Category: Digital Marketing

Perplexity and OpenAI are both moving into AI-powered web browsing. Perplexity was first out with Comet, which is in beta for premium subscribers. Soon after, reports surfaced that OpenAI is working on its own browser. The rise of ChatGPT and Perplexity is…

I still remember the piercing, digital screech of a 56k modem initiating its handshake with the future. While waiting for QuickTime VR demos to appear on my screen, pixel by agonizing pixel, I’d evangelize to anyone who’d listen about Siteman, a website…

Resource-constrained marketers are using AI to help increase productivity by helping with everything from ideation and faster workflows to data analytics. But there’s one caveat when using AI in marketing: Don’t let consumers know, because they hate it. Nearly nine in 10…

Your martech vendor selection process starts with analyst reports, doesn’t it? You pull up those comprehensive evaluations, scan the vendor rankings and shortlist enterprise platforms with impressive feature matrices. It feels responsible and looks professional. Big-name brands get quick nods, but you’re…

Microsoft search ads updates usually fly under the radar — such is life as a distant second to Google — but a late August announcement deserves attention: the launch of impression-based remarketing. Given Microsoft’s scale, this won’t be a game-changer. Symbolically, though,…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: State of A/B Testing Report,” Unbounce and Ascend2. SMB marketers in the B2B sector say conversion rate optimization (CRO) is their top A/B testing priority in 2025, but a…

With the beach umbrella stored for the winter and the kids back in school, it’s planning season for marketing teams. Developing a strategic plan for the coming year is an annual task for many marketing teams. It requires collaboration with other teams…

Marketing has long been measured by the marketing-qualified lead (MQL). Entire budgets, campaigns and reporting cadences built around producing as many as possible, with targets backed into based on volume. The result was marketing teams churning out thousands through brute force and…

Today, Adobe announced the general availability of its AI agents for Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and AEP Agent Orchestrator, the platform layer for managing and customizing AI agents from Adobe and third-party ecosystems. Adobe previewed the agents and orchestrator at its Adobe…

AI hype is following a well-worn path. During the dot-com boom, we were promised the internet would bring an overnight revolution. While it was revolutionary, some changes arrived quickly, but most unfolded over years, marked as much by failures and false starts…

AI adoption is accelerating among revenue teams, but a new report finds widespread breakdowns in execution, effectiveness and alignment.  “The Go-To-Market Performance Gap Report” (registration required) from Highspot found these problems particularly prevalent among a group the report calls “AI Leapers” —…

B2B SaaS user journeys are rarely straightforward. Unlike the faster, more direct paths common in B2C, SaaS buyers take longer to decide — working through extended evaluations, multiple stakeholders and often trials or demos before committing. That’s why it’s essential to understand…

The 2025 holiday season won’t be business as usual. Consumers are bracing for higher prices, fewer discounts and continued supply chain hiccups. Add that one in four plans to spend less overall, according to a Gartner report, and the challenge for marketers…

Marketers rarely share A/B test results. With AI, that’s becoming a bigger problem — and opportunity. AI can deliver significant wins, but it can also stumble in ways that hurt campaigns and brands. Most of what we learn stays hidden inside individual…

As data and AI become the dominant forces in marketing, the real question is no longer if your martech stack matters, but what belongs at its center.  The tools and platforms marketers choose today will determine whether their organizations are ready to…

As B2B marketers, we’ve spent the last decades optimizing channels, refining nurture streams and automating campaigns. But something’s shifted in this new AI-powered GTM world.  Growth is no longer just a distribution game. It’s a product game. The most effective marketing teams…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Three out of four U.S. shoppers expect to pay more, according to Gartner’s report, “2025 Holiday Advertising and Consumer Trends Marketing Must Address.”  The report said one in four Americans…

I was talking to a B2B marketer recently who admitted her email campaigns weren’t pulling their weight. They took too much time to build, engagement was flat, and — worst of all — they weren’t booking meetings. Meanwhile, her team’s LinkedIn outreach…

High inflation, recession fears and ongoing uncertainty are putting tremendous pressure on companies across industries. With marketing often viewed as discretionary, budgets now face unprecedented scrutiny from the C-suite. CMOs face tough choices: delivering indisputable, near-term ROI while advancing long-term brand and…

HubSpot’s Inbound conference opened for business today on the coast opposite its usual home in Boston. With so much change hitting marketing in the past year, a new venue in San Francisco seems appropriate. HubSpot knows firsthand the upheaval of the old…

Marketers today aren’t just swimming in data — they’re besieged by it. Every campaign, click and customer touchpoint continuously generates insight.  But this data only matters when it’s activated. That requires systems to ingest, analyze, orchestrate and act on it successfully. Far…

MOps professionals are the backbone of modern marketing. But somewhere between the constant pings, last-minute quick asks and dashboard emergencies, it’s far too easy to slide into a role that feels more like a help desk than a strategic partner. It’s not…

Google’s role in everyday information seeking is shrinking, while AI tools – particularly ChatGPT – are quickly gaining ground. That’s according to a new Higher Visibility survey of 1,500 U.S. users. By the numbers. Google’s share of general information searches fell from 73%…

Your brand message is no longer entirely yours to control.  AI systems have become storytellers, shaping how consumers discover and understand your brand. Every customer review, social media post, news mention, and errant leaked internal document can feed AI models that generate…

