New consumer research reveals a growing divide between AI-powered discovery and purchasing decisions, suggesting that brand recognition may become even more valuable as algorithms reshape how people shop.
Read MoreCreator marketing has become a permanent fixture in brand strategy, but the industry is still treating campaigns as temporary investments. The real value may come from what happens after the campaign ends.
The holiday shopping season is shaping up to be bigger, more competitive and more complicated than ever. Consumers are spending, but they’re also scrutinizing every purchase. Here’s what marketers need to understand before the year’s biggest shopping event.
As AI reshapes how consumers find and evaluate products, marketers are racing to improve visibility in AI-generated recommendations. But the real competitive advantage may have less to do with search optimization and more to do with the people willing to recommend a brand. For years, brands have invested heavily in…
Consumers are discovering apps through personal recommendations, questioning subscription value, and approaching AI-driven discovery with skepticism. For marketers, the next phase of app growth will depend less on acquiring downloads and more on earning a permanent place in people’s lives.
As financial anxiety reshapes holiday shopping behavior, marketers face a fundamental challenge: generating demand is no longer enough when consumers are increasingly uncertain about their ability to spend.
NordVPN’s new partnership with the Los Angeles Lakers is the latest example of a growing relationship between technology brands and professional sports.
As AI agents take control of product discovery, comparison and purchasing, marketers face a fundamental challenge to how brands create value. The real threat isn’t that consumers will stop caring about brands, but that brands may lose the opportunity to influence the decisions consumers increasingly delegate to machines.
Read MoreEvery year, marketing becomes more measurable, more personalized and more automated, yet brands seem increasingly uncertain about what actually works. The problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the industry has become exceptionally good at measuring itself while becoming progressively worse at observing real human behaviour.
B2B marketing spent two decades building a vast machine to capture, score and nurture leads, but buyers learned how the machine works and quietly stopped cooperating. The result is an industry generating more contacts, more dashboards and more artificial intent while sales teams increasingly wonder where the actual customers went.
AI has become one of marketing’s most powerful product claims, but regulators are making something increasingly clear: future features, ideal conditions and edited demonstrations cannot be advertised as present-day reality.
Google may have abandoned its plan to kill the third-party cookie, but the forces making identifier-based advertising less reliable never went away. The smarter question is no longer when cookies disappear, but why marketers are still building around them.
Experiential marketing has spent years chasing scale, spectacle and shareability, but the 2026 World Cup exposed a more important opportunity: turning real-world experiences into something increasingly scarce in modern marketing — genuine trust.
Direct mail may look like a relic of marketing’s past, but the transactional data behind it could solve one of digital advertising’s biggest problems. As AI takes greater control of audience modeling, knowing what real people actually bought may prove far more valuable than another mountain of clicks, browsing behavior…
