AI Can Optimize The Campaign. It Can't Tell Marketers Whether It Created Demand.
Siraj Dawar, Head of Marketing at Bee Enterprises, found a 30x ROAS campaign creating no new demand. As ad platforms automate, the dashboard needs a second opinion.
Growth & Strategy
Growth and go-to-market strategy covering demand generation, distribution, positioning, revenue planning, and audience development insights.
Running Marketing And Sales As One Flywheel Turns Brand Familiarity Into Qualified Pipeline
Nikolay Tsonev, Head of Marketing at Businessmap, shares why he now tracks branded search instead of website traffic, and why marketers and salespeople at Businessmap report the same metric.
Meta Told Its Shopping Agent to Rank Well-Known Merchants First. Challenger Brands Start Behind.
Meta's Muse is told to rank well-known merchants first, check just three stores and save checkout for its own catalog. Challenger brands start behind.
LinkedIn Is Testing a Feed Built Only From Who You Follow. Company Pages Would Reach Their Followers, at Most.
LinkedIn’s new Network tab shows only posts from connections and follows, a test that would limit Company Pages to the followers they’ve actually earned.
How to Build an Owned Media Strategy: A Step-by-Step Framework
How to build an owned media strategy in eight steps: define your reader, launch an industry publication, feature real executives and earn an audience.
PR vs. Owned Media: Which One Is Still Working in 2026
PR still lands mentions, but the brands keeping their audiences in 2026 are the ones publishing their own.
Marketing Keeps Inventing Engineers. Is Any of It Real?
Profound has built a manifesto, a course, a job board and a podcast around the marketing engineer. The title will become a real job only when people with nothing to sell start paying for it.
AI Can Now Copy Everything Except Your Data and Your Opinion
AI made average content free, so a sourced opinion is the last scarce asset in marketing.
As Discovery Fragments, OpenTable Wins Attention By Putting Someone Else In The Spotlight
OpenTable CGO Robin Chiang on how the platform stays authentic by amplifying the restaurants and creators diners trust.
OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person, Which Tells You Something About AI
The company that taught machines to write your emails is hiring a Global Head of Events to bring people together in person. It says a lot about what gets more valuable as everything else gets automated.
ChatGPT Ads Seem to Lift Organic Traffic. Is Paying to Be Found the Future of AI Search?
Marketers say ChatGPT ads lift their organic traffic, and OpenAI says ads can't touch its answers. Nobody outside OpenAI can check which is right, and that may shape AI search more than the ads.
What Is Owned Media in B2B? A Complete Guide
Google and LinkedIn send B2B companies less traffic every year. Owned media is how more brands are building audiences they don't have to rent. This guide covers what it is, how it works, and how to get started.
How B2B Companies Build Owned Media That Buyers Actually Read
Search and social reach are shrinking fast. Outlever, which builds and runs industry publications for brands, argues that B2B marketers should stop renting attention and start publishing.
AI Made Content Cheap. Brands Are Turning to Newsrooms to Stay Heard.
Half of new online articles are now written by AI, and LinkedIn and AI search reward brands less every quarter. Outlever's Melissa Rosenthal explains why B2B companies are building newsrooms.
Companies Are Using Their Own Data to Newsjack Breaking Stories
Redfin, ADP and Ramp have each turned internal data into news coverage within days, and sometimes hours, of a major story. Smaller B2B companies can do the same with narrower data.
LinkedIn Isn't Hiding Your Posts. It's Selling Them Back to You.
The reach collapse has a technical explanation, and the platform's new price list has a commercial one.
AI Barely Uses Your Website to Describe Your Brand
When buyers ask an AI engine about your company, it leans almost entirely on what other people have published about you. Your own site is a small fraction of the input, and that changes where Q4 budget should go.
Companies Are Hiring Editors to Run Thought Leadership and Measuring Them on Pipeline
A handful of new job postings tie thought leadership to revenue instead of article counts. It is a small trend with a clear signal: owned media is turning into an operating function.
Your Website Is Broken Because Nobody Wants an Argument, Webflow's CMO Says
The median website scores 2 out of 5 on AI discoverability. Webflow's CMO says that's what a conflict-averse marketing team looks like from the outside.
You Can Advertise in OpenAI Until They Decide That You're Competition
OpenAI has quietly barred ads for image and audio tools that compete with its own. Video is still allowed, which tells you how the rule works.
CTV's Consolidation Wave Bought Pipes, Data, and Measurement. The Missing Piece Is the Ad Itself.
The CTV land grab added platforms, data, and attribution. It didn't solve the reason most mid-market brands still can't afford to make a TV ad.