AI is reshaping email marketing, starting right in the inbox. Clicks are becoming optional — sometimes unnecessary. That’s convenient for subscribers but potentially disastrous for marketers. Zero-click marketing is emerging as the response: content that delivers value instantly, whether through snippets, previews…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: Klaviyo’s “2025 Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) Forecast.” AI is becoming central to how people shop, and the holiday shopping season is no longer confined to Black Friday and…

This article was co-authored with Michael Maziarka, VP Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, specializing in customer experience, customer success management and customer marketing programs. For years, B2B marketers have depended on surveys, focus groups and website feedback forms to understand their…

Attributed revenue, ROAS, conversion rate — traditional marketing metrics track efficiency but often miss the signals that reveal which customers drive growth. Today, first-party customer data is more accessible and valuable than ever. And when combined with AI, it opens the door…

The promise of account-based go-to-market (GTM) has always been clear:  Align marketing and sales around the highest-value accounts. Deliver personalized engagement. Drive measurable revenue impact.  But as the strategy has matured, a new reality has emerged: execution complexity, organizational inertia and outdated…

Salesforce introduced details of its Winter 2026 release this week, and the expansion and integration of Agentforce into marketing teams’ tools are particularly noteworthy.  If there’s a central message to the updates for the Salesforce marketing applications, it’s this: Welcome to the…

What’s keeping your business from succeeding with first-party data? Is it silos in your tech? Silos in your organizational structure? What about internal politics? With the demise of third-party cookies and an always-shifting privacy landscape, marketing organizations continue to hear about the…

Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers are valuable new additions to marketers’ AI toolkit. MCP is a framework that lets LLMs connect to external data sources and tools, giving them agentic abilities to execute tasks. Imagine having ChatGPT automatically draft up and schedule…

You know that moment when leadership asks, “How much are we spending on social video?” You pause — not because you don’t know your campaigns, but because answering means: Pulling multiple reports. Reconciling mismatched labels. Piecing together data from different teams to…

Referral traffic from ChatGPT to websites is down 52% since July 21, according to Profound’s Josh Blyskal, who analyzed more than 1 billion ChatGPT citations and 1 million referral visits from a sample of sites across various verticals. By the numbers. Some…

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: What should we expect from social commerce during the…

As marketers working in retail gear up for their most significant time of year, email campaigns are central to their strategy. However, despite all the planning and crafting of email messages, 31% of consumers delete emails within seconds, basing their decision on…

The rise of AI-powered search has profoundly changed how people learn, discover, and decide. For brands, maintaining site health now extends far beyond traditional SEO best practices, becoming a critical factor in how AI systems discover, understand, and portray your content.  That’s…

Search is changing fast — and so is how people discover content online. AI-driven tools like ChatGPT are cutting into traditional website traffic, pushing businesses to rethink how they design and optimize their digital presence. I saw this shift up close during…

Marketers today aren’t short on tools or content — they’re drowning in both. Fragmented stacks, manual processes and an overwhelming tide of generic AI output have created more chaos than clarity.  The costs are steep: wasted budgets, diluted brands and campaigns that…

Marketers love bold words. Radical candor. Radical transparency. Radical acceptance. They sound daring, but in practice, they’re often hollow — more performance than principle. In organizations where truth is bent to fit the storyline, “radical” language becomes branding, not behavior. This behavior…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: “Brands Battle for Attention as AI Redefines the Funnel,” (registration required) from Cordial. One-third of consumers now regularly use AI platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Claude throughout their shopping…

Are you looking to boost your app’s growth and turn new users into loyal fans? Join Adobe product experts for a free webinar on consumer and practitioner trends in mobile app growth and real-time, personalized engagement. In this session, you’ll discover how…

Trade shows and virtual conferences still dominate marketing calendars, especially for field marketing teams. But more sophisticated ABM programs are discovering that privately hosted events beat scale for driving qualified pipeline. These intimate gatherings create something that large-scale events simply cannot: meaningful,…

I just came back from a journey. I adopted Luca, a 100-pound standard poodle, in Palm Springs, California, and drove him back to my home in Dallas. The trip took my co-driver and me 20 hours over two days.  But we didn’t…

Everyone’s talking about composable architecture. Vendors promise modular systems that adapt instantly to your changing needs. Analysts call it the future of marketing technology. The pitch is compelling: why settle for rigid, all-in-one platforms when you can build exactly what you need?…

Today, Klaviyo announced the acquisition of Gatsby, a social commerce platform that helps brands convert social media engagement into owned customer relationships. Consumers are increasingly starting their shopping journeys on social platforms by engaging with creators, communities and user-generated content (UGC). Mordor…

Marketing is undergoing a structural shift — not only in how content is created, but in how campaigns are orchestrated, insights generated, operations managed and outputs governed. At the center of this change is generative AI. For senior marketing leaders, the question…

Before you know it, the holiday shopping season will be here and they do every year, ecommerce marketers will face both opportunities and challenges. To excel, leveraging the right martech stack is crucial.  Here’s an overview of the five most popular martech…

As AI-powered discovery gains traction in both B2C and B2B, brand is suddenly becoming essential again. This marks a significant shift from the previous 10 to 15 years, when performance marketing established itself as the dominant strategy. Nowhere is the contrast between…

