The retrospective felt like a breakthrough. The team diagnosed exactly where their reasoning broke down, mapped the root causes, and committed to doing better. Three months later, they repeated the same mistakes. The diagnosis was accurate. What was missing was a system to turn awareness into development. Diagnosis alone doesn't create change. Most improvement efforts fail not from lack of insight, but from lack of judgment infrastructure.
Total revenue -- $149 million, up 16%, surpassing prior outlook due to higher spend on social measurement and optimization products, and new customer contributions. Adjusted EBITDA, excluding stock-based compensation and onetime items -- $52 million, with a 35% margin, representing a 12% increase; ahead of previous guidance, driven by higher revenues. Optimization revenue -- $68 million, growing 16%, supported by financial services strength, insurance sector contributions, and increased QSP adoption across DV360 and Amazon DSP.
Too often, we pick formats because they're "hot" (hello, TikTok and AR lenses) rather than because they align with our brand's outcome. As marketers, we must reverse the lens by asking what business objective we're pursuing-awareness, consideration, conversion, retention-and then choosing the format that best fits that objective. For example, if your goal is top-of-funnel reach with a younger demographic, then short-form immersive reels or stories might make sense.
While video podcasting is exploding in popularity, advertisers say they're still holding back ad dollars due to the lack of clear measurement across the different mediums. According to a survey from podcast advertising agency Oxford Road, 76 percent of brands said they would increase their podcast spend if YouTube attribution were standardized with audio, and close to a quarter would increase spend by 50 percent or more.
A new report on workplace mentoring from the Association of Business Mentors (ABM), Unlocking Impact, highlights a clear tension: While 70% of businesses say that mentoring boosts performance and 98% would recommend it, 37% admit that they struggle to measure outcomes. It's one thing to feel that mentoring is beneficial for us. It's quite another to know and be able to prove its efficacy.
This week, Pinterest has added a range of new content to its Pinterest Academy education resources, including video from its recent "Pinterest Presents" event, covering all of the latest announcements and updates. offers a range of courses designed to help you make the most of Pinterest for your marketing efforts, while also demonstrating your knowledge, via approved certifications that you can add to your website.
Marketing is often undervalued, which is not news to many reading this newsletter. When companies are looking to make budget cuts, they often begin by looking to their marketing teams and campaigns. But a new white paper from insights company TransUnion and marketing trade organization MMA Global uses their Brand as Performance (BaP) framework to determine the true value of campaigns, and finds that traditional measurement methods have undervalued brand marketing's impact on sales by as much as 83%.
We built funnels, tracked clicks and optimized journeys because we could seewhat was happening. We optimized for the "messy middle": customer journeys we can track on the open web. The premise that we can see it all, track it all is obsolete. The customer journey has migrated to closed AI environments, leaving our analytics stacks blind. The causal link between action and result has evaporated.
The idea that personality never changes once you reach adulthood continues to be challenged by study after study. There's one big problem, however, even with the most sophisticated study, they use the wrong measure of personality. The well-known Five Factor Model, or Big Five, with its scales that measure neuroticism, openness, extraversion, conscientiousness, and agreeableness, wasn't designed for anything other than one-time, stable measurements.
Imagine the negative event or possibility in question and feel the intensity of the feeling you experience in catastrophizing about it. While keying into your negative feeling, rank how bad the event in question feels on the 10-point negative values scale. Focus now on rationally assessing how bad the possibility really is. When you think of very bad things like earthquakes and tsunamis, is this truly as bad as
You know the old adage "garbage in, garbage out"? Well, it applies to the walled gardens, too, even with all of their access to first-party data. The big ad platforms have been investing more in end-to-end automated systems for planning, launching and optimizing ad campaigns, but they still need high-quality data inputs to feed those tools.
