#ibal-survey

#ibal-survey

The study surveyed 1,226 marketing decision-makers who work for businesses of different sizes and industries throughout the U.S., U.K., Australia, and Canada.

Approximately 500 tonnes of gold are lost in e-waste every year, which translates to a staggering worth of about $15 billion, highlighting the significant economic impact of electronic waste.

You don't need to pay for expensive software tools in order to analyze what people are saying about your brand online, according to Jazmin Griffith, the founder of social listening agency Que Lo Que. Social listening, or the act of tracking customer sentiment through social media comments and posts, is an important practice for any business with an online presence. "There's a lot of data out there," John Box, the CEO of Meltwater, a SaaS platform that provides social listening services, previously told Inc.

Weather impacts sales. Every retailer knows it. But for most, the likelihood that it might rain, snow, or sleet on the third of March somewhere in the Midwest is rarely used. Vendors such as Weather Trends have offered accurate, long-range forecasts for more than 20 years. But the opportunity is not predicting the weather; it's knowing what to do with the data. AI might change that.

Imagine you're selecting an influencer to work with on your new campaign. You've narrowed it down to two, both in the right area, both creating the right sort of content. One has 24.6 million subscribers, the other 1.4 million. Which do you choose? Now imagine you could find out the first had 8.7 million unique viewers last month, while the second had 9.9 million. Do you want to change your mind?

My role was straightforward: write queries (prompts and tasks) that would train AI agents to engage meaningfully with users. But as a UXer, one question immediately stood out - who are these users? Without a clear understanding of who the agent is interacting with, it's nearly impossible to create realistic queries that reflect how people engage with an agent. That's when I discovered a glitch in the task flow. There were no defined user archetypes guiding the query creation process. Team members were essentially reverse-engineering the work: you think of a task, write a query to help the agent execute it, and cross your fingers that it aligns with the needs of a hypothetical "ideal" user - one who might not even exist.

Only a third of brands fully integrate search into their media mix according to new research from the Internet Advertising Bureau. In its Search Marketing Barometer 2012, which surveyed the top 200 advertisers according to ALF, 72% of brands stated that search is only partially or not at all integrated with the wider media mix. Some 94% said their is a greater opportunity to integrate search.

They were trying to get to the bottom of how to diminish catalogue distribution without having a negative impact on store and online sales. They were also keen to define the geographic areas where digital content would work best and how to profile those areas to classify digital purchase behaviour. Together with Analytic Partners they were able to uncover opportunities to eliminate 22% of catalogues with negligible sales impact and increasing digital support in high-performing topologies, preserving€ 294 million in sales.

In the first two weeks of January 2026, overall spend on health and wellbeing rose by 3.9% year-on-year, despite customer numbers falling by 2.8%. Spend per customer increased by 6.8%, showing that those who continue to prioritise health are committing more of their budget to it. The data suggests that January is no longer viewed as a reset period, reflecting how health and wellbeing is now prioritised within household budgets throughout the year rather than treated as discretionary spend.

Mike Pastore is the Head of Content & Media at Third Door Media, the publisher of the Martech and Search Engine Land websites and the producer of the SMX and MarTech Conferences. In nearly three decades in B2B marketing, Mike has worked as an editor, writer, and marketer. He first wrote about marketing in 1998 for internet.com (later Jupitermedia). He then worked with marketers at some of the best-known brands in B2B tech, creating content for marketing campaigns at both Jupitermedia and QuinStreet.

Key stat: 54% of US marketers plan to fully implement their generative engine optimization (GEO) strategy within three to six months, according to September 2025 data from Scribewise. Beyond the chart: Use this chart: Drop this into your next digital strategy review to show stakeholders the GEO timeline pressure. Use it to benchmark your team's implementation plans against the majority.

You aren't short on data; you're surrounded by it. But when that data is trapped in disconnected systems and conflicting dashboards, it feels less like an asset and more like a "data prison." We know the frustration of having plenty of information but limited ability to turn it into trusted action. The upcoming March 4th MarTech Conference session, "Break out of data prison with a strategy to end the silos," addresses this head-on.

In the 2026 installment of the State of Digital Media Benchmark, the media consultancy analyzed the governance protocols of 143 major advertisers representing about $35 billion in annual spend. One chilling if unsurprising conclusion: agencies blame clients for being so siloed the agency doesn't have clarity on client data, which is arguably the lifeblood of modern digital marketing. It all translates to what the report cited as a "dangerous disconnect between 'having data' and 'having visibility', particularly among the world's largest advertisers, those spending at least $1 billion in media annually.