Marketing departments are missing goals left and right. Your marketing isn’t converting because the way you’re talking about your offer sucks. Maybe you’ve tweaked form fields, added a video of your SDR in an email or even tossed in a digital Starbucks…

July was another month with more than 100 updates rolling out to HubSpot users. With each month, the company continues to push forward on AI, CRM usability and automation flexibility. July brought new ways to connect your CRM to tools like Claude…

I may live in a marketing-measurement bubble, but if you’re a brand — especially a consumer brand — you’ve likely felt the itch: “‘Maybe we should think more seriously about incrementality.”  The good news? You don’t have to overhaul everything at once.…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Fewer than half (47%) of marketers surveyed for a report on B2B growth say they have a structured GTM framework. Even more worrisome, 53% of respondents selected the incorrect answer…

TL;DR: Take the 2025 MarTech Replacement Survey. The 2024 MarTech Replacement Survey gave us insights into how marketers evaluate and replace their technology tools. A clear majority of the 2024 respondents reported replacing a martech solution in the past year — most…

They were so close. After months of research, the marketing tiger team had identified the perfect path forward for AI integration. They had done the due diligence, built the business case and secured the budget. In the final presentation to the CMO,…

The value is real, the hype is louder, but progress has been slower than most admit. Unlike martech tools that enhance a task or function, AI at scale reshapes entire roles. Yes, agents and workflows can make incremental improvements — but true…

How consumers discover and engage with brands is fundamentally changing. With millions now turning to AI search platforms for instant answers and recommendations, your brand’s visibility and reputation are increasingly shaped by how it is mentioned and portrayed in AI-generated responses. This…

You’ve probably noticed marketing has been thrown into a bit of upheaval thanks to AI, busted playbooks and new ideas about what marketing should do and how its effectiveness should be measured. We all rely on things we’ve learned in the past,…

Marketing has evolved beyond static roles and siloed teams. In today’s hyper-dynamic environment, customer expectations demand more: speed, relevance, empathy, and personalization. That is where the Positionless Marketer thrives. Enabled by Positionless Marketing, modern marketers are no longer confined to the limitations…

“AI is really the revenge of the English major,” said Teresa Barreira, CMO of digital consultancy Publicis Sapient. “You don’t have to have a computer science degree anymore.” That’s because the AI conversation in marketing needs to move beyond tools and toward…

Last week, Google published a blog post rebutting claims of declining website traffic from Google Search.  “Overall, total organic click volume from Google Search to websites has been relatively stable year-over-year,” the post said. “Additionally, average click quality has increased and we’re…

The traditional divide between marketing and IT has faded. Today, these two functions operate in lockstep, redefining how organizations manage data, design customer experiences, and build scalable, technology-driven marketing operations. This evolution isn’t about shared projects or better communication — it’s a…

Every go-to-market leader is chasing higher close rates, larger deals and faster velocity. What if those outcomes aren’t simply the result of better product-market fit or sharper pricing strategy — but the causal effects of three deeply human psychological states? Welcome to…

In this episode of Playbook Broken, Ed See, chief growth officer at Zeta Global, joins us to explore the evolving landscape of marketing in the age of AI. We discuss the fundamental roles of marketers in setting preferences and managing premiums, delve…

Generative engine optimization (GEO) is quickly becoming essential for brands that want to stay visible in an AI-driven world. It’s the practice of optimizing your content so tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity can surface it. The good news? If you already…

For a while, prompt engineering felt like strategy. Craft the perfect input, unlock perfect output. Add a few tokens here, adjust tone there and suddenly your chatbot sounds like a senior marketer. A productivity revolution. A creative partner. Maybe even a competitive…

A new report suggests retail media networks (RMNs) need to evolve from platforms that push ads and pricing into content engines that influence how a new generation of consumers shops. The report, “New Content Mandate: Building Shopper Trust in a Fragmented Retail…

Ad fraud isn’t only a problem for consumer marketers. It’s increasingly infiltrating B2B—primarily through fake leads. With high demand for qualified prospects and lead generation a top mandate for most B2B marketing teams, the opportunity for abuse is significant. Fake leads typically…

Last week, Salesforce and ServiceNow invested $1.5 billion in Genesys, a customer experience vendor that built its business powering contact centers.  Genesys was one of the pioneers of cloud-based contact centers, or contact-center-as-a-service (CCaaS). The company continues to evolve, focusing now on…

Monday’s stand-up starts with a mystery: our dream prospect — an enterprise logo we’d flagged as a high-fit target months ago — just signed with a competitor. No one recalls seeing them in HubSpot, no inbound signals, no SDR pings. By the…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. More than one-third (37%) of professionals report that data silos prevent efficient data sharing across teams, according to a report from Ascend2 and Collibra. The report, “The State of Data…

Let’s be clear – this is our choice. We can be proactive and take some risks, or not. This is the big bang theory: BANG. AI promises untold, unimaginable increases in efficiency BANG. All eyes and money turn to AI with profound…

In many organizations, decisions are made in boardrooms, far removed from the customer’s reality. Metrics are dissected. Dashboards are studied. Yet somehow, the real customer experience gets overlooked or misrepresented. That’s where a customer immersion program changes everything. It’s not another survey.…

