Blueprint — page 41 | The Gradient

Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

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Paramount, Warner, and the Price of Consolidation

“You don’t have to be the loudest person in the room”

The feedback about your personality is tricky, it could be seen two ways. They can’t see your impact as easily. You’re doing the work, but it’s not being communicated well. You need to make your thinking visible for them to see your value. You can try to emulate the extroverts on your own terms. Commit

Google May Have To Share Search Data With Rivals

The European Commission has sent preliminary findings to Google proposing measures to share search data with rival search engines, including AI chatbots that qualify as online search engines under the DMA, across the EU and EEA. Under the proposal, Google must share four categories of anonymized data on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) terms. The

Inside Coachella’s Off-Site Events That Are Rewriting the Festival’s Landscape

Coachella took over the desert this past weekend, and brands were quick to follow. But some of the biggest moments on that front happened off-site, where brands could build outside the constraints of the festival grounds. Off-site events felt smaller and more exclusive, and some with even better perks. Calling them “parties” would’n’t be accurate;

The one thing I wish I’d known: “you don’t need everything figured out”

What do you wish you’d known about the industry when you were first starting out? That’s the question we posed to a range of creatives recently, and we got a range of answers. To discover answers discussing openness and technology, see the first in this ‘one thing I wish I’d known’ series. For more tips

How To Build AI Visibility In 90 Days [Webinar]

AI search has changed how buyers discover solutions. Here’s how to make sure they find you. Why AI Visibility Is Now a Growth Priority Platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews are now active discovery channels for buyers. Marketing leaders who understand those signals are building durable visibility. Those who don’t are quietly losing

Adobe rebrands Experience Cloud as ‘CX Enterprise,’ goes all-in on AI agents

Adobe is replacing its Experience Cloud umbrella with a new flagship offering called Adobe CX Enterprise— an AI-first platform that merges creative and marketing capabilities under a single, agent-based architecture. The company plans to unveil CX Enterprise and more than a dozen related product announcements at Adobe Summit 2026, its annual marketer-focused event running April

ANNA :: Behance

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68 Million AI Crawler Visits Show What Drives AI Search Visibility

A new analysis of 858,457 sites hosted on the Duda platform shows how AI crawlers are interacting with websites at scale. The data offers a clearer view of how crawling activity is growing and what SEOs and businesses should do to increase traffic from AI search. AI Crawling Has Already Reached Scale AI crawling is

Despite globe uncertainty, brands are spending

I know I’ve harped on the uncertain economic conditions so far in 2026 quite a bit. (It could have to do with the fact that I looked at my 401K and saw it’s performing at -1.36% year to date, after years of upward growth.) But the reason it merits being covered is because somehow, for

Unlearned shares the personal career reflections of top creatives

Digital design tool Readymag has long supported young creatives since its launch in 2012, and its latest project – the editorial project Unlearned – aims to shed further light on just how to find the right path after design school. It takes the form of 13 written perspectives from influential names across the industry, all at different

Should You Use Auto-Generated Creative? – Ask A PPC

It won’t surprise anyone that most advertisers are hesitant to use auto-generated creative from ad platforms. Auto-generated ads fall into the following categories: Customer-in-the-loop (CITL): Assets are generated based on inputs like a website URL or a user prompt. The advertiser always has a choice as to whether or not they want to include these

Week of April 6 Evening News Ratings: WNT Stays on Top

ABC World News Tonight with David Muir was America’s most-watched newscast in total viewers and the Adults 25-54 demo for the week of April 6. However, WNT, NBC Nightly News with Tom Llamas, and CBS Evening News with Tony Dokoupil did not register any week-to-week gains in either measured category for the just-concluded week. In

Why Mullet Madjack’s retro VHS-era anime art style still stands out

Over the years, especially if you’re not a deep cut anime fan, there’s a version of cyberpunk we’ve all been trained to expect, it’s neon glow, glassy surfaces and hyper-clean UI, but PC-shooter Mullet Madjack, coming to Switch on 30 April, isn’t interested in that version at all, instead it tears the genre back to

The Complete Guide To Agentic Commerce

For 30 years, checkout has been a page. A form with fields for name, address, credit card number. Whether it was Amazon’s one-click patent or Apple Pay’s fingerprint, the innovation was always about making that form faster to get through. The form itself never went away. Now it is. This is the final article in

Reclaiming the power of the story — fueled by data and AI

The pressure to produce content at an unrelenting pace often leaves marketing teams feeling like they’re running a marathon on a treadmill — moving fast, but losing the human connection that actually drives results. At the May 6th MarTech Conference, we’re hosting a session called, “Marketing’s moment: Reclaiming the power of the story — fueled

Horizonfilms :: Behance

Search Ad Growth Slows As Social & Video Gain Faster

Search advertising is one of the largest digital ad categories, but its growth is slowing as social media and video post faster gains, according to IAB’s annual report, conducted by PwC. What The Data Shows In 2025, digital advertising revenue reached $294 billion, reflecting a 13% increase from the previous year. The report uses self-reported revenue

The M&A lag was attributed to macroeconomic uncertainty

The last two weeks witnessed separate mergers and acquisitions in the ad tech sector, a stark contrast to the opening three weeks of the year, according to statistics from LUMA Partners released this week. The deals in question were Viant’s intended $40 million purchase of TVision, an announcement made a day after True Anthem’s takeover

Nao Lee’s posters are digital terrains that hide small and unruly treasures for you to find

Often in graphic design, whether consciously or not, we learn to make things match, to keep things uniform enough to look like they all come from a cohesive whole. But Nao Lee (a.k.a undefinedtomato) is an expert in overriding this inherited instinct – she’s the kind of designer that just loves juxtaposition. That might be

AI Agents Are Here And Your Website Isn’t Ready, Says No Hacks Podcast Host

AI agents are already here. Not as a concept, not as a demo, but shipping inside browsers used by billions of people. Every major tech company has launched either a browser with AI built in or an extension that acts on your behalf. Anthropic’s Claude for Chrome can navigate websites, fill forms, and perform multi-step

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