Marketing tech

Marketing tech

If you're managing social media marketing without a social media scheduler, I've got one thing to say to you: You're making your job harder than it needs to be. A social media scheduler eliminates the chaos of logging into multiple platforms, posting in real-time, and hoping you remembered to hit publish at the right moment - freeing you to focus on strategy instead of logistics.

For millions of people, virtual worlds like Roblox and Fortnite are a preferred escape from the real world-and these games have proven to be a successful way for brands to reach target consumers. A new study from GEEIQ, a data and insights platform for brand marketing in virtual worlds and gaming environments, shows that brands spent $229 million on this marketing channel in 2025. And while that's just over half of the $441 million spent on virtual marketing in 2024,

Here's a story about Kuh Elsa: A butler informs his employer, the Count, that one of his cows has died. The Count owns more than 3,000 of them, so he barely reacts. Unfortunate, he says, but hardly catastrophic. Cows die. That is, after all, what cows do. Still, he asks how it happened. The roof of the barn fell on her head.

Unilever has struck a five-year partnership with Google Cloud as the CPG giant prepares for a shift toward agentic commerce and artificial intelligence-powered marketing, according to a press release. The owner of brands like Dove and Hellmann's Mayonnaise will migrate its integrated data and cloud platforms to Google to build out an enterprise-wide AI infrastructure. Unilever will use tools such as Google's Vertex AI to develop capabilities in areas including brand discovery, measurement and marketing.

Performance has always been the foundation of commerce media because it tied spend to measurable behavior. From sponsored search to sponsored products, the category scaled by delivering outcomes that could be directly attributed to transactions. Automation, AI-driven optimization and closed-loop measurement accelerated that model and made outcomes-based buying the norm. Outcomes still matter. But as AI reduces friction and increases competition, outcomes alone no longer create separation.

Last year, the agency partnered with Spectrum Reach, Spectrum's advertising arm, to analyze show-level metadata and see which programmatic CTV placements were performing best across several of its campaigns. One of those campaigns was for a major food and beverage brand that wanted to build on the momentum of its Super Bowl advertising by securing spots in both men's and women's college basketball games during the tournament.

Ads have officially come to ChatGPT. OpenAI has started testing out paid advertisements on both its free model and lowest-priced tier, which costs $8 a month. (Users that opt to pay $20 or more per month or use ChatGPT through a work account will never see ads, the company says.) The pilot program includes major retailers, such as Target and Williams Sonoma, technology companies such as Adobe, and well-known consumer brands such as Audible, Ford, Mazda, Mrs. Meyers, HelloFresh, and Factor.

In the fintech vertical, where growth depends on trust, the decision to monetise through in-app advertising is a bold bet, one that could backfire if a bad ad experience undermines user confidence. But Toss, South Korea's leading fintech super app with over 25 million users, turned that risk into a major revenue win by implementing filters based on user-level relevance and using behavioural signals and first-party data to block disruptive or inappropriate ad categories.

Not just any algorithm, mind you, but the most devilish metric devised to date. Because it finally translates the old publicity strategy of fame once governed by unquantifiable guesswork into money. No, it isn't (black) magic, just computerized math: by analyzing and comparing quantitative and qualitative data, the program in question calculates and assigns an economic value to these star appearances based on their public performance.

"We believe in the power of context for YouTube advertising and our clients have seen great results across the funnel from it," says Scott Stewart, executive vice president at Epitaph Group. "Now, by analysing attention scores for these campaigns, we have a new way to show that performance."

Beauty and fashion influencer Eni Popoola first learned she'd been deepfaked the way many creators do: from her audience. A YouTube ad sent by a follower featured her face and her voice, promoting an online course she had never heard of. "People were sending screenshots saying, 'Hey, there's this video of you, and we obviously know it's not you, because this is not something that you would talk about,'" Popoola said. She's far from alone, as the experience of finding one's AI doppelganger - promoting unknown supplements, self-help content or beauty products - is becoming increasingly commonplace in the creator economy.

For advertisers, it's a problem because the world is going to change a lot for them. We've really fine tuned the system that you're talking about, and now we're throwing a wrench into all of that and saying actually people aren't interacting with the web in the same way they used to, which means a whole completely different type of interaction that you are all going to have to adjust to,

Intent arbitrage means capturing a buyer's interest before they even start evaluating competitors - and thanks to AI, this capability is available to every business. AI detects emerging intent by processing millions of data points and continuously monitoring intent signals, letting companies respond faster than traditional, reactive demand-generation methods. Turning early intent signals into a competitive advantage requires leadership buy-in and coordination between marketing, sales and product teams.

What happens when the AI companies (inevitably) encounter spam and attempts at SEO/GEO manipulation in the markdown files targeted to bots? What happens when the .md files no longer provide an equivalent experience to what users are seeing? What happens if they continue crawling those pages but actually toss them out before using the content to form a response? ...And we keep conflating "bot crawling activity" with "the bots are using/liking my markdown content?" How will we know if they're actually using the .md files or not?

The European Commission has launched a new antitrust probe into Google, expanding its long-running scrutiny of the tech giant's advertising practices. Regulators suspect the company may be manipulating the pricing of its search ad auctions, potentially inflating clearing prices "to the detriment of advertisers," according to a February 9 letter sent to affected businesses and seen by Bloomberg. The investigation marks the latest in a series of EU actions against Google,

We're under immense pressure to adopt AI. We're buying tools, licensing copilots and training teams on prompt engineering. But in our rush to modernize, we are often taking our existing, convoluted, approval-heavy, siloed workflows - think of them as our corporate cow paths - and simply adding AI to them. The result is bad processes happening quickly. If you apply AI to a workflow riddled with friction, you get chaos faster than efficiency.

People who enter phrases such as best flowers for Valentine's Day, might see ads from an Albertsons banner in their area. Albertsons' participation in the pilot program follows other steps the company has taken to integrate agentic and generative AI tools into its operations. Albertsons said its retail media unit, Albertsons Media Collective, will be looking to help brands reach shoppers through ChatGPT as the pilot program progresses.

Microsoft is testing underlining the product name and product price in the shopping ads carousel at the top of the Bing Search results.

Then coming on to the next point, which is you can create your own sessions and user properties. Now you can do this in the GA4 interface under Explorations.

Speaking at Oasis Assembly, Dawn Hilarczyk, COO of Borghese, and Hillary Hutcheson, CMO of RoC Skincare, outlined how their teams are adapting to generative engine optimization, or GEO, as AI-driven search increasingly shapes product discovery. Borghese, a more than 70-year-old Italian skin-care brand known for its Fango mud treatments, and RoC, a U.S.-based mass-market clinical brand with deep ties to dermatologist recommendations, are approaching the shift from different angles.

Lead management in B2B has evolved into a systems challenge that spans teams, platforms and the entire revenue lifecycle. It is a complex engineering discipline that requires a holistic, lifecycle-driven approach rather than a simple marketing-to-sales handoff. In a recent strategy session, we examined what it takes to build a lead management engine today. We concluded that many organizations are still attempting to solve 2026 problems with a 2010 mindset.