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

WSI June 2026 Most brands treat their email newsletter like a goodwill deposit. Show up consistently, deliver value, build trust, and eventually the relationship pays off. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. And incomplete thinking about a channel this powerful is expensive. A newsletter built right isn't a brand play. It's a revenue engine. The distinction matters because it changes everything downstream: how you structure content, how you segment, how you measure, and ho

WSI June 23 2026 Most Companies Measure Search. The Best Ones Use It To Drive Growth. Every mid-market business I work with is sitting on top of more buyer intelligence than any market research firm could produce on demand. Search data. Query trends. Content gaps. Competitive visibility shifts. Real signals from real people actively trying to solve real problems, collected in real time, at scale, for free. And almost none of it makes it into a decision to drive growth. Not be

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

Everyone's talking about AI. Not everyone's talking about the same thing. That distinction is becoming expensive for businesses that assume all AI is interchangeable. GenAI tools, AI agents, and agentic AI aren't three names for the same technology. They're three fundamentally different operating models with different capabilities, different limitations, and very different requirements to deploy well. Understanding where each one starts and stops is the difference between usi

There are now 15,384 martech solutions in the market. Up 9% year over year. That number should give every CMO pause, not because there are too many tools to evaluate, but because the entire premise those tools were built on is crumbling. Your martech stack was designed around a simple assumption: that buyers would discover your brand, visit your website, click through your content, and move through a funnel you controlled. Every platform you bought, including your CRM, your M

We've Been Doing It for 15 Years. The marketing industry loves a rebrand. Give an old idea a new name, write a few white papers, and watch the conference circuit pick it up like it just fell from the sky. Elastic marketing is the latest example. I've been reading the 2025 and 2026 takes on this concept with a mixture of amusement and mild irritation. Not because the idea is wrong. It's not. The model is solid and it works. I know it works because we've been running this way f

New research shows that marketing agencies—companies whose entire business model depends on staying ahead of marketing trends—are failing at AI adoption. The implications for internal marketing teams are significant. Over 60% of agency professionals cite skills gaps and lack of training as the biggest blocker to effective AI adoption. Even more telling: 73% say staff upskilling is the single most important requirement for AI to work at scale. This isn't a tooling problem. It'

When click volume tanks, most advertisers start poking around in Google Ads looking for what broke. They tweak bids, fiddle with keywords, maybe pause a few underperformers. That's backwards. A click drop is a symptom. The actual problem usually lives on your website. Google Is Grading Your Website. Most Businesses Are Failing. Quality Score isn't some arbitrary number Google invented to annoy you. It's their way of telling you whether your landing page is doing its job. Thre

They Matter More Than the Usual Feature Dump Every January, ad platforms announce updates. Most are incremental. Some are marketing spin dressed up as innovation. But Microsoft's recent changes to their automated campaigns address something I've been pushing clients to think about for some time now. It's the tension between letting algorithms optimize and actually growing your business. The Real Problem With Automated Campaigns Here's what drives me crazy about most automati

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

I'll say it again: we need to take a breath. Every few months, a new wave of articles warns that search has fundamentally changed and your entire strategy needs to pivot. This time it's "hyper-personalization"—the idea that no two users see the same results, so everything you know about visibility is obsolete. Google has used all of it since at least 2012 Except personalization has been baked into search for over a decade. Location, device, search history, language—Google has

Your martech stack is underperforming. Not because the tools are bad, but because nobody's connecting strategy to execution. You bought the platforms. You integrated them (mostly). You're paying the monthly fees. And yet the results don't match the sales demo that convinced you to sign. The solution everyone talks about is hiring specialists. Build out your team. Get dedicated experts for each discipline. The problem is most mid-market businesses can't afford to expand their

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

A Reality Check for CMOs Planning for 2026 Why This Year Was Different Every year brings change but 2025 was different. This was the year that separated what came before from what comes next—a genuine inflection point where theories became measurable realities and strategies that worked for a decade started failing in real time. For years, we talked about AI disrupting search. We speculated about zero-click futures. We debated whether Google would cannibalize its own traffic.

AI is a tool, not a strategy. It's a capability, not a business model. Sundar Pichai just told the BBC something every marketing agency should tattoo on their foreheads: AI models are still making mistakes, and businesses need to stop treating them like magic solutions. I've seen this movie before I was there for the dot-com bubble and the spectacular crash that followed. I actually bet my entire career in marketing on the idea that eventually—eventually—there would be a legi

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