Paid Is Now the Only Guaranteed Slot in an AI Answer
OpenAI's ad business passed a $1 billion run rate in under 200 days. On a free ChatGPT account, a sponsored card can now sit directly beneath an answer that recommends someone else.
The CFO Is Now the Final Boss in B2B Software Buying
Nearly half of B2B software buyers have watched a CFO reverse a purchase their company already approved. Your funnel logs it as a budget freeze.
The Pages Your Agency Built to Win AI Citations Just Lost Half of Them
ChatGPT halved its listicle citations on August 6 and Google demoted the same kind of page twelve days later. Roundups and comparison articles have been the core deliverable in AI visibility retainers since 2024.
A Million People Clicked LinkedIn's Slop Button. By Monday It Meant Your Posts Get Less Reach.
Hari Srinivasan posted the figure on Thursday, August 20. By the following Monday the main finding had reversed direction, and the timeframe and the unit of measure had come apart too.
On September 15 the Web Starts Hiding From AI, and It Takes Your Press Coverage With It
From September 15, Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers on ad-supported pages by default, thinning the independent coverage AI systems can read about your category.
Brands Are Paying to Get Into AI Answers. Publishers Are Deleting the Pages That Put Them There.
Search traffic collapsed and took the display business down with it. For a growing number of publishers the archive is the last inventory left, and they have worked out that it can be sold twice.
Reddit Lost 86% of Its ChatGPT Citations in Four Days. Nobody Can Tell You Why.
Reddit had a signed licensing deal with OpenAI and still lost most of its visibility overnight, with no warning and no explanation. That should worry anyone currently budgeting against AI search.
Gartner Sold Three Review Sites for $110 Million. G2 Now Owns Half of What AI Says About Your Category.
Gartner sold three review sites to G2 for $110 million. Citation data since suggests one company now supplies most of the evidence behind AI software recommendations.
Reddit Became the Most-Cited Source in AI Answers. Marketers Are Paying $2,500 a Month to Strip-Mine It.
Reddit is now among the most-cited sources in AI answers. A market has formed to sell brands mentions there, and the communities involved are pushing back.
Stop Pitching Reporters. Start Being the Thing They Cite.
Ramp hired an economist and built an index off 70,000 companies' transactions. Carta hired a Forbes reporter to write quarterly. Both now get cited by outlets that would never have run their pitches.
OpenAI Business CMO Colin Fleming Says Everyone Can Do Marketing Now. So Who Gets to Say No?
Fleming argues that AI has knocked out marketing's oldest constraint. He may have named the wrong one.
Owned Media Has Had a Proof Problem All Year. a16z Just Settled It With a Payroll.
A firm whose entire business is judging where capital compounds ran an in-house media operation for twelve months, looked at the result with better information than any outside analyst will ever have, and put more in.
The Next Acquisition Spree in B2B Isn't Software. It's the Press That Covers It.
Robinhood, Zapier, DigitalOcean, Pendo, Semrush, Plaid. Six software companies bought the publications their buyers read, and not one of them has answered the question a reader should be asking.
Zoom's CMO Rebuilt The B2B Funnel For A Market She No Longer Controls
Zoom CMO Kimberly Storin is replacing the awareness-to-preference funnel with a model built for AI discovery, where brands earn trust in rooms they no longer control.
AI Is Flattening Your Category Into One Table. Human Stories Are the Only Way Out.
Buyers now meet your category as a summarized comparison table. The only thing that survives the flattening is what specific people actually think.
Owned Media Is Not a Newsletter. It's an Operating Strategy.
A newsletter is not an owned media strategy. Here's what winning companies actually build: an editorial engine that treats audience as an asset.
The Quiet Churn Problem Nobody in B2B Is Modeling Yet
SaaStr cancelled Notion after seven years without a single complaint. Quiet churn is what happens when an AI agent absorbs your product's last job.
HubSpot Bought Media Companies With a Formula That Couldn't Price What Media Is Actually For
HubSpot valued its media acquisitions on CAC math, and now a story it can't control has cut its market cap.
PR Didn't Win the AI Era. Reddit and Owned Media Did.
85.5% of AI citations come from earned media. Or 40%, depending who counts. What eight studies actually show about Reddit, owned media and where PR fits.
You Didn't Hire a Million Bad Employees. You Just Never Told Anyone What Good Looks Like.
A Hebbia founder's viral essay pins AI's failure on the workforce. He's right about the mechanism, and wrong about who it indicts.
LinkedIn Is Done Pretending AI Posts Are Harmless
A new flagging feature, a pulled writing tool, and a clear message: generated posts will cost you reach. Here is what that means for anyone building a brand there.
