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The GRADIENT: Why Taste Is the New Moat

Is this the most honest piece of advertising ever made?

There’s a claw machine sitting in Moco Museum in London right now, and inside it hangs an authentic Hermès Birkin bag worth over £10,000. You’re invited to play. Interested? Well, who wouldn’t be? There’s just one problem. You will not win. The game is, by the creators’ own cheerful admission, completely and utterly rigged. The

The Way Your Agency Handles Leads Will Define Success in 2026

More leads don’t matter if they aren’t answered or followed up with at the right time. What happens when clients don’t answer inbound leads? How do you prove marketing ROI when leads don’t turn into booked appointments? How much revenue, or trust, is lost to slow response times? Watch on-demand to learn how agencies are

Stranger Things Recaptures No. 1 Spot

After ceding the top spot for one week, Netflix’s Stranger Things recaptured the streaming crown in Nielsen’s Top 10 Overall Streaming chart for the week of January 19. Stranger Things bounced back with 1.66 billion viewing minutes for the recorded week, edging out Paramount+’s Landman, which also reclaimed its No. 2 position with 1.615 billion minutes

J.Lindeberg :: Behance

At the heart of J.Lindeberg, founded in 1996, lies a bold contradiction — the refined world of fashion and the raw pulse of sport. These two forces, distinct yet inseparable, carries a tension that allow for something electric to happen. J.Lindeberg reached out to SDL to shape a new direction for the brand and we

Why Do Budgets Overspend Even With A Target ROAS or CPA?

This month’s Ask a PPC explores a common advertiser question: Why budgets sometimes overspend even when a target ROAS or target CPA is in place. Understanding this behavior requires separating two concepts that are often conflated: budgets and goals. While they work together, they serve very different functions within auction‑based ad platforms. In this post,

The HubSpot updates you don’t want to miss from January 2026

The most impactful HubSpot updates from January 2026 focus on removing friction from everyday HubSpot work. Here’s what stood out to us. HubSpot kicked off 2026 with a batch of updates that feel intentionally practical. January’s releases focused on smoothing out the parts of HubSpot teams touch every day: workflows, lifecycle stages, segmentation, reporting and

The design of Genie Wu proves craft and code can co-exist

Genie Wu’s design “begins with a double take”. When living between Taiwan and the United States, the designer learned that meaning is never fixed, it simply shifts and reshapes with every culture and point of view. “That habit of looking twice informs how I approach every project. I treat the world as layered, where everyday

New Meridian Tool, Performance Max Learning Path – PPC Pulse

Welcome to this week’s PPC Pulse, where this week’s focus is on scenario-based planning in both Google and Microsoft platforms. Google introduced a new Scenario Planner within Meridian, giving marketers the ability to model budget allocation shifts before committing spend. Microsoft launched a scenario-based Performance Max learning path designed to walk advertisers through practical campaign

What the rise of AI influencers means for marketers

Conversations about AI in influencer marketing centre heavily around managing workflows and increasing post frequency. But as the creator economy evolves interest is increasing in AI-generated influencers. AI influencers have technically been around for around a decade, with one of the most popular, Lil Miquela, making her Instagram debut in 2016. Another, Mia Zelu, went

This free fan remake is the perfect way to celebrate Zelda’s 40th anniversary

Today is Zelda’s 40th anniversary, marking four decades since the original game made its debut for Famicom in Japan in 1986 before launching on the NES in the US and Europe a year after. It seems the perfect occasion to revisit the first Zelda game – or at least a reimagining of the landmark release.

Google AI Mode Link Update, Click Share Data & ChatGPT Fan-Outs – SEO Pulse

Welcome to the week’s SEO Pulse: updates affect how links appear in AI search results, where organic clicks are going, and which languages ChatGPT uses to find sources. Here’s what matters for you and your work. Google Redesigns Links In AI Overviews And AI Mode Robby Stein, VP of Product for Google Search, announced on

The mental gymnastics of principal media

There’s a very specific facial expression CMOs make when “principal media” enters the conversation — composure holding, skepticism setting in. They understand the mechanics: an agency buys inventory, resells it and keeps the margin. What’s changed is the expectation that they take a side. For some, the model nudges decisions toward the agency’s balance sheet, not

Desert Coffee (USA) :: Behance

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Google Ads Surfaces PMax Search Partner Domains In Placement Report

Some advertisers are now seeing Performance Max placement data populate in Google Ads reporting, including Search Partner domains and impression counts that had previously been absent from the report. PPC marketer Thomas Eccel flagged the change on LinkedIn, noting the report had been empty for his PMax campaigns until now. “I finally see where and

Dept Powers Up Its Global Content Studio With Adobe AI

The demand for marketing content is higher than ever as consumer attention fragments and brands are able to reach people in multiple languages and contexts across the globe. Dept wants to change how that work gets done. The digital agency has partnered with Adobe to rebuild how its 500-person global content studio operates. The overhaul

Vlad Boyko on bringing back early 2000s clubbing visuals

The most successful work in this steady run of experimental flyers and prints always seemed to be the ones Vlad designed for friends or ‘small’ events: “the one flyer that I think, received the most attention last year was Doomscrolling Live for a small ambient listening night organized in Antwerp by my friends SYSTM. I

‘Summarize With AI’ Buttons Used To Poison AI Recommendations

Microsoft’s Defender Security Research Team published research describing what it calls “AI Recommendation Poisoning.” The technique involves businesses hiding prompt-injection instructions within website buttons labeled “Summarize with AI.” When you click one of these buttons, it opens an AI assistant with a pre-filled prompt delivered through a URL query parameter. The visible part tells the

Content marketing jobs are splitting in two

If you think content marketing is still about writing blog posts and filling an editorial calendar, the job market says otherwise. A Semrush analysis of 8,000 U.S. content marketing job listings shows a profession in the middle of a structural shift. Companies are no longer hiring content marketers just to produce assets. They want them

These detailed earphones just got discounted – they were only released two months ago!

I just finished writing my review on the Binary Acoustics EP321 MEMS in-ear monitor, when I noticed that there’s already $15 off the asking price, over at Amazon. The EP321 only got released in December 2025, and it was great value for its asking price, so this is definitely a deal worth highlighting. There are

Vectorization And Transformers (Not The Film)

Information retrieval systems are designed to satisfy a user. To make a user happy with the quality of their recall. It’s important we understand that. Every system and its inputs and outputs are designed to provide the best user experience. From the training data to similarity scoring and the machine’s ability to “understand” our tired, sad

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