Probabilities drive decisions. A company that’s 80% certain there’s a viable market for a new product will act very differently from one that’s only 20% certain. Still, probability can be hard to grasp. It’s vague — a bit like beauty. We may…

Too often in email marketing, we see a tactic that worked for someone else and rush to replicate it — without asking if it fits our goals, audience or business context. Here’s why that approach rarely works as expected, and how to…

CTV advertising introduces unique challenges in targeting, measurement and creative supply — and that’s just for B2C brands. Throw in B2B’s long sales cycle, the measurement nuances that come with it and the wrinkle of humanizing services or tech products through great…

There are more than 15,000 martech tools available on the market today, and each of them is a potential risk for your organization.  As with any software product, the applications themselves — and the data they store and process — are targets…

Adobe Marketo Engage began rolling out its July 2025 product updates on July 11, 2025, and enhancements are rolling out to customers throughout the month.  The July release brings major improvements to the email designer Marketo introduced at the start of 2025,…

Nearly two months after introducing a deep research connector for ChatGPT, HubSpot announced today a CRM connector for Anthropic’s Claude AI platform. HubSpot is building connectors to add customer context to large language models (LLMs). Marketers are increasingly comfortable with tools like…

It’s not the easiest time to be an email marketer. Gmail and Yahoo’s evolving spam guidelines — compounded by earlier iOS updates that made them harder to meet — have turned deliverability into a universal challenge. When Gmail rolls out a new…

Amid the hype and dire warnings about AI creating a “Frankenstein’s monster,” one of the most tangible shifts marketers face today is the rapid transformation of B2B buying behavior. Deep research tools like OpenAI and Perplexity allow buyers to circumvent traditional processes,…

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Replit is an online integrated development environment (IDE) that enables…

AI is now your silent brand manager.  Marketing leaders face a new imperative: engineer a brand identity that machines can read, context they can understand, and presence they can discover across every customer journey.  Your brand must maintain consistency across human and…

There is an old web adage, “Either you buy a product or you are the product!” I rephrased this years ago as “It’s the cost of free.” For decades, we’ve been giving away behavioral and personal data all for the use of…

Marketing budgets may be flat, but pressure on CMOs to deliver results continues to climb — and so does investment in martech. The market is growing, led by large enterprises embracing AI-driven tools for content, personalization and automation, alongside first-party data solutions…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Revenue Operations (RevOps) is undergoing a rapid transformation, according to a study by Wakefild Rsearch and Salesloft. Traditionally, many organizations viewed RevOps as a sales support and reporting role. The…

Recently, I put some of the newer, more powerful deep research tools through their paces to see if AI coulRecently, I put some of the newer, more powerful deep research tools through their paces to see if AI could handle the kind…

In 2023 and 2024, Delaware fundamentally changed the rules on fiduciary duty. The threshold for breach was lowered to negligent oversight, and the duty itself was extended far beyond the board and CEO — to all corporate officers, with individual liability for…

A few years back, I joined a company with a smart, seasoned content team. Behind the scenes, the system was chaotic. The strategy was strong. The ideas were there. But deadlines slipped. Writers missed briefs. Review cycles stretched on for weeks. The…

Imagine a company investing heavily in faster ambulances while ignoring the pothole-riddled road that keeps causing accidents. It sounds weird, but, according to a new survey, this is happening in marketing AI investments across the private sector. Executives pour money into downstream…

In this episode of Playbook Broken, we delve into the shifting landscape of business marketing and sales playbooks. We welcome Will Allen, VP of media and AI privacy products at CloudFlare, to discuss the evolution of content creation and AI in today’s…

If you own a marketing budget, you know they’re under constant scrutiny. Business leaders want to see every dollar spent contributing to tangible business growth. Yet, many organizations are guilty of making common allocation mistakes that can stunt growth, waste precious resources…

We’ve all felt the frustrating side of automation — irrelevant marketing emails, clunky digital workflows, or robotic customer service that leads you in circles. Too often, technology is used to reduce costs or speed up interactions at the expense of real connection.…

Optimizing for Google’s AI Mode—and AI search more broadly—isn’t just a tweak to your existing SEO playbook. It’s a shift in mindset. But don’t worry: You don’t need a computer science degree to navigate it. What’s required is a clear understanding of…

With more than 100 product updates released last month, June continues HubSpot’s momentum in AI innovation, CRM flexibility and cross-team efficiency. Whether you’re in marketing, sales, service or ops, this month’s highlights are designed to help your team move faster, gain better…

Marketing isn’t suffering from a lack of tools or ideas — it’s suffering from operational entropy. Every new tool, tactic and workflow adds complexity, and complexity compounds friction. As your system grows, so does the drag. In my career, I’ve seen several…

Why do so many marketers still email like it’s 1999? Despite all the tools we have to optimize frequency and personalize content, my inbox shows how little most brands have evolved their email approach. Every day, it fills up with a river…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Marketers appear to be generally satisfied with their martech tool stacks, according to MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack Survey report, but the level of satisfaction varies by company size.…

X (formerly Twitter) has changed a lot in the past couple of years, and for B2B marketers, it may not feel like the obvious place to focus. LinkedIn usually gets that attention. But X still has an active user base —especially among…

