Posts about Performance Marketing
AI, influence, brand, and customers: four skills defining marketing leadership in 2026
TL;DR AI makes up 17% of marketing activity today and is heading to 44% within three years. To stay ahead of it, leaders need to understand what AI is actually doing inside their platforms well enough to direct it, not just accept vendor recommendations. Cross-functional influence starts with investing in relationships with finance, product, and sales before you need something from them, and communicating marketing's value in their language, not yours. Brand and performance should share a single view of data and a single measurement framework, even an imperfect one, so budget decisions are made on a consistent basis across the whole portfolio. And customer intelligence needs to be an ongoing habit, not a project. Leaders who stay close to qualitative signals like customer conversations and sales call patterns make better strategic decisions than those who rely on performance dashboards alone.
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How to plan your media budget for international expansion
TL;DR International expansion isn't just a marketing problem. It's an ops problem, a finance problem, and a logistics problem. Before you touch your media budget, validate the market opportunity, ensure you have the operational foundation (localized site, payment processing, customer service), and understand local channel costs. Limit your initial market selection to ensure quality over quantity, focus on proven channels first, and analyse category and brand demand within the market, identify where and how your budget will actually move the needle. Budget planning works backward from realistic targets, not forward from wishful thinking.
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Can AI create a (trustworthy) full marketing strategy?
TL;DR AI isn't ready to independently create full marketing strategies yet. While generative AI excels at facilitation (summarization, brainstorming, content polishing, and visualization), it falls short on the nuanced, expertise-driven work that defines strategic planning. The tools lack access to crucial first-party data, can't replicate human taste and judgment, and often produce generic outputs when asked to do too much. Right now, AI works best as a collaborative thought partner, accelerating existing processes rather than replacing human expertise. The key? Use AI for tactical support while keeping humans firmly in the decision-making seat.
5 minute readAre marketing best practices helpful or lazy?
TL;DR Best practices in digital marketing aren't one-size-fits-all solutions. While foundational principles like testing and brand consistency matter, blindly following "best practices" can trap you in formulaic thinking. The key is understanding when to apply them, when to break them, and recognizing when someone's just trying to sell you something disguised as a best practice.
3 minute readWhat e-commerce marketing leaders should do in their first 90 days
TL;DR New e-commerce marketing leaders face intense pressure to deliver results quickly, but the most successful ones resist the urge to make immediate changes. Instead, they spend their first 90 days listening, learning, and building relationships. The key priorities: understand your market and customers deeply, learn the business economics from finance, evaluate existing teams and partnerships fairly, and establish clear communication systems. Only after this discovery phase should you start making strategic changes.
5 minute readAnswering your biggest performance marketing questions
Performance marketing is constantly evolving, and we know you have questions. In this special Q&A episode, we took your questions about performance marketing, from AI’s impact to reporting best practices and answered them in this wide-spanning conversation.
3 minute readAutomated campaigns take advantage of marketers
Automation isn’t the holy grail we’ve been promised — or at least, that was our hypothesis going into episode six of our video series, The Hypothesis. In this episode, we tell you what exactly advertising automation is, where we think it goes wrong, how it takes advantage of busy marketers, how we use it, where we test to ensure its effectiveness, and more. Watch the full video below or listen to the episode here to get this conversation in its entirety. More of a skimmer? Keep reading for our top takeaways.
2 minute readHow should we use the marketing funnel in 2024?
It’s time to retire the marketing funnel. Or at least, that was our hypothesis going into episode one of our new video series, The Hypothesis. Over the course of the episode, we talked about how marketers use the funnel today, where they go wrong, how they can use it to their benefit, how we think of it for ads, and where we see this concept 5 years from now. Watch the full video below or listen to the episode here to get this conversation in its entirety. More of a skimmer? Keep reading for our top takeaways.
2 minute readMarketing measurement in 2024
Winners and losers in a changing measurement landscape TL;DR cookies are going away and we're not sad about it (they weren't as effective as they promised to be anyhow) but modern marketers still need to adjust their measurement strategy. As of right now, organizations can rely on experimentation, mixed media modeling, qualitative surveys, and monitoring business performance (in addition to cookies, as long as we have them). We believe marketing teams that fully embrace experimentation and other statistical measurement techniques in 2024 and beyond are going to win against teams delaying the transition away from cookies. A culture of experimentation is the only way for marketers to win going forward.
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