Know What's Happening in Marketing
Know What's Happening in Marketing
PopSockets turned phone backs into a $169M revenue engine
PopSockets transformed the unused back of smartphones into a monetizable surface, evolving from a garage prototype in 2011 to a global brand that posted $169 million in revenue by 2017. The simple grip design generated constant repeat interactions and word‑of‑mouth growth, driving its rapid expansion.
As audiences increasingly skip traditional commercials, brands are turning to authentic product placements to maintain relevance. EightPM’s partnership with 7‑Eleven led to a subtle integration on the hockey rink in the series Heated Rivalry, illustrating the power of early, low‑touch collaborations. Meanwhile, Loverboy founder Kyle Cooke launched his beverage directly on the reality show Summer House, generating dozens of placements per episode. Short‑form social content and influencer campaigns now fill the timing gaps between long‑form TV integrations, creating a continuous brand presence.
Google’s John Mueller clarified that repeated crawling of pages returning a 404 status is not a problem and can even be a positive signal. Googlebot continues to revisit 404 URLs for an extended period to verify whether the content has...
Nestlé is targeting the "fourth wave" of coffee, a Gen Z‑driven shift toward at‑home café experiences that prioritize cold, convenient, customizable, and crafted drinks. The company is expanding cold‑forward offerings, including Starbucks Crema Collection concentrates and a new Coffee Mate Cool Crème frozen...
Affiliates are increasingly turning to paid traffic as organic search becomes volatile, but success hinges on a simple margin test: earnings per click must exceed cost per click. High‑ticket SaaS, finance, and insurance offers provide enough commission to absorb higher...
Venatus Media, in partnership with Lumen Research, reports that its video‑ad platform achieves up to five times higher attention by targeting audiences "In the Zone"—users deeply engaged in gaming, sports or entertainment. The technology assesses mindset, context and timing to...
A new DMA and Jicmail report finds traditional media outperform digital in trust, creativity, targeting, and measurement. Channels like TV, radio, out‑of‑home and direct mail—dubbed “Super Touchpoints”—deliver 25% higher effectiveness but are used in only 55% of campaigns. Effectiveness rises...
Why the data shows that social selling is the new SEO / GEO by @Timothy_Hughes https://t.co/uVT5YMhhva @DLAIgnite #SocialSelling #DigitalSelling #Sales #SalesTips #SalesLeader #Salesforce #SalesEnablement #Marketing #Leadership #SEO #GEO #ArtificialIntelligence #TechNews https://t.co/5PW10TOssf
German luxury label MCM is marking its 50th anniversary in 2026 with a year‑long campaign that includes a refreshed logo, a digital content series, and refreshed versions of iconic products such as the Ella Boston handbag and Liz tote. The...
I spent $5k on a fancy explainer video. It had a 10% view-through rate. I recorded a simple screen-share with Loom. It had a 70% view-through rate and drove sales. The market doesn't care about fancy. It cares about clarity....
India’s pet‑focused podcast The Happy Pawdcast, hosted by Sonali Bendre, announced a co‑branded merchandise line with online retailer The Souled Store. The partnership follows Season 2’s strong performance, which reached over 14 million pet lovers, generated more than 20 000 hours of content,...
Influencer marketing tied to the Indian Premier League is projected to hit roughly ₹700 crore by the 2026 season, according to Qoruz. Spending has risen from about ₹250 crore in 2023 to ₹550 crore in 2025, reflecting a 40 % compound annual growth rate....
Glossier announced it will shutter nine of its twelve global stores over the next 2.5 years, retaining only flagship locations in New York, Los Angeles and London. The move follows a slowdown in millennial‑driven growth and a strategic pivot toward...
Publishers are piloting AI‑powered sell‑side agents that use large language models to negotiate and package ad inventory on behalf of sellers. Early adopters such as The Weather Company and Optable have built prototypes leveraging the open Prebid framework and Anthropic’s...
Publishers are experimenting with sell‑side agents—LLM‑powered sales bots that negotiate ad inventory on their behalf. An open‑source framework donated by AdCP to Prebid now lets companies build and test these agents, with early pilots at The Weather Company and data‑clean‑room...
