Marketing

Why more brands are rethinking influencer marketing with gamified micro-creator programs

Urban Outfitters last week rolled out ME@UO, its latest bet on micro-creators, joining brands like American Eagle, Express, Home Depot, Lowe’s, and Sephora that are reworking affiliate marketing into always-on, gamified creator programs. These creator programs reward smaller creators for consistent content, signalling a shift in how brands engage and scale influencer marketing.  “It reflects […]

Why more brands are rethinking influencer marketing with gamified micro-creator programs Read More »

Bold Call: AI compute costs are the future of the upfront… and principal media

Agencies have a compute problem. As AI takes over more of their day-to-day work, from writing copy to generating performance reports, it’s introducing a new and deeply unpredictable cost center. Every prompt, every output, every round of agentic back-and-forth costs tokens, and those tokens are variable in ways that neither agencies nor their clients know

Bold Call: AI compute costs are the future of the upfront… and principal media Read More »

Future of Marketing Briefing: The case for and against an agency subscription remuneration model

The idea of agencies selling subscriptions instead of billable hours has kicked up significant debate over the past week. It started when S4 Capital’s Monks told me it expects roughly a quarter of its revenue to come from subscriptions by year end. Cue the hot takes that are nearly unanimous in one verdict: subscriptions aren’t

Future of Marketing Briefing: The case for and against an agency subscription remuneration model Read More »