Zero-click search is becoming the norm — AI delivers instant answers, and users rarely look beyond them. However, when the topic is health, overlooking original sources or subtle nuances can lead to serious misunderstandings. A real-world test of AI search in action…

For as long as most of us can remember, go-to-market (GTM) operations — especially marketing and sales — have been treated almost entirely as operating expenses. The logic was simple: GTM costs are short-term, their benefits too uncertain and their ties to…

In January 2020, Scott Brinker introduced five martech archetypes: maestros, makers, modellers, marketers and managers. His framework maps roles based on their internal or external focus and whether they lean more toward process or technical execution. Managers, meanwhile, lead teams that span…

Could your revenue team use better open rates?  How about improved reply rates? Or faster deal velocity? The key to better engagement with prospects and customers might be all around you. Most of us grew up watching video on television, and now…

ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity: these are the new operating environments. Your content must be invokable inside them, or no one will see it. At SMX Advanced, I broke down how to build an AI visibility engine: a system for making your net-new facts…

Generative AI is transforming digital video ad creation, with 86% of digital video buyers either using or planning to use it in creatives, according to the IAB’s just-released 2025 Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy report. Currently, 30% of digital video ads…

Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored how AI is transforming Digital Asset Management (DAM)—from foundational use cases to the potential of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and even the rise of autonomous agents. Now, in this final piece of the series, I…

Mel Robbins is a New York Times bestselling author, former CNN legal analyst, and a globally recognized expert in personal development. Her “Let Them Theory” offers a simple but powerful mindset: when others doubt, criticize or question you, let them. It’s not…

We put a lot of faith in systems — dashboards, tools, processes — hoping they’ll deliver performance. But real results often come down to something simpler: real-time coaching. Beating a full team with half a roster I love baseball. My kids play…

After waves of user requests, annotations are finally back in Google Analytics and GA4’s version is more useful than ever.  Whether you manage analytics for a brand, agency or client, annotations are your new best friend for bringing context to data. Use…

Congrats! Your team just delivered an outstanding conference. The speakers were dynamic, sponsors were happy, customers got face-to-face time with your executives and sales took home some shiny new leads. It’s your moment. You’re a star.  But wait. The valuable content you…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: “How to Align Sales Engagement Strategies With B2B Buyer Preferences,” Gartner. Despite a growing preference among B2B buyers for self-service, with 61% saying they would rather avoid sales reps…

Amplitude, a leading company in behavior-tracking software and digital analytics, announced it acquired Kraftful, a startup that uses AI to understand customer feedback. Amplitude hopes to now give marketers and product teams a complete picture of their customers, ultimately helping them create…

(This article was co-written by Ayse Guvencer) Giving the keynote at a convention for CFOs, I said: “The market for anything that makes people feel good about their assumptions is huge because it makes them feel secure right up until the moment…

Product messaging works when it creates recognition — when the reader thinks, “this is for me.” That moment sparks belief and begins to shape how they see your product in the context of their world. This is the desired outcome of effective…

In this episode of Playbook Broken, we explore how traditional marketing playbooks are becoming obsolete in the rapidly changing landscape influenced by AI and shifting buyer behaviors. Marc sits down with Zach Vidibor, CEO of Octave, to discuss the challenges and opportunities…

This year, Pride Month saw a marked decrease in ad spending and corporate engagement with the LGBTQ+ community. It would be easy to see this as a loss for that community, which had to scramble as corporations canceled sponsorships of Pride Parades…

The pressure to modernize your marketing technology stack is real. Your competitors seem to be running circles around you with sophisticated automation, your CEO keeps asking why conversion rates aren’t improving and every marketing blog you read assumes you have a team…

The way marketers use data is shifting fast, mainly because of privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA. Companies are under pressure to find new ways to analyze performance, target audiences and share data — without crossing legal or ethical lines. That’s where…

Over the past decade, marketers have become experts in identity resolution. We’ve mapped behaviors across devices, stitched together customer records, and built sprawling graphs that promise a 360-degree view of the customer. But much of that picture is built on signals that…

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) made a lot of headlines when it replaced Universal Analytics two years ago. Marketers, upset about losing a familiar tool, moaned loudly about GA4’s “problems.” Since then, however, the criticism has died down. Users now understand Google’s move…

Ecommerce is more competitive than ever, so your emails need to work harder by being more fun. In a sea of special offers and near-identical services, something happier, zanier and unexpected makes your brand stand out. Creating a memorable, enjoyable brand interaction doesn’t…

Too many marketing teams get trapped in endless feature comparisons when choosing core technology. They scrutinize capabilities lists, technical specifications and product demos without asking a more fundamental question: What will this help us accomplish? Feature obsession leads to buyer’s remorse. Marketing…

Amazon Ads. It’s an expansive ecosystem of tools, insights and performance levers, many of which remain underutilized or unknown by brands and marketers. To ensure your brand gets the most from Amazon, let’s highlight the year’s key features, tools and integrations you…

Most marketing measurement models operate on a simple assumption: effects are additive.  Campaign A drives 100 leads, Campaign B drives 200, so the total impact is 300.  But in reality, marketing often defies this logic. Some efforts multiply the effects of others. …

