Blueprint | The Gradient

Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

Featured Stories

Advertising, Marketing & Media Industry News

Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

8 artists reflect on a decade of unexpected career turns and surprise opportunities

A lot can happen over the course of 10 years. Unexpected opportunities can take you in a new direction that you’d never thought of, or personal circumstances can put constraints on your life. Sometimes your dreams don’t seem so appealing when you get close to them, and it turns out that something entirely different is

Google Deprecates Practice Problem Structured Data In Search

Google will deprecate practice problem structured data in January and clarifies Dataset markup is only for Dataset Search. Book actions remain supported. Practice problem markup is being deprecated from Google Search in January. Dataset structured data is for Dataset Search only; it isn’t used in Google Search. Book actions continue to

GMA Celebrates 50th Anniversary With On-Air Reunion

Top of the Ticker: On Monday, ABC News’ Good Morning America celebrated its 50th anniversary with an on-air reunion. Past and present GMA talent, along with Walt Disney CEO Bob Iger, congregated inside the morning broadcast’s new studio at 7 Hudson Square, which received a special studio dedication. Among the attendees, Lara Spencer, Sam Champion,

How travelling with nothing but pencils and a notepad helped Harriet Yakub tackle her fear of a blank page

This didn’t assuage all moments of uncertainty, however. Harriet recalls feeling tentative when starting the notebook, a mindset she believes you can see change as the notebook progresses. “I was quite nervous to start, cautious with strokes and colours and afraid I’d ruin a page. It didn’t have the energy of my digital work, but

OpenAI’s Sam Altman Raises Possibility Of Ads On ChatGPT

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman sat for an interview where he explained that his vision for the future of ChatGPT is as a trusted assistant that’s user-aligned, saying that booking hotels is not going to be the way to monetize “the world’s smartest model.” He pointed to Google as an example of what he doesn’t want

When shadow DAMs become the real system of record

As organizations generate more content than ever, digital asset management (DAM) now sits at the center of marketing and creative infrastructure. But as the technology matures, a quiet shift is challenging enterprise control and governance — the rise of shadow DAMs. These systems mimic core DAM functions yet operate outside official frameworks. This year, the

How Deadpool’s director went from drawing Playboy centrefolds to making hit movies and series

Tim Miller is best known for directing the original Deadpool movie and for creating the TV series Love, Death & Robots for Netflix and Secret Level for Amazon. But he had a long career in animation and VFX before that. Miller co-founded Blur Studio 30 years ago and has worked on everything from game trailers

A Playbook For Technology Leaders

Search is moving from queries typed into a box to conversations held with systems that understand intent, context, and outcomes. People no longer look for pages. They look for solutions, guidance, and confidence that they are making the right choice. Agentic AI pushes this shift further. Instead of waiting for instructions, agents act on goals.

ITV in talks with Sky to sell broadcast arm

The deal would see ITV sell its terrestrial channels and streaming business to Comcast, bringing together two of the UK’s biggest TV advertising platforms. ITV has confirmed it is in talks with Sky over the sale of its broadcasting arm to the company. Responding to press speculation on the matter, ITV said it is in

Inside Younguk Yi’s supremely weird paintings

It’s been found that the human brain detects faces 90-130 milliseconds after looking at an object that could slightly resemble a face – it’s called face pareidolia. Of course, our eyes are trained to recognise faces in unfamiliar environments because we look at faces all day long. But this is certainly not Younguk Yi’s goal,

Where SEO Meets AI Retrieval

Search isn’t ending. It’s evolving. Across the industry, the systems powering discovery are diverging. Traditional search runs on algorithms designed to crawl, index, and rank the web. AI-driven systems like Perplexity, Gemini, and ChatGPT interpret it through models that retrieve, reason, and respond. That quiet shift (from ranking pages to reasoning with content) is what’s breaking the optimization stack

The Trade Desk’s argument against an Amazon face-off

Amazon’s biggest rival for programmatic ad dollars is once again waving off the comparison. For the second quarter in a row, The Trade Desk CEO Jeff Green told analysts that Amazon isn’t a direct threat to his business. To some, that might sound even more outlandish this time round. After all, Amazon is leaning harder

The most beautiful coffee machines in the world

There are pens, and there are pens. The humble biro is arguably one of the few everyday objects that are actually design masterpieces, but it’s hardly going to inspire lust among design fans. But from Montblanc to Pelikan, there are luxury stationary brands out there creating beautiful writing implements designed to do just that. Just

Google’s Preferred Sources Tool Is Jammed With Spam

Google’s Preferred Sources tool is meant to let fans of certain websites tell Google they want to see more of their favorite sites in the Top News feature. However, Google is surfacing copycat spam sites, random sites, and parked domains. Some of the sites appearing in the tool are so low quality that only their

Netflix’s Monster Remains in First

Netflix’s Monster anthology series, Monster: The Ed Gein Story, has made it two weeks in a row in the No. 1 position in Nielsen’s Top 10 Overall Streaming chart. For the week of October 6, Monster led the way with 2.308 billion viewing minutes, a +51% increase from the previous week. The Adults 18-49 demo

Lex Carthur’s romantic ads focus on the emotional core of top tier athletes

Lex Carthur is a director who does what he knows, which is a lot. Beginning as an artist then moving to photography, then falling in love with photojournalism, Lex has only continued to expand artistically with over a hundred jobs under his belt for clients such as Nike, Adidas, Sports Direct, Salomon and Vans. Interested

How To Do A Complete Local SEO Audit: 11-Point Checklist

Local SEO includes several specific tasks geared to establishing the relevance and authority of a business within a targeted geographic area. Search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini and ChatGPT reference many different data points to determine who will be surfaced in their respective result sets, which include AI Overviews and AI

AI-powered campaign creation without the creative logjam

At the November MarTech Conference, Molly St. Louis, co-founder of Mosaic Group Media, led a session on building and scaling AI-assisted content operations — without losing control of brand, process, or risk. The panelists for the discussion were A. Lee Judge, co-founder and CMO, Content Monsta; Angela Vega, director of capabilities and operations, Expedia Group;

Sydney Sweeney finally addresses the backlash to that jeans ad

Remember when the president deemed it necessary to tell the world he was a big fan of a jeans ad? Yep, August 2025 was a strange era for advertising, with Sydney Sweeney’s American Eagle ad provoking controversy for its supposed promoting of eugenics. The whole thing was all anyone could talk about for a moment

Was It Better Then Or Now?

Twenty-five years ago, Google launched a modest advertising product that would evolve into one of the most influential tools in digital marketing. Back then, it was called Google AdWords; today, it is Google Ads. Over that quarter-century, the platform has transformed in format, scope, and ambition. While the technology behind Google Ads has evolved dramatically,

Join Our Newsletter

For more professional opportunities join our newsletter.