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Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

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Cannes Briefing: Creativity is moving beyond the agency model

Your Younger Audience Is Declining Faster Than It Looks

Last week, I argued that habitual publisher traffic – direct and branded – has been eroding for years, and that the under-35s are leading the charge. Not directly provable, but a theory. Now that I am no longer part of that cohort, it’s easier to pin the blame on them. Which is entirely what I

FREE! The email subject line rules that don’t hold up!

Email marketers have spent years following the same advice: use power words, personalize subject lines, avoid ALL CAPS, and keep punctuation to a minimum. A new study suggests some of those rules may be hurting performance instead of helping it. Researchers at the University of Helsinki analyzed 31,812 marketing email subject lines sent a combined

Mindy Seu invites us to uncover our erotic relationship with the internet

Cyberfeminism Index creator, designer, researcher and educator Mindy Seu joined us on the Nicer Tuesdays stage in Los Angeles to introduce us to A Sexual History of the Internet, a compendium-cum-performance-piece of our erotic relationship with the visual history of sex. Her talk came along with a slideshow interactive via Are.na all about teledildonics, cybersex

Google AI Overviews Study Finds Lost Clicks Weren’t Lower Quality

The extra outbound clicks that websites get when Google’s AI Overviews are removed seem to be of similar quality to the clicks with the AIOs still included. This finding comes from an updated, randomized field experiment, which showed a 39.8% decrease in organic clicks when the summaries are shown. Researchers Saharsh Agarwal and Ananya Sen

‘Surveillance pricing’ laws are coming for publishers’ subscriptions

Google threatens to cut publishers out of new AI partnerships, New York Times amends lawsuit against OpenAI, and more. WTF is “surveillance pricing”? Publishers may advertise a single subscription price on their websites, but in practice subscribers pay a range of prices due to promotional, introductory and retention discounts. Now some of the tactics behind

Honor Magic V6 review: Forget the iPhone Fold!

Why you can trust Creative Bloq Our expert reviewers spend hours testing and comparing products and services so you can choose the best for you. Find out more about how we test. I’ve been using the Honor Magic V6 for the last two weeks, and I’ve got some thoughts… I say ‘using’ and not ‘testing’,

OpenAI Hiring Points To Image & Video Ads Coming To ChatGPT

OpenAI is seeking engineers to develop new image, video, native, and conversational ad formats for ChatGPT, moving beyond the standard sponsored unit tested since February. Three listings on OpenAI’s careers page, first surfaced by Digiday, describe building ads across text, image, video, native, conversational, and interactive surfaces, all within OpenAI’s new monetization team. More formats would

Meta Names Denise Moreno CMO as Alex Schultz Becomes First Chief Data Officer

Meta has appointed Denise Moreno as its new CMO, succeeding Alex Schultz, who has been named Meta’s first chief data officer. Moreno is a 17-year Meta veteran, and most recently served as global SVP of consumer marketing and growth. Both execs will report to Meta COO Javier Olivan, and Moreno will now join Schultz on

Habitual Publisher Traffic Is Collapsing

AI has been public enemy No. 1 for at least two years. As the early wave of excitement wore off, people realized the content we, as SEOs and publishers, had spent years flooding the internet with was being used to make the richest even richer. We cannot deny the open web is changing – AI

Practical advice for scaling start-up marketing

Start-up marketing isn’t for the faint of heart, and if you want to learn how it’s done well, you can check out the highlight reels on LinkedIn, or you can spend time with someone who’s scaled marketing start up and discuss what they’ve learned. In this episode of Conversations with MarTech, Abby Strong, chief market

Photographer Da’Shaunae Marisa on the importance of grief and knowing your roots

Photographer and filmmaker Da’Shaunae Marisa took the Nicer Tuesdays stage in Los Angeles in the form of a flower to take us through her creative journey, from an early interest in photography to a stellar career in photojournalism centring the beauty of Black life in America, leading to a giant Rubik’s Cube installation and work

AI Agents Struggle To Read B2B Pricing

A Siteline report tested a Claude agent on 100 top B2B software products. It found access errors and hidden pricing caused the agent to visit third-party sites for info it couldn’t find on official pages. The report, by Siteline founder David Kaufman, involved running a simulated Claude agent through 534 attempts to discover monthly prices

OpenAI plans image, video and conversational ad formats

OpenAI has spent its first four months laying the groundwork for its ad business. Now it’s turning its attention to the various formats that will power it. Three job listings on OpenAI’s careers page point to text, image, video, native, conversational and interactive ad formats in the works. The company is looking for an ad

xTool has invented a new hardware category with the O1 Omni printer

XTool is a major player in the digital crafting space and has today announced the launch of yet another exciting innovation: the xTool O1 Omni desktop UV Printer. It’s available to pre-order right now from xTool’s website, in three editions: Single UV for £ 1,399, Dual-Head UV for £2,199, or UV + DTF Fabric Edition

ChatGPT Users Are Now Mostly Non-English

Over half of active ChatGPT users now predominantly use a language other than English, as reported in consumer usage data released by OpenAI. The most common non-English languages are Spanish, Portuguese, and Arabic. The figures include individual ChatGPT plans, such as Free, Go, Plus, and Pro, but do not cover Codex, Enterprise, or education products.

MLB Hopes to Walk Off With More Fans Using Content Creators

What will fandom look like in the future? MLB and Jomboy Media may be giving us a glimpse. At ADWEEK House at Cannes Lions last week, senior reporter Mark Stenberg sat down with Courtney Hirsch, CEO at Jomboy Media; Dexter Fowler, former MLB All-Star and co-founder of 400 Ventures; and EJ Aguado, vice president, player

Inside the PESO Model® Certification

This year, I tore apart the thing with my name on it. The PESO Model® Certification has taught thousands of people for more than a decade, and I rebuilt it from the studs anyway—because the old version taught PESO as a framework to understand, and 2026 demands you run it as an operating system. Inside,

How ChatGPT Actually Picks Sources

I keep getting the same question from clients and SEOs (GEOs?). “How do we show up in ChatGPT?” The answer is always the same. Write good content, do listicles, comment on Reddit. The usual. But, how do we actually know any of that works? Most of it gets repeated on faith, one expert quoting the

AI made email marketing easier. It needs us to make it better.

Why is email marketing like being in a long-term relationship? Because when you ask your partner how they’re feeling, and they respond, “Fine,” you know that doesn’t always mean things are good. In the same vein, AI can produce campaigns that look fine. But on closer inspection, you might find it doesn’t have the juice

“Creatives have a mid-life crisis every five years”

The truth is the industry has changed since that narrative. We don’t have the opportunity to visit endless museums to get inspired, spend a day typesetting a poster, get the paints out and experiment. The industry moves faster. I’m hesitant to suggest side projects, because if you’re truly burnt out, then it’s not the best

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