The 100x CMO Job Is Here. ClickUp Is Paying Up to $1M for One Person to Be the Entire Marketing Department.
The Fortune 500 spent the year deleting the CMO title. ClickUp just reinstated it as a job for exactly one human, reporting to the CEO, with 3,000 agents underneath and no team at all.
Twice a Year, Software Companies Admit They Got the Price Wrong
Not in those words. Salesforce is on its fifth AI pricing model in under two years, and buyers can do the arithmetic.
Distribution Is Broken, and the $20 Billion Content Industry Doesn't Want to Talk About It
A $20 billion content creation boom is running headlong into a distribution crisis, and the industry keeps solving the wrong problem
Tokens Became a Commodity in 18 Months. AI Search Is Next.
Token prices collapsed 280x in 18 months, and AI search is on the same curve. The only asset that survives commoditization is the one no platform can auction off: your brand.
The B2B Blog Is Collapsing. The Companies Replacing It Are Becoming Publishers.
A real shift is underway in go-to-market strategy. Companies are moving from renting attention to owning it, and the early numbers suggest this isn't a fringe experiment. It may be the next default.
New Research From Contentful and The Atlantic Shows CMOs Talking Big and Investing Small
Contentful CMO Elizabeth Maxson partnered with The Atlantic to survey hundreds of marketing leaders on how AI is actually being used inside their teams.
Two AI-Search Startups Are Arguing About Margins of Error. The Number They're Fighting Over Isn't the Problem.
A competitor says the category's best-funded name is selling noise. The most interesting people in the argument think both sides are measuring the wrong thing.
Twilio's CMO Says Agents Are Becoming the Buyer. Here's How He's Rebuilding Marketing Around It.
Chris Koehler came into January with a full-year strategy. It lasted about a month. What broke it, and what he's doing instead, should be on every brand leader's radar.
80% of What ChatGPT Cites Doesn't Rank on Google. The Great Flattening Just Got a Price Tag.
Ahrefs analyzed 75,000 brands and found that AI engines ignore the old content playbook entirely.
Ramp Studied 21,559 Companies. The Ones Spending Most on AI Are Hiring More, Not Less.
Ramp's transaction data reveals the line between AI companies that grow and those that stall sits at about $33 per employee per month.
The Same Article Is Running on a Hundred Local News Sites. Google Has Noticed.
Free syndicated content became local journalism's Taboola with a byline. Now the model that props up hundreds of newsrooms is on borrowed time.
Google, OpenAI, and Chase CMOs Agree: Your AI Strategy Is Only as Good as Your Least Fluent Employee
At Cannes Lions, the marketing chiefs of Google, OpenAI, and Chase joined AI Trailblazers founder Shiv Singh for one of the most candid conversations of the week.
The Information Rebuilds Its App to Own More of the Subscriber's Day
The Information rolled out a rebuilt version of its mobile app this week, and founder Jessica Lessin used a note to subscribers to explain the thinking behind it.
Reddit Is Using LLMs to Fight the Spam LLMs Created. What It's Really Defending Is the Last Authenticity Moat It Can Sell.
There is an easy way to read Reddit's latest announcement and a useful way to read it.
Elena Verna Says AI Confidence Theater Is Eroding Trust in Every Brand. She's Right.
Elena Verna, the growth leader at Lovable and one of the most credible growth voices in tech, published a plea last week that a lot of people have been muttering privately for a year.
Walmart Bought the CTV Platform That Was Supposed to Democratize TV Advertising. Then Pulled It Behind a Wall.
The deal strengthens Walmart's retail media business. It also continues a pattern that should worry every brand that doesn't live inside a retail ecosystem.
Everything in Marketing Still Works. It Just Doesn't Differentiate You Anymore.
The advice was right for twenty years. It stopped being useful the moment everyone got the same tools on the same Tuesday.
Everybody's Giving GTM Data Away. Somebody's About to Get Rich, and It Won't Be You.
Clay just cut the price of data by up to 90 percent. Unify just opened its platform to anyone. The cheering misses what's actually happening underneath.
LinkedIn CMO Jessica Jensen Says the Video Push Is About Winning Gen Z. What She Described Is a Trust Moat Nobody Else Can Copy.
Jessica Jensen sat down with Maryam Banikarim and The Wall Street Journal to explain why LinkedIn is betting on video and creators.
Workato's First Thought Leadership Hire Connects Content Directly to Pipeline
Alex Lamascus joined Workato as its first dedicated thought leadership hire and promptly moved the function closer to the sales floor than the comms team.
LinkedIn Just Turned "Uses HubSpot" Into a Verified Credential. The Brand Behind the Tool Is the One Getting Endorsed.
