It's Thursday afternoon in 2025. You're setting up a booth at a Realtor appreciation event, maybe your third one this year. You paid $2,500 for the table. Dozens of agents drift by. Three stop. One takes a koozie without even looking up. By six o'clock you're loading candy and koozies back into your car and calling it brand awareness. You'll do it again next quarter.
We live in a world moving at the speed of AI, where everything is changing all at once. As we streamline every aspect of life to be faster and more efficient, it only makes sense to modernize how we network. Before you overhaul your networking style, it's important to remember the fundamentals, then build on them with new skills. Networking is everywhere, all the time
As customers' journeys grow more complex and non-linear, I've found that it's no longer enough to simply appear on multiple platforms: The platforms must be interconnected. A true omnichannel strategy allows business leaders to present customers with a unified and consistent experience across multiple channels and touchpoints. HockeyStack's recent B2B research indicates that the number of impressions and touchpoints required to close a deal increased by 9.5% and 19.8%, respectively, from 2023 to 2024.
On the media side, it's a gift: optimization at scale, smarter targeting, real-time reporting. It's the stuff that used to eat entire departments for breakfast, now handled in seconds. But when we let it run the creative floor, that's where things get messy,
The phrase 'Google it' may not hold the same weight in the age of AI-powered search engines. Increasingly, shoppers are turning to AI platforms like Google AI Overviews, Gemini and OpenAI's ChatGPT to discover, research and even purchase products. The shift is reshaping brand visibility. 'There's been a marked shift in awareness: brands are realizing that years of hard-earned search equity are being reshaped overnight as AI moves from search engines to answer engines,'
I bet you remember when Nike first began using their catchphrase: "Just Do It!" It was 1988, and this tagline could be found everywhere. It was a challenge to act, to initiate, to take a risk, to move forward even if it's hard. After 37 years, Nike is reintroducing this iconic rallying cry to Generation Z, but they are tailoring their message to the Gen Z mindset: "Why Do It?" It is customized to meet young athletes where they are.
It's not just their creativity or hustle, it's their ability to embrace innovative tools that give them a competitive edge. Enter ChatGPT, the AI powerhouse that's quietly transforming the way elite marketers work. Imagine crafting hyper-targeted campaigns in minutes, uncovering hidden customer insights, or predicting market trends with uncanny accuracy. These aren't futuristic dreams, they're the everyday reality for marketers who know how to harness the full potential of AI.
You'll spearhead our company-wide shift to AI-first creative, building and operationalizing a pipeline that transforms how we conceive, produce, test, and analyze content across Performance Marketing, CRM, and Brand. This is about elevating team capabilities, driving innovation at scale, and setting a new benchmark for what creative can achieve. This role requires both strategic thinking and hands-on execution. You'll be shaping the future of creative work at Blinkist, delivering real impact while pushing the boundaries of what's possible.
Over the last two years, the value of content has collapsed. Thanks to the LLM revolution, the internet is drowning in an avalanche of indistinguishable output: an endless parade of fast-food writing, recycled reports, and SEO-bait fluff optimized for algorithms instead of people. That's why the only competitive moat left is the human story. For business leaders, this creates an urgent mandate: Storytelling is no longer a marketing tactic. It's a strategic business imperative-the only reliable engine for changing minds and shifting behaviors.
Gamification is one of those shiny objects that periodically captures companies' attention - a tactic that promises to boost engagement and revenue metrics. After all, everyone else seems to be doing it, so why not your company, too? At its core, gamification means applying game design elements in non-game contexts to tap into human motivation - boosting engagement and participation over time. In marketing, that can translate into higher revenue, stronger loyalty and longer customer lifetime value.
We expect that fewer consumers will be landing on the web pages where most of that display inventory has historically existed, and so there will just be fewer monetizable audiences there to begin with,
The Lovie Awards recognise Europe's internet communities across culture, technology and business - and while they may not be as high-profile as the Oscars or Grammys, you've likely seen the winning work everywhere. Take Dazed Studio's Hinge: No Ordinary Love campaign, for example - last year, the stories spotlighting true dating app love stories were inescapable, especially to those who ride the New York City subway.
