Category: Industry Insights

Research Labs The Monetization of Trust: What OpenAI’s Ad and Commerce Strategy Means for AI, Merchants, and Users Ads, transaction fees, and the quiet commercialization of your AI advisor. Conversational AI is being restructured around commercial incentives. The decisions OpenAI...

Research Labs Why 3-Second Creative Impact Matters More Than Storytelling Recognition precedes interpretation in feed-based environments For decades, storytelling has been treated as the highest ambition of advertising. Narrative was understood as the mechanism through which brands created meaning, emotion,...

Research Labs The Acquisition Trap: Why Consumer Tech Is Abandoning “Growth at All Costs The playbook that built a generation of startups has hit its structural limits. The Model That Ate Itself For the better part of a decade, the...

Research Labs The End of Marketing Best Practices Why proven playbooks are failing and what replaces them Introduction: When best practices stop working For decades, marketing has been guided by a reassuring promise. If best practices are followed, results will...

Research Labs The Strategic Cost of Treating Creative as an Output, Not an Input Why creative belongs at the beginning of strategy, not the end For much of modern marketing history, organizations have operated under a stable and largely unquestioned...

Research Labs From Campaign Reporting to Market Sensing: The Next Evolution of Analytics Why backward-looking metrics no longer create competitive advantage Marketing analytics did not fail in its original mandate. It matured inside a set of operating assumptions that no...

Research Labs The $15,000 Tool Problem: Why Agencies Keep Winning How enterprise complexity creates permanent demand for human intermediaries There are now more than 15,000 marketing technology tools available to enterprises. In 2011, there were roughly 150. That represents a...

Research Labs Why Advertising Is No Longer a Creative Cost Center From discretionary spend to strategic infrastructure The broken assumption For decades, advertising operated under a comfortable and largely unchallenged assumption. It was treated as a creative cost center. Necessary...

Research Labs The Myth of Media Replacement and Why AI and Traditional Communication Must Coexist How Infrastructure and Meaning Must Work Together The Broken Assumption Every major shift in communication technology has been accompanied by a familiar assumption. The assumption...

Research Labs How AI is helping colleges segment by motivation and demographics Understanding why students choose matters more than who they are Higher education has long operated on an assumption that demand could be understood, forecast, and influenced primarily through...