LinkedIn now lets the apps you use write a verified line about how you use them, right on your profile. Members get credibility, and the brands get something more valuable.
The AI ROI Paradox: Why More AI Spending Is Getting Harder to Justify
According to Jasper's 2026 State of AI in Marketing report, 91% of marketing teams now use AI in their work. That's near-total adoption. But only 41% of those teams can actually demonstrate a return on that investment.
The Hiring Filter That Separates AI-Native Creative Teams From Slop Factories
Aimee Stewart, VP Brand & Communications at Invisible Technologies, runs AI-native creative with a four-person team. Her hiring filter is the one most CMOs are getting wrong.
Your Follower Count Stopped Driving Your LinkedIn Reach. The Data Proves It.
Despite a decade of growth advice built entirely on audience size, the latest algorithm data shows follower count barely predicts how any single LinkedIn post performs.
Starbucks Sold Its AI on a 99% Accuracy Number. Nine Months Later, 11,000 Stores Are Counting Milk by Hand.
The press release said the inventory was automated, intelligent, and fun. The internal memo, nine months later, said the baristas could go back to counting it themselves.
Earned Media Drives 84% of AI Citations. Owned Media Is What Makes It Possible.
A Muck Rack study has been getting passed around PR teams for weeks, and most people are taking the wrong lesson from it.
The AI Caste System Your Company Is Building on Purpose
Somewhere in your organization right now, a quiet sorting is underway. Not a restructuring. Not a reorg. Something more permanent.
What Barona's CMO Learned Building an AI Content System From Scratch
Barona CMO Joni Helminen built his AI content system himself. His framework for encoding brand voice and knowing what to stop delegating is the playbook most teams are missing.
Fewer People, Different People, New Math: How the Biggest Companies in Tech Are Rebuilding Their Orgs From Scratch
In the span of a few weeks this spring, some of the largest and most watched companies in tech announced they were restructuring around the same idea: fewer people, completely different roles, and organizational models.
Google Just Killed Search As We Know It. Here's What That Means for Every Brand on the Internet.
For 25 years, Google Search has worked the same way. You type something. You get a list of links. You click one. That's over.
We Power Our Own News Site. Here's Why That Changes Everything.
State of Brand runs on the same infrastructure we deploy for our customers. This was never a marketing decision.
OpenAI Put Ads in ChatGPT. The Trust Contract With AI Search Is Already Over.
On February 9, 2026, OpenAI started testing ads in ChatGPT. Sponsored recommendations now show up at the bottom of AI-generated responses for users on the Free and Go tiers.
New Data Proves Your 'AI Employee' Is Destroying Trust Faster Than It's Cutting Costs
Companies are putting AI agents on org charts, giving them names, and calling them teammates. A large-scale experiment shows this is backfiring on accountability, quality, trust, and professional identity.
The Smartest Companies Are Hiring Economists to Break the News. Here's Why It's Working.
Experian, Ramp, LinkedIn, Redfin, Carta, and Realtor have all hired in-house economists or data storytellers.
LinkedIn Is Quietly Killing Video Reach, and the Data Proves It
Despite LinkedIn's aggressive push into short-form video after a 36% viewership surge in 2024, the data tells a completely different story.
What Is Owned Media, and Why Is It the Only Channel That Compounds
Channels that B2B brands built their growth on are collapsing, and the companies responding by becoming publishers are the ones pulling ahead.
The AI Search Manifesto: Why Every Company Needs to Become a Publisher or Disappear From the Conversation
The brands that publish will be found. The brands that do not will be described by someone else, or not described at all. This is the complete case, backed by every data point we could find.
Zoom Has a 'SWAT Team' for ChatGPT Visibility. That Should Tell Every Brand Leader Where This Is Headed.
Zoom's CMO assembled a cross-functional war room to control how AI describes the company. The data behind that decision applies to every brand reading this.
The Content Distribution Sham: How B2B Companies Are Getting Fleeced by an Industry Built on Arbitrage, Opacity, and Junk Inventory
B2B content distribution has become an arbitrage industry where someone takes a margin at every layer, and most marketers cannot audit where their dollars actually land.
56% of B2B Marketers Can't Prove Content ROI. The Industry Kept Spending Anyway. That's Over.
For a decade, traffic volume gave content marketers cover. Budgets grew, headcount grew, and nobody had to answer the ROI question with any real precision.
The Brands That Act Like Publishers Are Going to Win AI Search. Here's the Data.
We have been saying it for months: the way people find information is changing, and the companies best built to win are the ones that publish like media companies.
