Brand strategy and creative execution, from positioning and storytelling to campaigns, identity systems, and the ideas that make companies memorable.
Two months after Andreessen Horowitz doubled down on its New Media team, the firm is recruiting producers, creative directors, editors and scriptwriters in Los Angeles, and pitching them with a film screening.
Advertisers remain wary of AI-made ads, even as the output improves. A look at the trust gap, and at Waymark's new premium tier built from brands' own photos and footage.
Demandbase, Adobe and Multiply are handing B2B campaigns to AI agents. Few teams have decided who approves the work, or how their brand stays distinct.
Vanta's AI writing policy came from its general counsel, not marketing, and it signals where every company's rules for AI writing are headed next.
Tech layoffs in 2026 have already passed last year's total. More professionals are responding by writing in public, building owned audiences that don't disappear with their work login.
Companies are pushing CMOs toward efficiency and commercial strategy. The first public mistake nobody had the authority to stop will push them back toward owning the brand.
Manifest EVP of Strategy Geoffrey Director on why AI and younger customers are forcing banks to earn the trust their institutional authority once delivered on its own.
Meta launched Muse with one character across every partner and platform, then let that character get suggestive in the one place Meta doesn't sell ads.
Delve got kicked out over alleged fake SOC 2 reports and Corgi keeps picking fights online, and both are testing what the YC name still guarantees.
Clay's version went viral in August. Heidi Health published its own this week. Polarsteps and Leapsome sit in between. The companies drawing these lines are, almost without exception, the ones building AI.
Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke says employees are lobbing "AI slop grenades," and the real casualty is your brand.
AI search stopped citing brand copy and started citing trusted people. So B2B brands are handing their credibility to employees and experts who can walk.
Bending Spoons is paying about 2.3 times revenue for the company that defined online collaboration, a lower multiple than it paid for Airtable and roughly ninety percent below Miro's peak.
Ramp is reviving the secret corporate musicals of the 1950s for one night on Broadway, with Billy Porter, Billy Zane and a show written for CFOs.
Sports betting stopped growing this year and the incumbents are cutting staff, which leaves Kalshi's $40 billion resting on Americans finding new things to gamble on.
Peloton's Emma Lovewell has a Drake-shaped career: ubiquity, a catalog, range, and an audience that follows the person. Her Arhaus partnership shows why that matters to brands.
The great contradiction, in one stack: Grammarly, Adobe, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and LinkedIn all sell the drafting tool and the detector that flags what it produced.
Air announced a new CMO on Monday and accepted his resignation six hours later. The whole thing was staged, a trade publication reported it as real, and it beat every B2B launch of the quarter.
CMO, CEO, or Comms. Three reporting lines, three structurally different publications, and one question no B2B job posting in this category has answered yet.
The team's judgment was already sitting in Slack threads and Google Docs comments, and mining it is the most copyable idea in B2B marketing right now. It also solves the easier half of the problem.
Sales, product, retention, recruiting, the investor story. Duke's survey of 308 marketing leaders finally gave the pattern a name, and the name is not flattering to anyone above the CMO.
Five ways owned media operations fail. The one that kills the most of them has nothing to do with content quality, and it is fully visible on the day you launch.
Six years of silence, a dozen unannounced shows, forty planetariums, and more than 300 record stores. Underneath the aesthetic is the most copyable partner playbook in recent memory.
Companies are hiring the role faster than they can agree on what to call it, who it reports to, or what it gets to decide.
Thousands of advisory firms pay Forbes to display its rankings badge in their marketing. Nobody outside a private equity diligence process was checking the rankings.
Anthropic's new watermarks flag anything Claude touched, not just what Claude wrote, and that distinction is the one brand teams should worry about.
The document says nothing about legal exposure or data leakage. It sets out four principles, and all of them are about how much of a reader's time a piece of writing is allowed to cost.
Bending Spoons paid 2.7 times revenue for a company that raised $1.4 billion. The number went viral because it was the first honest brand valuation the software industry has run in a decade.
A CFO told Bain researchers he'd throw money at marketing if he believed the data. The 65% valuation premium says the case exists. The pitch is what's broken.
Lynn Lucas, CMO at Everpure, on why customer authenticity outlasts AI-generated sameness, and the data governance question most marketing leaders are not asking their vendors.
Owned media is content and audience infrastructure a brand fully controls: publications, newsletters, and communities. Here's why it's replacing the B2B blog in 2026, and the data behind the shift.
Kane Parsons sided with the fans over his own studio, and A24's reversal exposed how unprepared Hollywood is for IP its audience created first.
Audiences aren't reading your copy for the message anymore. They're reading it for proof a person wrote it.