When it comes to data, marketers have focused primarily on the quality of the structured data in their CRM and marketing automation platforms over the past 15 years.  In my March article, I discussed why current data governance and management processes must…

AI Max now appears as a distinct search match type in reporting dashboards, giving marketers a new layer of visibility into performance data that previously lived in a black box. How to find it. Users with AI Max-enabled campaigns can now segment…

Today, Cloudflare unveiled “pay per crawl,” a way for websites to charge AI crawlers for access. Currently in private beta, the program provides more control over AI bots and lets each site set a price. The company also announced it will block…

You’ve probably noticed marketing is becoming increasingly complex. It requires diverse skill sets and close coordination with colleagues within and beyond the marketing team.  But even in this cross-functional world, many teams struggle with internal silos — departments or individuals operating in…

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: Which martech categories need to include AI or…

Microsoft Advertising is revamping its approach to enforcing ad policy compliance. Instead of outright disapproving entire ads, it reviews individual ad assets (e.g., headlines, descriptions, and images). This move gives advertisers more flexibility and less disruption when policy issues arise. Instead of…

Finally, vacation season is here. School is out for most students, and parents want to take a break or send their kids off to camp. However you define it, June, July and August mark the start of vacation for most of the…

Great marketers know how to analyze campaign data and pull the right performance levers. However, creative quality often takes a backseat to other factors — even though it shouldn’t. Ads with strong creative deliver roughly 30% higher ROI than average, per The…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Popular LLMs like Google Gemini and ChatGPT have to get their information from somewhere. There’s a vast amount of information available online, and each LLM uses its own methods to…

There’s no shortage of conversation about giving marketing a seat at the table. Over the years, we’ve seen dozens of articles calling for marketing to be treated as a strategic partner, not just a service department. But the real problem isn’t just…

As AI-powered workflows become central to sales and RevOps, go-to-market (GTM) execution is increasingly dominated by high-volume, sales-led outreach. This change prioritizes short-term demand capture over long-term brand building and demand creation. While AI enables scale and efficiency, it often sidelines marketing’s…

The IAB released its new Gaming Measurement Framework today, designed to make gaming campaigns easier to understand, compare and optimize. With over 80% of U.S. internet users identifying as gamers, it is a difficult audience to ignore. Until now, there’s been no…

Feeling the squeeze of economic uncertainty? You’re not alone. With tariffs and geopolitical tensions weighing heavily on the economy, marketing leaders everywhere are searching for a clear path forward. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, we sit down with Lisa Cole,…

The FTC approved Omnicom’s purchase of Interpublic Group this week, after the ad agency giant promised not to engage in any nefarious brand safety activities. If you think I’m exaggerating, the proof is in the consent decree: Omnicom cannot base its  “advertising…

Marketers need to keep pace as consumers use an ever-increasing number of channels to engage with brands. That often leads to the type of silos and fragmentation they’ve battled for years. Today, Klaviyo introduced new AI-powered product features at its K:LDN event…

Salesforce this week announced Agentforce 3, which the company says will give Agentforce customers the visibility and control they need to scale their AI agents. Visibility is a fundamental problem for early AI agent deployments. Simply put, teams can’t see what their…

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Q: What is an MCP server, and how can marketers…

Most companies aren’t failing at AI because of bad tools. They’re failing because every team is pulling in a different direction. Without a clear strategy, even the best technology creates more noise than value. Most companies are doing AI — Few are…

Every day, we hear how AI is reshaping marketing. Need 100 social posts tomorrow? Done. Launch a campaign before lunch? No problem. Automation is accelerating everything — but speed alone isn’t a strategy. In 2025, 88% of digital marketers use AI in…

In this episode of Playbook Broken, I dive into the rapidly changing landscape of marketing, driven by AI and automation. Featuring Melissa Reeve, a 25-year marketing veteran, a MarTech contributor and co-founder of the Agile Marketing Alliance and Marketing Frontier.ai, the conversation…

This article was co-authored by Rachel Smith, a Sr. Principal Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice, specializing in marketing data and analytics, marketing technology and marketing operations. Brand marketing is under the microscope. As CFOs demand harder evidence of impact, marketers must…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: MarTech 2025 State of Your Stack Survey. Click to enlarge. MarTech’s 2025 State of Your Stack Survey found nearly one-quarter of the tools and capabilities marketers plan to add…

Multi-touch attribution (MTA) is a waste of time and money. This isn’t a controversial statement anymore. Few disagree except for MTA vendors, and even they have quietly hedged their bets, introducing media mix modeling (MMM) and incrementality testing. Wise. Yet brands continue…

Marketing has experienced a significant evolution roughly every two decades. We went from the 4 Ps of marketing, introduced in 1960, into the digital boom of the 2000s when marketers became obsessed with data, which was treated as “free.” Personalization was king.…

Marketers, and B2B marketers in particular, often face criticism for focusing on vanity metrics. Vanity metrics are numbers that are easily measurable and look good on paper but don’t directly correlate to business outcomes or provide actionable insights. Let’s take a closer…

Consolidation struck the customer data platform (CDP) market again today, as Supermetrics announced the acquisition of real-time CDP vendor Relay42. Supermetrics calls itself a marketing intelligence platform and helps simplify data integration and management for brands and agencies. Founded in 2013, Helsinki-based…

