NMS Editorial Team

NMS Editorial Team

Stretched timeline graphic showing the gap between Hershey's 2024 marketing spend and the mid-2025 read, with a multi-agent MMM dashboard alongside.

Hershey's $450M Media Team Was Reading 2024 Data Halfway Through 2025

The Hershey Company partnered with Mutinex and Tracer to compress its marketing mix modeling cycle from months to three weeks using agentic AI. Hershey's VP of media and marketing technology, Vinny Rinaldi, told Adweek the team got its 2024 spend read midway through 2025, while planning for 2026

QSR Brands Hit ChatGPT First Because You Don't Comparison-Shop a $5 Pizza

Little Caesars launched its ChatGPT app on April 16, 2026. Starbucks rolled out a beta the day before, and Burger King's app is already live in the OpenAI directory. All three brands sell single units priced under $10, which is not an accident. ChatGPT's commerce surface

Magazine collage showing a server log printout with highlighted bot user-agent strings overlaid on a stylized rising bar chart, in muted retro print colors.

Agent Traffic Grew 7,851%. Most Analytics Still Counts It as Buyer Intent.

HUMAN Security's 2026 State of AI Traffic report measured automated traffic growth at 23.51% in 2025 against 3.10% for humans, with agentic browsers up 7,851% year over year. Most marketing analytics still credits those sessions as buyer intent, which silently inflates CPA on every campaign

Blueprint diagram of a news publisher robots.txt file with GPTBot and ClaudeBot lines marked disallowed, beside a chart showing 7% weekly traffic decline.

Wharton Priced AI-Crawler Blocking at 7% of a Publisher's Weekly Visits

A Wharton-Rutgers working paper tracked 30 news publishers from November 2022 through May 2024 and found that blocking AI crawlers cuts a publisher's weekly visits by roughly 7%. The drop showed up in three independent traffic datasets and held inside a Comscore household panel, meaning real humans, not

Pop-art halftone grid of product tiles, several stamped Sponsored, with torn yellow caution tape labeled 2020 Antitrust cutting diagonally across the listings.

Google Folded Paid Ads Into the Free Shopping Grid That 2020 Antitrust Built

On April 20, 2026, Google began injecting Sponsored product tiles directly into the free listing grid on the Shopping tab, a placement that had been organic-only since the 2020 antitrust concession. SERP researcher Brodie Clark documented sponsored tiles mixed into the free grid on office chair queries, alongside the existing

Blueprint diagram of a cliff edge labeled 30% on one side and 68% on the other, with five interconnecting building-block icons bridging across in technical schematic notation.

Cyrus Shepard Found the 4-Trait Cliff: Site Win Rates Jump From 30% to 68%

Cyrus Shepard analyzed 400+ websites for his Zyppy Signal newsletter on April 9, 2026 and found a sharp inflection in 2026 Google traffic outcomes. Sites with three of his five Google-friendly traits won the algorithm 30.7% of the time. Sites with four traits won 68.1%, more than doubling

Pop-art style Meta Ads Manager with one consolidated ad holding 10 stacked image and video creative variations and a per-asset Media breakdown reporting column

Meta's New Creative Workflow Cut Jon Loomer's 36 Ads Down to 6

Meta is rolling out a new creative workflow that lets advertisers upload up to 10 images and videos inside a single ad, with per-creative URLs, per-creative placement opt-ins, and a Media breakdown for asset-level reporting. Jon Loomer used it to consolidate 36 ads in a single ad set down to