Profound Is Betting $96M That Marketing Engineer Is the Next Big Role. Are Orgs Ready to Absorb One?
Every platform shift produces a wave of new job titles. The Marketing Engineer is one worth taking seriously, which is exactly why the org change has to come before the hire.
The Companies Building LinkedIn-First Newsrooms Are Quietly Winning the New Distribution War
Trade media is collapsing. Google referral traffic is in freefall. And a new class of companies is responding by doing something that would have seemed absurd five years ago: becoming publishers themselves.
Ramp Is Hiring a Head of Content to Build a Media Brand. That Tells You Everything About Where B2B Is Going.
The $32 billion fintech company does not want a content marketer. It wants a media builder.
LinkedIn Is Now the Top AI Citation Source for B2B Queries. Individual Profiles Beat Company Pages.
Recently, I wrote about LinkedIn's algorithmic shift away from company pages and why employee voices had become the primary distribution layer for B2B brands.
Ramp Runs Three Brand Playbooks at Once and Proves B2B SaaS Can Build Cultural Relevance
An expense management company that makes you laugh, makes you smarter, and makes your finance team faster shouldn't work in B2B, but Ramp proves it does.
B2B Creator Marketing Has Entered Its Performance Era
For years, B2B creator partnerships lived in the brand budget and died on soft metrics, now they're being measured against pipeline, revenue attribution, and customer acquisition cost.
What Happened to Figma This Week Is Coming for Every B2B SaaS Brand
Three days. One board resignation, one product launch, and a 7% stock drop. What happened to Figma this week is a brand strategy story.
Meta Just Automated Your Ad Strategy. The Only Thing Left to Control is Brand.
Meta removed manual targeting, deprecated legacy campaigns, and started generating creative by default in 2026. For brand leaders still treating this as a media buying problem, the damage is already compounding.
LinkedIn's Algorithm Killed Company Pages. Employees Are The Distribution Now.
LinkedIn's algorithmic shift toward authentic, expert-driven content just made that official. Now there is only one channel the platform is actively rewarding, and for B2B brands, that means leaning into people.
Allbirds Shoes is Now an AI Company
Allbirds pivoted to GPU leasing under the name NewBird AI, and the story is a case for why brand discipline outlasts every hype cycle.
Why I Launched My Own Newsroom: A Letter From The Editor-In-Chief
This publication will cover marketing, growth, GTM, and brand as it's actually evolving. Not the version that looks good in a recap deck, but what's really shifting, why it matters, and what to do about it.
B2B Buyers Choose Their Shortlist Before the First Call and Only Brand Gets You on It
The game is mostly over before your sales team knows it started, and brand is the only asset that travels into the rooms where shortlists get built.
The Media Buying Spree Was Never About Media
When billionaires start buying the same asset class at the same time, it's worth asking what they see. The answer isn't content.
Stop Running Influencer Programs Like Campaigns. The Best Voices Are Noticing.
B2B influencer marketing has a structural problem. The budgets are growing, the voices that matter have options, and most brands are still negotiating like neither of those things is true.
The Gated Whitepaper Gave B2B a Decade of Volume and Now the Model Has Nothing Left
The gated whitepaper model broke because AI can't crawl it, buyers won't tolerate it, and the leads it produced were never that good.
Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI With Zero Ads and Proves Enterprise Buyers Pay for Trust at Scale
Anthropic tripled its revenue in four months and overtook OpenAI without a single ad, proving trust is the growth engine enterprise buyers pay for.
Beehiiv Eliminates the Last Infrastructure Excuse for Owned Media
With newsletters, websites, and podcasts manageable from one dashboard, Beehiiv has made owned media frictionless. The harder part was never the tech.
B2B Marketers Find a New Edge in Earned Authority as AI Overviews Reshape Visibility
AI Overviews reduced click-through rates up to 61%, making brand authority the last remaining path to visibility where B2B buyers actually make decisions.
LinkedIn Has Become AI’s Favorite Source Material. Without Input, The Narrative Is Moving On Without You.
LinkedIn now ranks as the second most-cited domain across major AI search platforms, meaning AI systems regularly pull from employee posts and long-form articles to answer professional questions.
What OpenAI Couldn't Generate Is Exactly The Asset Every Brand Should Be Building
OpenAI’s acquisition of TBPN, a daily live tech talk show, signals that even the company building the tools behind today’s content ecosystem still has to buy trust instead of generating it.
OpenAI Acquires TBPN And Joins The Tech Giants Betting That Owned Audiences Beat Paid Media
OpenAI acquired TBPN, a live tech show averaging 70,000 viewers per episode and on track for $30 million in revenue this year. It's the latest in a string of smart-money bets on owned media.