Programmatic buyers have traditionally relied on domain‑level whitelists and blacklists to clean up inventory. The article argues that domains are merely containers and that true quality control must happen at the bid‑request level, where signals such as device, geo and...
TikTok Shop is emerging as both a discovery engine and a conversion platform for beauty brands, influencing purchases across in‑app, e‑commerce, and physical retail channels. The platform’s halo effect has generated double‑digit growth in brick‑and‑mortar sales and a measurable lift...
Brands are shifting earned‑media budgets toward niche news creators on platforms like TikTok and podcasts. Companies such as Tropicana’s Naked Smoothie, NASCAR and AI firms are partnering with creators who deliver news‑adjacent content to reach Gen Z and socially‑savvy audiences. This...
TikTok Shop partnered with Fishermen Integrated to launch the Ramadan‑Raya campaign “Bazar Direka Untuk …”, turning the shopping journey into a curated shoppertainment experience. The initiative runs from 1 March to 13 March 2026 and blends product curation, creator‑led content, original music and...
Just used https://t.co/axM115CdJx to compare @cursor_ai vs @Lovable narratives. 9-4, Cursor. The gap isn’t product. It’s positioning clarity. Innovation-driven + specific audience > transactional + broad market. Every. Single. Time. https://t.co/8jjpQqn99i
Sanrio has teamed with Converse to release a new Chuck Taylor collection that blends the Japanese brand’s kawaii characters with the iconic sneaker’s street‑wear heritage. The line features Hello Kitty, Kuromi, My Melody and Cinnamoroll across shoes, apparel and accessories,...
AAMI has launched a new TV commercial called “Luck of the Bounce” to mark the start of the 2026 AFL season. The spot, directed by Stephen Carroll and produced by FINCH, highlights the sport’s unpredictable nature and colorful characters. It...
Starbucks revamped its rewards program, introducing green, gold and reserve tiers and adding non‑transactional ways to earn stars such as reusable‑cup usage and gamified challenges. The update also changed star expiration rules, giving higher tiers permanent credit. However, the rollout...
Media24 announced a strategic pivot toward performance‑led publishing, consolidating advertising, content marketing, and data analytics into a single commercial engine. The platform is built to deliver measurable campaign performance rather than relying solely on traditional inventory metrics. By unifying these...
YouTube introduced Reimagine, an AI‑driven feature for Shorts that converts a single frame into a new eight‑second video using Google’s Veo model. The tool embeds directly into the Shorts editor, offering preset visual variations rather than freeform prompts. It aims...
LinkedIn unveiled Premium Creator Sponsorships with Top Voices 360 and expanded its BrandLink suite, giving B2B marketers new ways to partner with influential creators. The platform now lets brands place ads alongside top creator content, bundle BrandLink and Event Ads, and...
Forrester positions itself as the connective tissue across the marketing ecosystem as AI reshapes commercial models in 2026. The firm offers research that spans marketing, technology, AI, CX, and EX, delivering a "total experience" view for CMOs, agencies, and martech...
I built a skill for Claude Code that writes cold email sequences that actually get replies. You tell it who you're reaching out to and what you're selling, and it builds a multi-touch sequence with personalized openers, value-driven follow-ups, and a...
HVAC firms must dominate local search by mastering Google Business Profile and Local Services Ads. Their website should act as a conversion‑centric hub, mobile‑optimized with instant contact options. Reputation management, content marketing, and targeted paid ads amplify trust and lead...
The article outlines how ecommerce brands can build a video asset library to repurpose Facebook and Instagram videos across email, SMS, landing pages, and paid ads. It provides a quick decision framework, step‑by‑step download methods, format guidelines, and a simple...
One of the worst things you can do for AI search visibility? Destroying your SEO performance with shiny new AI search tactics that are ultimately dangerous for SEO - and by extension - AI search. In my latest Substack article, I wrote...
In this episode of Behavioral Science for Brands, Michael Aaron Flicker and Richard Shelton dissect ProCell’s award‑winning B2B campaign that reframed cheap batteries as a hidden cost rather than a low‑price win. The creative team used humor—personifying wasted labor with...
