Only about half fully trust AI

How small companies can win with account-based marketing

For years, account-based marketing (ABM) was framed as an enterprise-only play — a luxury for companies with six-figure deals and long sales cycles. If you’re a founder or marketing lead at a seed-stage startup, you’ve probably filed ABM under “someday.” It’s time to rethink that. The ABM market is projected to grow from $1.4 billion

I can’t believe all these pop-culture icons come out of copyright in 2026

Yes, I know next year is still a fair way off. But I’m already obsessing over what enters the public domain in 2026. Because I truly think this is a big deal. Betty Boop. Nancy Drew. The Maltese Falcon. Pluto. The Three Stooges. Agatha Christie’s first Miss Marple novel. These aren’t forgotten relics. These are

How To Do A Complete Local SEO Audit: 11-Point Checklist

Local SEO includes several specific tasks geared to establishing the relevance and authority of a business within a targeted geographic area. Search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT reference many different data points to determine who will be surfaced in their respective result sets, which include AI Overviews and AI

Sainsbury’s on why the BFG is the ‘perfect vehicle’

Sainsbury’s is bringing the BFG back for Christmas 2025 in an advert focused on helping others over the festive season, designed to “mirror” the supermarket’s brand tone of voice. Continuing the BFG campaign, part of Sainsbury’s long-standing creative platform ‘Good Food for All of Us’, was a no-brainer for marketing director, Radha Davies. “It pushed

Deepak Panglia on capturing FKA Twigs’ “dreamlike intimacy” on-stage

Each shot balances the lighting, the smoke machine and the stage’s figures: Twigs and her many dancers. And the reason it feels so deliberate, so premeditated, is all in the storytelling. Each element of Twigs’ live performance are treated as characters within their own right. In one image, the lighting obscures the performers facial features,

How Google Discover REALLY Works

This is all based on the Google leak and tallies up with my experience of content that does well in Discover over time. I have pulled out what I think are the most prominent Discover proxies and grouped them into what seems like the appropriate workflow. Like a disgraced BBC employee, thoughts are my own.

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