Marketing

There’s a classic problem in the ad tech and martech ecosystem. Although there are tens of thousands of vendors across the Lumascape, helpfully bucketed by dozens of three-letter acronyms (CDPs, DMPs, SSPs, etc.). Nobody has any idea what anybody else does. And no company’s site or press release provides any help at all. Blurbs is

There’s a saying in Texas: “All hat and no cattle.” It means all talk and no action. That idiom does not apply to the folks within the Consumer Protection Division of the Texas attorney general’s office. They’re the ones tasked with enforcing the recently passed Texas Data Privacy and Security Act (TDPSA) and they’ve been

AI agents and so-called “super signal aggregators” are being framed as the saviors of premium publishers and advertisers who prioritize high-quality media. But these technologies could perpetuate programmatic’s worst practices and push premium media brands into a Commoditization 2.0 era. Commoditization 1.0 occurred when quality media brands legitimized the programmatic open marketplace by participating in

Drain the Slop Social media companies are finally trying to cut all the junk out of their diet.  Last week, Meta announced the removal of over 500,000 Facebook accounts engaged in “spammy behavior or fake engagement,” including things like long, unrelated, hashtag-filled captions on images and videos or regurgitated content from other creators. Similarly, YouTube

Sign number 108 that creators aren’t just a tactic for marketers anymore: they’re hiring agencies of record to manage them. It might not be as headline-grabbing as Unilever’s influencer pledge or Publicis buying up Captiv8, but it signals the same shift: marketers are, for the umpteenth time, done dabbling. The era of patchwork partnerships and

Between the TikTok ban and the tariffs eating into marketing budgets, the first half of the year was full of growing pains in the creator economy. As the second half of 2025 shifts into focus, trends in how brands spend and creators monetize are coming into full view. Amid the so-called cultural wars, marketers are

Amid an uncertain economy, some marketers are reconsidering their former dependence on performance strategies. They’re not cutting back on digital, though. Instead, they’re running with an updated playbook layering CTV, creator marketing and audio on top of search and social. Consider the case of Opensky, a financial services brand that offers secured credit cards to

To launch a new sparkling water in the U.S., Nestlé Waters turned to the country’s most well-known “love affair” with Italy (as the brand’s global CMO puts it): The Sopranos. The campaign — featuring Sopranos stars Michael Imperioli (Christopher) and Steve Schirripa (Bobby) — highlighted “the craft” of creating the new beverage, Sanpellegrino CIAO!, from harvested