Author Archive

For most of TikTok’s life, the advice was consistent: shorter is safer. Get to the point, keep it tight, let people watch it twice. A fifteen-second video that people finished beat a sixty-second one they abandoned. Reporting from July 2026 suggests that calculation has inverted — and that the retention bar has risen sharply. Alongside […]

On July 22, 2026, OpenAI introduced Presence — enterprise voice and chat agents that answer customers, resolve issues, and carry out approved actions inside a company’s own systems. OpenAI states that Presence resolves 75% of inbound English-language phone support without a human involved. If that number holds even approximately, it’s one of the clearest cost-reduction […]

As of August 2, 2026, the EU AI Act’s transparency obligations are in force. The European Commission adopted its guidance on Article 50 on July 20, and the deadline arrived without postponement. Most non-European marketers have filed this under «European problem.» That’s the expensive misreading. The obligations follow where the content is shown, not where […]

There’s a specific kind of media buyer who built a career on audience construction. Layered interests, lookalike percentages, exclusion lists, careful demographic sculpting — the craft of deciding exactly who should see the ad. Meta has been quietly removing the value of that skill for two years. With Andromeda, its retrieval and recommendation system, combined […]

Here’s something most people running a social account have never considered: your posts have been appearing in Google Search results for years. Someone types a question, your carousel surfaces, they read it, and they may never open Instagram at all. Until July, that traffic was completely invisible. Instagram’s insights show in-app performance. Google’s data was […]

July 2026 delivered the densest wave of AI model releases in a single month so far — and unusually, the headline wasn’t capability. It was price. Images at roughly three cents. Video from five cents a second. Text models dropping 80% in a single announcement. For a small marketing team, that changes something concrete: creative […]

July 2026 was unusually dense. Google restructured search, OpenAI opened an ad platform, two major social platforms rewrote their distribution rules, AI production costs fell by roughly an order of magnitude, and a labelling law took effect that applies to advertisers who have never set foot in Europe. Most of it was covered as separate […]

The most instructive thing that happened in AI commerce this year wasn’t a launch. It was a retreat. In March 2026, OpenAI abandoned the idea of completing purchases inside ChatGPT. Not because it couldn’t build it — because, as Search Engine Land reported, shoppers research products in the chat and then prefer to finish the […]

For years, the cheapest way to grow a social account was to post other people’s work. Clip farms, aggregator pages, screenshot accounts — all built on the fact that platforms rewarded engagement without asking where the content came from. July 2026 closed that gap on two platforms at once, and the numbers involved are not […]