AI in Marketing

How AI tools are reshaping campaign workflows, attribution, and agency operations. Analysis that goes beyond the hype.

Isometric tech office org chart with emptied marketing and design desks, a dense cluster of engineering desks remaining, and a downward 36 percent arrow over marketing.

Big Tech Cut Marketing Hiring 36% and Kept the Engineers

Marketing hiring at major tech companies has fallen 36% since 2019, according to SignalFire's 2026 State of Talent Report, while engineering hiring dropped just 11%. Design fell 48% and product management 39%. The cut landed hardest on coordination and support functions, not on the roles tied directly to

Brand Voice Development: A Framework for Teams, Not Just Founders

A brand voice framework only works if it survives the handoff from founder to team. Most fail because they describe how the founder sounds rather than giving writers a repeatable way to produce that sound. The fix is operational, not philosophical: rules, examples, and exclusion lists, graded on every piece

Retro newspaper illustration of a Gmail inbox with an AI robot reading the top email first, percentage stats showing CTR dropping from 4.35% to 3.93%.

Gmail's AI Inbox Made 'In the Inbox' the Wrong Deliverability Win

Gmail launched AI Inbox to trusted testers in January 2026, and the broader AI summary layer rolled out across roughly a quarter of the world's email accounts in the months that followed. Folderly's analysis of billions of messages logged email click-through rates falling from 4.35%

Columbia Dumped a Year of Rain on Two Hikers and Built an Ad AI Can't Fake

Columbia Sportswear emptied a year's worth of rain from a crane-suspended balloon onto two hikers in waterproof shells, then locked twin brothers in a desert sauna under a magnifying-glass ceiling with a flamethrower aimed at them. The campaign, made by adam&eve\TBWA and shot by Tim

Isometric illustration of AI agents passing notes in a chain with integer taxonomy IDs replacing natural language text

Natural Language Is Breaking AI Ad Agents (and the Fix Is Boring)

If you hand a campaign brief to four different people at an agency, you get four slightly different interpretations. That is normal. It is also manageable, because humans catch the drift in review meetings and email threads before anything ships. Now imagine the same brief passed between four AI agents

Isometric illustration of a digital landscape with rows of identical bot avatars filling browser windows while a lone human figure checks a phone

Sam Altman Is Worried About the Dead Internet He Built

Sam Altman tweeted something remarkable last September. "I never took the dead internet theory that seriously," he wrote, "but it seems like there are really a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts now." The CEO of OpenAI, the company whose chatbot kicked off the largest flood of