If you believed AI startups and the world's greatest AI-forward tech companies are just hiring engineers, data scientists, and developers, you're clearly missing out. Behind tech powerhouses and AI house names like OpenAI, Anthropic, and other smaller AI startups from Silicon Valley to Europe, there are three skills that repeatedly show up on these companies' career pages and are evidently in strong demand.
Despite the emergence of October sales events and December's strong sales performance last year, Black Friday remains the premier event for retailers. Last year, the NRF found that an estimated 197 million consumers, up from their initial prediction of 183.4 million, shopped during the five-day holiday weekend between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday. As this holiday shopping weekend maintains its crown as the tentpole event for consumers, retailers continue to react in kind, focusing a significant amount of their ad dollars around Black Friday.
Creating a successful company logo is a multifaceted magic trick, combining marketplace wisdom with personal intuition and a splash of creativity. Most restaurants start from scratch, hoping the design resonates with customers - but that's not always the case. The founder of one beloved fast-food chicken chain got an unusual gift of logo inspiration when remodeling a building. While uncovering traces of history and mystery, entrepreneur Todd Graves discovered a fascinating mural from which the logo of Raising Cane's arose.
In a world of fluid identities and real-time data, personas are obsolete. B2B is no different from B2C in the sense that we are marketing or selling to individuals. Those individuals are humans, with their own past experiences, preferences, prejudices and personalities-and all of those things impact the way they receive and interpret information, and their propensity to buy at any time. Rigid personas flatten complexity and miss nuances, and when overused, potentially even alienate prospects and limit revenue opportunities.
Fast-forward to today and the original DTC wave has since dissipated. Digital and social customer acquisition costs are much higher, driving traffic is more competitive, direct-to-consumer is no longer a differentiator, and venture capital has significantly dried up now that money is no longer dirt cheap. It would seem that the large brands and the rest of the market have closed the last remaining ad arbitrage opportunities-or have they?
Sam Meller is the Head of Social for The Hustle, but we briefly got to borrow her for Masters in Marketing, because she makes everything she touches better. That's how I got a chance to hear about a tactical content shift that led to a startling 35,000% increase in visibility on LinkedIn. When I heard this story, y'all, I threw an Asana card on our editorial calendar so fast I nearly broke my clickin' finger.
Zoom out: While there are newsletter platforms that offer some automated and direct ad sales support, they don't always offer the same level of high-touch sales support and relationship building necessary to broker bigger cross-platform sponsorship deals for creators that span podcasts, events and newsletters. "When I talk to marketers, they almost universally agree with the premise that these journalists have incredible communities and valuable audiences, but they say there's no infrastructure to execute large-scale brand campaigns," Frucci says.
Brand loyalty is often less influenced by emotional connection than by pragmatic considerations like convenience and situational need, according to new GWI research conducted on behalf of Razorfish. While nearly two-thirds (65%) of marketers believe repeat purchases are rooted in love for a brand, less than a quarter of consumer respondents cited brand love as a key motivator for repeat purchases or usage across categories including grocery, airlines, credit cards, streaming platforms and hotels.
It's no wonder personalization programs so often fall short of expectations - they're focused on stats, not mindset. Consider this: even within the same demographic group, nearly 90% of people disagree with one another. Demographics tell us who a customer is, but behavior reveals why they act the way they do - and that's what drives trust and loyalty. Here's a slightly controversial take: I don't believe in personas. They work for storytelling and empathy building, but for personalization, they're too limiting.
The holiday season has always been retail's make-or-break time to shine, but the stakes are particularly high in 2025. It's shaping up to be one of the most unpredictable yet a s economic uncertainty lingers due to persistent inflation and the potential ripple effect of tariffs. For brands, this creates a perfect storm of pressure; it's no longer enough to capture attention with festive creative or gain ground by flooding channels with holiday messaging.
Pampers is the number one pediatrician-recommended brand in the US, committed to helping babies, supporting parents and protecting the world little ones will grow up in. When reports in the US indicated that 4 million children under the age of three have never been read to in their lifetime, Pampers set out to change that. It tapped Snapchat to help with its new purpose: to offer families books through the power of augmented reality.