The dunks write themselves, but the third $300K editorial hire of the year isn't a punchline. It's the market repricing human judgment as AI writing gets free.
There's a feature that has quietly become table stakes across every AI marketing platform, and the product documentation is worth reading closely.
There's currently an unwritten rule circulating among LinkedIn users, passed along like a survival tip: whatever you do, don't touch the sympathy reaction.
Amazon MGM Studios has walked away from Artificial, the nearly finished Luca Guadagnino film about OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, with Andrew Garfield in the lead.
Mercury, Vanta, Cohere, and LangChain are all hiring senior "brand creation" and "narrative" leaders. They're describing newsroom jobs, and the titles tell you where B2B competition is about to move.
Heike Young, former Head of Content at Salesforce and Microsoft, built a career getting companies to sound like people. Most of them still don't.
Her essay is the clearest case yet for treating brand governance as operational infrastructure, and the results are on her side.
"Billboards can be beautiful." That's how Cary Hudson, design director at OpenAI, announced the company's newest out-of-home campaign on LinkedIn.
There is a moment in every technology cycle when the industry settles on a word and then wears it down to nothing.
Somewhere on your commute this week or scrolling across your feeds, you may have passed an ad for a company called Goofstump.
LinkedIn announced its Creator Marketplace on June 10, and the timing says as much as the product does.
The Times asked whether LinkedIn is entering its "post-cringe era." We think the sharper question is a brand one. What happens when the most boring platform on the internet decides it wants to be fun?
The software giant is backing a bill to protect a visual artist's signature look from AI imitation, and the implications run straight through the brand economy.
Only 19% of users in 2026 say they feel excited about AI. Two years ago that number was 50%. 54% of Americans report AI fatigue.
Something is happening to your brand right now that nobody on your marketing team is tracking.
Same week. Two hires. One story nobody in the AI hype machine wants to talk about.
Earlier this year, we published The Great Flattening. Our argument was straightforward: AI is making every company sound the same.
Spotify replaced its flat green icon with a glittering disco ball for five days. The backlash was instant. The virality was bigger. And the brand strategy underneath it is the one your team should be studying right now.
Ad Age just named "Keep Thinking", Anthropic's first brand campaign from Mother, the Best B2B Campaign at the 2026 Creativity Awards. The most awarded B2B campaign of the year came from a company that barely advertises.
Air put Maury Povich in a SoHo studio to determine the paternity of an AI girlfriend. Underneath the absurdity is a brand insurance policy built for the moment AI subsidies end.
For years, the conventional wisdom around LinkedIn was pretty simple: you post, you get your little burst of engagement, and within a day your content is buried. That's not how LinkedIn works anymore.
Brand Finance just proved what we've been arguing since we started this publication. Brand is the most valuable and most neglected asset in B2B.
Fred again.. asked fans to cover their phone cameras at every USB002 show. Then he shared photos and videos with them through Dropbox.
The first official sub-two-hour marathon was not a marketing stunt. It was not a paid endorsement. And it might be the most valuable brand moment in sports this year.
Anyone can generate an image in ChatGPT, but Adobe is betting the enterprise will pay for the layer that ensures every image belongs to the same brand.
Thought leadership delivers the lowest CAC in B2B SaaS and compounds across AI discovery, yet most companies still treat it as overflow instead of infrastructure.
The model thinks before it generates. It reads the web before it renders. It spells words correctly. And it just took the number one spot on every image generation leaderboard within hours of launch.
What Red Lobster and Cracker Barrel got right and wrong this year comes down to a single principle most brand leaders never price in. Understanding it before a crisis is considerably cheaper than learning it after one.
B2B is in the middle of the largest rebrand wave in a decade. SaaS companies are redesigning websites, building new design systems, and overhauling visual identities at an unprecedented pace. But at what cost?
Barron's found 73 corporate documents using the same "not just X, it's Y" construction in one quarter, creating a brand opportunity for any company willing to sound distinct.
For most of the last decade, B2B marketing teams optimized for MQLs. Budget flowed to paid search, gated content, and email nurture sequences, because those were the channels that produced a number by next Tuesday.
AI is stripping the execution layer from marketing, and what survives is the strategic brand work that was always the most valuable.
After a decade of digital saturation, the B2B brands seeing the strongest pipeline results are investing in physical experiences that can't be replicated or automated.
Jake Block, Head of Studio at Clay, on why the brands winning the next era of B2B are the ones treating storytelling as a strategic operation, and he's building a two-part media organization inside Clay to prove it.
Air's Head of Content Ariel Rubin on the operating model behind B2B's most culturally fluent brand, from the Rizzler to a handwritten New York Times ad with the CEO's phone number.