Most people still think of AI as a tool for generating content or powering chatbots. But agentic AI is already driving deeper transformation—especially in customer experience. Unlike traditional AI, AI agents don’t just respond—they act. These systems plan, reason, and execute tasks…

I’m no stranger to marketing strategy, messaging frameworks and the kind of narrative clarity that makes a landing page convert. The challenge comes when I send the copy to a developer.  Without a UX designer in the middle, I have limited means…

Large Language Model (LLM) agents aren’t very good at key parts of CRM, according to a study led by Salesforce AI scientist Kung-Hsiang Huang. The report showed AI agents had a roughly 58% success rate on single-step tasks that didn’t require follow-up…

Today’s marketers are being asked to do more with less—but siloed tools and fragmented data make it nearly impossible to deliver personalized, efficient, and ROI-driven campaigns. Join us for a live panel discussion on how top brands are using Customer Data Platforms…

Adobe announced today Adobe LLM Optimizer, an enterprise application built to help businesses increase relevance in an environment where consumers embrace generative AI-powered interfaces to find and engage with brands. The shift to AI-powered interfaces is real. Adobe released data from its…

You don’t have to wait for Black Friday and the holiday season for online retail and ecommerce success. Ecommerce calendars have expanded significantly thanks to numerous holidays and cultural events. The result is a year-round selection of purchasing opportunities, all vying for…

Making the best targeting decisions can have a compounding effect on return on ad spend (ROAS), according to new data released this week by TransUnion. According to the TransUnion analysis, the upside in ROAS from better targeting could be as high as…

Customer data platforms (CDPs) have an identity crisis. Ten years after they first emerged, CDPs finally got their nod from Gartner — a birthday gift wrapped in validation. But something’s off. Once the darling of martech, the CDP has gone from must-have…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. When measured by conversion rate, the average AI search visitor (tracked to a non-Google search source like ChatGPT) is 4.4 times as valuable as the average visit from traditional organic…

Most ABM programs run on static data and generic assumptions. Marketers spend countless hours crafting personalized campaigns based on firmographics, technographic, and third-party intent signals—the same data their competitors have access to. It doesn’t have to be that way. What if the…

If you find yourself increasingly turning to large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini or ChatGPT when searching for information online, you’re not alone. Many people treat traditional search and LLMs as a binary choice — one or the other. But in…

As marketing teams rush to adopt AI and automation, many overlook a critical foundation: governance. Without clear ethical guidelines and accountability measures, even the most advanced tools can backfire, damaging brand trust and exposing companies to reputational and regulatory risks. AI’s promise…

There’s a troubling trend in boardrooms worldwide. As companies move from startup mode and scale into growth-stage execution, many are choosing to underinvest in marketing leadership, mistaking it as a cost center rather than the strategic engine behind revenue generation and go-to-market…

Salesforce today introduced Marketing Cloud Next, a significant update to its marketing platform that embeds autonomous AI agents across the entire customer funnel. The company says the product represents a shift from traditional campaign-based marketing to its much-touted “agentic marketing,” where AI…

Welcome to Playbook Broken, where outdated marketing tactics are left behind. In this episode, we meet Matthew Kay, ActiveCampaign’s new head of search and co-founder of the Tech SEO Connect conference. We discuss the rapid evolution of SEO, driven by AI and…

From a brand-new AI-powered pricing model to smarter workflow tools and advanced video marketing capabilities, this month’s updates are all about helping you move faster, work smarter and get better results across the board. We’ve curated the 14 most impactful updates from…

The IAB released its Digital Advertising Invoice API Specifications today. The specifications aim to fix long-standing payment problems in the digital advertising supply chain. They are open for public comment until Aug. 11, 2025. “Despite the digital nature of our industry, the…

In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a question about marketing to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet.  Q: Where are marketing teams under-utilizing AI? While many…

In B2B, complex buying decisions are rarely made on impulse. Yet, many marketing programs still focus almost exclusively on capturing short-term demand — a costly mistake. To build lasting momentum and drive future growth, you need a strategy that connects mental availability…

HubSpot announced today the launch of a deep research connector with ChatGPT.  More than 75% of HubSpot customers are already using ChatGPT, according to HubSpot’s Q1 2025 AI customer sentiment survey. Using the new deep research connector, those customers will be able…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: “The Human Marketers Report” from Magnolia and EM Marketing. Click to enlarge. “The Human Marketers Report” from Magnolia and EM Marketing asked marketers which activities are most impactful in…

Building an AI-first buying journey is now a strategic imperative for CMOs and lean GTM teams. Today’s buyers are self-directed, signals-led and heavily influenced by AI-powered personalization and expert-driven thought leadership. Many of my clients are in the early stages of building…

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with hundreds of teams using CRMs, and I’d sum upthe experience like this: technology moves fast. Humans? Not so much. We’re busy, messy, skeptical creatures of habit. Marry that with today’s constant change, andyou’ve…

The announcement on Wednesday that HubSpot built a deep research connector to ChatGPT generated a lot of excitement among HubSpot users and martech observers, but there is some cause for concern around data security. A number of online voices are claiming this…

I was digging into a potential client recently, a 10-figure B2B SaaS company with an eight-figure marketing budget, a top-tier team and all the shiny new toys. From the outside, everything was going well: regular product updates, strong positioning as the mature,…

