WSI - September 28 2026 When customer data and conversion tracking are already shaky, another layer of automation makes both the experience and the reporting harder to trust. Summary A growing share of B2B go-to-market teams let AI agents act on customer records without a clear view of what those agents are doing. When agents work from inconsistent data and unreliable conversion tracking, prospects get duplicate outreach and reports lose their link to revenue. Teams that sett

WSI - August 27, 2026 Summary: Merchant Center used to be a feed you set up once and forgot. It's now doing three jobs at the same time: reporting, paid ad eligibility inside Google's new AI Mode ad formats, and the organic data source Gemini pulls from to cite products. For most brands, that feed isn't manually maintained. It flows in through an integration with the ecommerce platform, pulling directly from what's already published on the product page, which means the produ

WSI July 2026 Summary Google local now runs as two parallel selection systems. AI Mode and the traditional Local Pack return different businesses for the same query, overlapping about 71%, and the criteria that get a business into one are not the criteria that get it into the other. Consumer adoption of AI for local discovery went from 6% to 45% in twelve months, and nearly all of those users verify the AI recommendation against a review profile before acting on it. The pract

Summary Call tracking gets treated as a marketing reporting tool, but it sits at the handoff point between marketing and sales. Most attribution models assume every tracked call is a real opportunity. A lot of them aren't, and that gap costs businesses more than a broken dashboard. Fixing it starts with qualification, not better attribution. Key highlights 67% of lost sales opportunities trace back to reps not properly qualifying leads in the first place, per Landbase's 2026

Summary A cluster of 2026 research from Iterable, BCG, Grant Thornton, McKinsey, and PwC points to the same underlying issue across marketing organizations: the barrier to using AI more fully isn't the technology, it's ownership. Most teams have the tools to move faster, personalize more precisely, and act on data in real time. What's missing is a clear answer to who's accountable when a decision goes live. Closing that gap, one named owner per decision, is what separates org

A closer look at the structured data, protocols, and payment rails building the two sides of the agentic web, and why both run deeper than a single file or standard. This one runs more technical than most of what I write. That's deliberate. The shift underway here touches how trust and transactions get built into the web itself, and it's still early. Every protocol named below is a draft, a trial, or a first-year rollout. None of this is settled, and the map will keep changin

Marketing teams have solved the visibility problem. Most now agree on which metrics matter. What's still unresolved is what happens the moment a number arrives, because without an agreement made in advance, every result becomes a fresh argument. Two real client engagements, a luxury vacation rental company and a home organization systems company, show what changes when a number has to earn trust before it gets acted on, rather than after.

AI Marketing Infrastructure Isn't Enough. Here's What's Missing. McKinsey just published a piece on AI capabilities reshaping marketing and I read it the way I read most major research, looking for where it confirms what practitioners are already seeing and where it surfaces something worth paying attention to that isn't already in the conversation. This one did both. The confirmation: Ninety percent of CMOs are experimenting with AI across their marketing workflows and fewer

Before you adopt AI, do sales and marketing agree on what a customer looks like? Don't go into the executive team meeting if you don't! Your company has invested in AI. Probably more than once. Marketing bought a tool. Sales bought a tool. Maybe the CEO approved a platform that was supposed to connect them. You ran the demos. You onboarded the teams. You told the board you were moving fast on AI. Here's the question nobody asked in that meeting: do sales and marketing agree o

I had a client meeting today. Good client, long relationship, smart operator. We covered a lot of ground, but one thread kept surfacing: shrinking conversion rates, why they're happening industry-wide, and what actually needs to change. The answer connects what's happening inside Google's auction to what Google is building outside of it. And it's worth putting on paper. Google Says Search Traffic Is Declining. Are You Paying Attention to What That Signals? Google search refer

Every platform claims credit for the same sale. Your paid search dashboard shows a conversion. Your display report shows a conversion. Your social team is celebrating a conversion. Your programmatic vendor sent a recap email with impressive numbers. Meanwhile, your CFO is looking at actual revenue and asking why none of it adds up. This is the attribution paradox, and it's not a minor reporting annoyance. It's a structural problem that quietly eats marketing budgets, defunds

Google's new Merchant Center hub for agencies changes how your campaigns get monitored, your feed gets managed, and your performance gets protected — on both paid and organic. If you've ever managed Google Shopping campaigns for more than one client, you know the drill. Multiple logins. Multiple dashboards. A constant game of tab-switching just to figure out which account has a feed issue, which promotion didn't go live, and which client is quietly bleeding performance becaus

Marketing spent the last fifteen years perfecting its ability to track attention. Impressions, reach, clicks, views, engagement rates. Agencies built dashboards that update in real time and reporting systems that can slice data seventeen different ways before breakfast. And somewhere along the way, people stopped asking whether any of it mattered. If you're a B2B executive looking at your marketing reports, you're probably seeing metrics that make your team look busy. What yo

Only 8% Of Companies Are Aligned I've spent 25 years in performance marketing. For at least 20 of those years, I've been having the same conversation with clients about sales and marketing alignment. The conversation hasn't changed. The data hasn't changed. The advice hasn't changed. And somehow, only 8% of companies have actually fixed the problem. 92% are about to learn what that costs when the old playbooks stop working altogether That's not a trend piece. That's an indict

Why Most CMOs Are Organizing Lists Instead of Driving Revenue Three forces are converging on your 2026 marketing budget: AI is fragmenting how buyers discover brands privacy regulations are shrinking your targeting options acquisition costs keep climbing The CMOs who thrive will be the ones who know their audiences deeply enough to reach them efficiently without relying on third-party data crutches. That requires segmentation. Real segmentation—not the kind where you slice an

An Analysis of the Data McKinsey just dropped their State of the Consumer 2025 report, and if you're in marketing, you need to pay attention. Not because it's telling us anything shocking—but because it's confirming what many of us have been watching unfold in real-time with actual data that C-suite executives might actually believe. The headline? The pandemic didn't just temporarily disrupt consumer behavior. It permanently rewired it. And if you're still waiting for things

Let me start with something most consultants won't tell you: 65% of contact information from online forms is wrong. And 57% of marketers are getting bad outcomes because they're misreading their data. So when someone promises you AI-powered personalization that actually works, here's what they're not saying: AI can't personalize chaos. It just makes the chaos faster and more expensive. This Is The Same Problem I Keep Seeing A while back, I told you AI won't fix your broken ma

Last week, I told you that your martech stack is probably broken—bad data, botched integrations, sales and marketing still fighting over lead definitions, and tools you're paying for but barely using. I promised to show you what happens when you layer AI on top of those problems before you fix them. Here's the data: A recent survey by Intermedia Global of 250 C-Suite professionals found that 24% of companies lost customers over the past year due to martech stack failures. 93%

AI Will Force a Rethink of the Marketing Technology Stack But Do This First I'm going to tell you something your martech vendors don't want you to hear: You're getting fleeced. Every week, I talk to mid-market CMOs who've spent six figures—sometimes seven—on marketing technology that's supposed to revolutionize their business. Two years later? They're using maybe a third of it, nobody trusts the data coming out of it, and they're locked into contracts they can't escape. Accor

PPC ads are a great way to reach a wider audience and drive more traffic to your site. As the digital marketing landscape continues to...