Zara marked its 50th anniversary with a high‑gloss campaign that borrowed luxury‑fashion aesthetics, hiring renowned photographer Steven Meisel and top models. The move signals a deliberate shift from pure fast‑fashion pricing to a more aspirational brand image. By pairing upscale...
The article outlines six tactics Shopify merchants can use to turn satisfied buyers into a word‑of‑mouth engine, including stellar customer service, frictionless checkout, shareable packaging, a visible referral program, active social engagement, and systematic amplification of customer stories. It claims...
Amazon Ads has launched an open‑beta Model Context Protocol (MCP) server that gives AI agents a contextual layer over its advertising APIs. The protocol lets agents orchestrate multi‑step campaign creation, ad‑group configuration, and analytics queries with a single natural‑language prompt....
Google announced it is developing a mechanism that lets website owners opt out of having their content used in generative AI features within Search. The move is part of a broader response to the UK Competition and Markets Authority’s proposed...
Last week I got an outreach email congratulating me on our Series D. Ahrefs has never raised a single dollar. We're bootstrapped. So someone's AI agent pulled the wrong data, mashed it together, and confidently sent me a "personalized" message that was...
Google announced that as of March 17 it is retiring several legacy ad format policies, including those governing form ads, image quality, responsive ads, and text ads. The removal reflects the migration of these older formats into newer, automated campaign...
Three months ago, a Make More Money student’s pipeline was referrals and luck. Last week, they sent me this message. They’re a solo developer specializing in Webflow. They did around $250K in revenue last year, but the model was brittle. Every...
Visibility now hinges on AI-driven search, not just rankings. SMX launches its monthly SMX Now webinar on April 1, featuring iPullRank experts Zach Chahalis, Patrick Schofield, and Garrett Sussman. They will unveil iPullRank’s Relevance Engineering (r19g) framework for Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) and an...
Pizza Hut has teamed with Warner Bros. Discovery to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Space Jam, launching a limited‑time Space Jam × Triple Treat Box priced at $21.99. The promotion coincides with the NCAA March Madness tournament, where the chain updates its...
In B2B way too many of us have fallen for "how do I show up for GEO agency prompts" instead of looking at "How do I show up against competitors". My hope is that you read this post and start to...
Cool new update from Discover Snoop: Individual LinkedIn Posts are now appearing in Google Discover. This is in addition to X, Instagram, and TikTok posts already showing more frequently in there. And as @AndellDam has recently been highlighting, this appears to...
Google Ads now supports vehicle feed integration in Search campaigns, allowing automotive advertisers to pull inventory from Merchant Center into text ads. The update adds clickable assets that display make, model, price and images alongside standard ad copy. Users can...
When William Grant & Sons launched Glenfiddich in the United States in 1963, it introduced a premium single‑malt whisky to a market dominated by blended scotches. Over six decades later the brand remains the top‑selling single‑malt in America, thanks to...
Bryce Peake, who led marketing decision sciences at Domino’s, says this in my new report with Databricks, released this morning — and I think it gets to the heart of it: “We’ve been trying to modify the same martech stack we’ve...
ive literally never thought about this before this is an extremely interesting way to think about ad spend: bringing the rigor of quant trading to paid ads
Near misses are dangerous to your health. Near misses in #SocialMedia can be fatal to your business. A miss means your message isn't being heard by potential customers. Your brand could crash. https://t.co/6CgUC488Df
Chubbies grew 50% year-over-year by turning 1.5M customers into content creators. Free UGC from their 'Chubster Nation' replaced paid ads. Meanwhile you're spending on ads with no community behind your brand. That's the gap.
Whoa, opting out of AIOs and AI mode could very well happen (for pubs that want that) -> From Google today: "We are developing further updates to our controls to let sites specifically opt-out of generative AI features in Search."...
New data suggests small publishers (10k daily pageviews or less) are hit hardest by search traffic declines —Chatbots only drive 1% of all traffic referrals, so they can't make up the gap —News sites get most page views from AI platforms, but...
