Marketing

Athena, a startup focused on AI-driven search visibility, has launched from stealth with $2.2 million in funding. The round included backing from Y Combinator, FCVC, Red Bike Capital, Amino Capital, and several veterans from the search and SEO space, including Eli Schwartz and Ashley Stirrup. The company is building what it calls a generative engine…

A UK-based early-stage startup called Paapi, which just closed its pre-seed funding round last month, is building a platform to help advertisers with privacy-safe ad measurement. If your first thought was, “Wonder if they’re named after the Protected Audience API in the Privacy Sandbox?” then I’m sorry to inform you that your brain is broken.

Brands are being constantly barraged with the message that agentic AI is the future of advertising. But marketers are struggling with the question of how much power to put in the hands of a machine. Making Science believes it’s hit the sweet spot. The digital marketing consulting firm recently launched a tool called Creative Hub

For much of the digital advertising era, the industry has raced to the bottom on price and quality. But in the past five years, more advertisers have been explicitly incorporating media quality into their measurement and buying practices. As buyers increasingly prove that high-quality media delivers better value, even at premium prices, the market for

Call It ‘Don’t Invest’ Microsoft is undergoing its second round of massive layoffs in as many months, Bloomberg reports. The details on the latest round are still unknown, but Microsoft Advertising was keenly affected by layoffs in May, which fell hardest on legacy product and engineering roles. But regardless of how the latest layoffs play

As holding companies look to acquire each other to get even bigger, and private equity firms seek out independent agencies to buy and merge with others, there’s another direction some agencies have taken: the ESOP route.  Employee Stock Ownership Plans, boiled down to their essence, are when an owner or founder sells his or her

Marketers are waking up to the sea changes in consumer behavior triggered by the emergence of “zero-click” AI search. Some are moving faster than others, though. B2B advertisers and brands that use a direct to consumer (DTC) sales model — and which often rely on organic and paid search as a means of dragging customers