Building a martech stack requires careful consideration — alignment with business goals, key features, integration, and compliance. But in higher education, those traditional criteria are no longer enough. Today’s biggest driver isn’t functionality — it’s audience expectations. And for colleges and universities,…

Growing your opted-in database is everything. These data assets are not only the bedrock shaping the performance and direction of your marketing strategy, they’re the foundation that will future-proof your growth strategy as privacy reshapes marketing. Your ability to orchestrate consent across…

“Stack follows strategy” is a well-known mantra. But how do you actually do it? Many teams claim it’s the right approach, but few can describe what the approach looks like in practice. Even fewer know where to start. What we’re missing is…

Marketing often walks a fine line between persuasion and manipulation. Some critics even say it’s all manipulation, no persuasion!  I’ve always championed ethical strategies and tactics that use decision-making psychology to help customers decide. That’s effective persuasion. But today, I see marketers…

Salesforce today announced a major update that integrates Slack more deeply into its platform. The idea is to let teams work in a unified environment—whether they prefer using Salesforce or Slack—without losing visibility into the full customer picture. Slack will now be…

Pegasystems kicked off the Pegaworld user fest today by announcing a range of AI-powered tools designed to simplify how enterprises automate work, build applications and upgrade outdated systems. The updates center on expanding the Pega platform with intelligent agents that can work…

Investment in martech to improve personalization is the core of many CX and digital transformation strategies. However, capturing the benefits of personalization for businesses and customers comes at a cost.  Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs prioritizing personalization in marketing…

Side giggers are getting more attention and are growing in number. Platforms like Fiverr, Upwork and others let them easily find side projects, earn a little extra income, practice their craft and/or feed their passions.  Over the last seven years, I’ve spoken…

Managing a customer’s experience throughout their complex journey is challenging. Interests and behaviors do not work in straight lines, and too often, the insights we capture are out of date before we share them. With customers demanding ever-more relevant and timely interventions,…

Businesses spend an average of 26.6% of their marketing budget on email, but many aren’t optimizing for inbox placement, according to a report from Kickbox. Nearly two-thirds of businesses (64.6%) say inboxing issues have directly impacted revenue or customer retention, the report found. Kickbox…

B2B buyers aren’t searching the old way anymore. Google’s AI Overviews, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Perplexity and Copilot Search in Bing have changed how we find content. Goodbye, traditional ranked blue links. Hello, generating direct, synthesized answers.  That has toppled long-held assumptions in B2B SEO and content strategy. In the…

Ecommerce teams often lack a full view of user behavior. Without precise data, efforts to improve product pages, checkout flows or campaigns rely on guesswork. Google Analytics 4’s event-based model captures detailed user interactions across the customer journey. Here is how to…

According to a 2024 Gainsight report, 73% of churned customers said they never saw value early enough to justify their investment.  In an era of instant gratification and eroding patience, your product or service isn’t judged by what it can do, but…

Marketing leaders are facing intensifying pressure: do more, prove more, and spend less. In this environment, resilience isn’t just a virtue—it’s a mandate. Join us for Marketing Resilience, Powered by Data on Thursday, June 5 at 1:00 p.m. ET / 10:00 a.m.…

Today, Invoca announced its acquisition of Symbl.ai, an AI-driven human intelligence platform. The combination is aimed at giving marketers better tools for orchestrating AI-powered customer journeys contributing to revenue growth. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. “AI fundamentally changes how brands…

After more than a year of trying, Salesforce announced today it is buying data management company Informatica for $8 billion. The purchase will bolster the CRM giant’s push into AI.  It will also boost Salesforce’s portfolio in data management and governance, aiming…

Consumer confidence has been increasingly volatile since the presidential election. The new administration’s higher tariffs, lower government spending and radical tax changes have unnerved many people. The University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index has fallen from 74 in December to 50.8 in…

Generative AI is astonishing and frustrating. There’s so much promise, and vendors are constantly releasing new capabilities. But it’s too hard to add to existing content creation workflows unless you have a team of developers. Suppose you’re evaluating AI solutions or struggling…

B2B teams are producing more content than ever — and getting less out of it. Social feeds are saturated, attention spans fractured and generic corporate messaging rarely gets noticed.  In 2025, you don’t need more content, you need more good content. That…

When account-based marketing (ABM) came along in the early 2000s, I was really excited and hopeful. I thought it would finally get B2B sales and marketing teams working together. I also knew that we marketers needed to move off our maniacal obsession…

MarTechCharts regularly highlights data of interest to marketers and marketing operations professionals. Source: “AI Adoption in Running Enterprise Revenue,” Clari. AI is reshaping businesses, and that includes revenue teams. But research from Clari identified a significant problem: reps don’t trust it, according…

Google’s AI Overviews and large language models (LLMs) have severely eroded clicks, click-through rates and organic traffic to websites. But a new Siege Media report may have found a silver lining: even if your sitewide traffic is down, your homepage may be increasing. By the numbers. For…

As we all navigate these confusing times, there’s a lot of talk about scenario planning. However, much of what’s said misses the core point of the practice. Let’s explore what scenario planning really is — and, more importantly, what it isn’t. (Spoiler:…