Marcus Startzel

New Tow Center report highlights growing tension in AI-era search: “We’re the providers of information…but Google now wants to be the distributor.” As zero-click answers rise, publishers face renewed pressure to prioritize direct audience relationships. https://lnkd.in/gzxcsgtY

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My brilliant colleague Reyna Warner published a real corker in Unbundled ABM. Take a read if you're interested in how to drive impact when budgets are tight! If you think it's compelling on the page – I can tell you first hand it's even more impressive in action!!! https://lnkd.in/e95WnhWF

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Excited to share that Aperiam has invested in Bedrock Platform. Obvious statement of the century: programmatic advertising has a complexity problem. The infrastructure that was built to give media buyers control has, over time, done the opposite. Burying teams under layers of operational overhead, legacy tooling, and opaque supply chains. Bedrock is built on a simple but powerful thesis: what if you stripped away the bloat and rebuilt the stack around what actually matters... precision, transparency, and speed to execution. Their platform combines AI-driven campaign automation with curated, premium inventory across video, CTV, DOOH, and audio, and aims to be flexible and get smarter over time. Plus, the team (Shane, Austin, Ryan, James) has deep roots in the infrastructure layer of ad tech and understands the plumbing better than almost anyone. We believe the next generation of programmatic will be leaner, faster and AI-first. Bedrock is building that.

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How to get your products listed in ChatGPT: 💡 Pro Tip: If your schema, reviews, and merchant policies aren’t clean and structured, ChatGPT won’t surface your listings — even with a valid feed. https://lnkd.in/gYxe-N2z

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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AI Unlocks a $100B Affiliate & Partnership Market. Introducing VantagePoint™ to Capture Value Beyond the Click. The Machine-Mediated Market is here. AI is fundamentally restructuring digital commerce—and with it, the economics of influence. Traditional content discovery is rapidly giving way to AI-mediated experiences. From search and social to the rise of conversational AI, these journeys are reshaping how consumers make decisions and how value flows through the ecosystem. The core challenge? Capturing the conversion value that happens beyond the click. This transformation is expanding the addressable market for Affiliate and Partnership Marketing dramatically. What is currently a $20B category now has the structural tailwinds to reach $100B over the next three years, driven by the essential shift from direct-response mechanics to comprehensive, influence-based attribution. At Partnerize, we’ve successfully navigated and built for technology transitions before: search, social, mobile. Each wave expanded the addressable market for partnership marketing. AI represents the largest opportunity yet. Today's launch of VantagePoint™ positions us firmly at the center of that shift. It is the first solution designed to measure influence across the full spectrum of AI-mediated journeys, allowing brands to capture value that extends well beyond the traditional click. As attribution continues to evolve, the opportunity is now to also fundamentally reconsider our measurement infrastructure. The companies that can prove value across both click-driven and clickless influence (the core of Answer Engine Optimization) will capture the expanding $100B TAM. That's the market we've built VantagePoint™ to own. A huge congratulations to Erez Nahom, Andy Crossen, and the entire team on the incredible work to make today possible. #VantagePoint #AI #PartnershipMarketing #AffiliateMarketing #Attribution #Partnerize #MachineMediatedMarket

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CMOs Are More Focused On Growing Revenue Than Brand Awareness https://lnkd.in/g8jyVmuY Chief marketing officers are increasingly prioritizing direct revenue outcomes over traditional brand awareness efforts, influenced by economic pressures, performance measurement demands, and AI‑enabled tracking. This shift reflects a need for more measurable impact on business performance, with revenue growth becoming a leading strategic metric for modern marketing leaders. #CMOInsights #RevenueGrowth #MarketingStrategy #BrandVsPerformance #BusinessImpact #DataDrivenMarketing

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Sooo... how can the same product, from the same company, with the same experience; suddenly grab market share from the market leader. No flashy launch, no innovation, no nothing. Change your brand positioning. How about if you are Anthropic (Claude), and you go up against a powerful government department like the DoW? Your intent was not brand position change; that'd be too pedestrian. There is of course, a lot of nuances in what happened; but the market does not care about the nuance - most of which I am most likely missing. The market cares about what they see and hear and feel. The Brand Positioning Deck on Amodei's laptop on never changed. Perceptions of the market changed of what Anthropic was. What it stood for, how far it will go for something as abstract, yet important as principles. As an aside: Amodei has re-engaged DoW and opened negotiations again as of late last week. Anthropic is still a business; and sometimes the market make a lot of assumptions, so you never know what is going on behind the scenes. But the users have made up their minds of what OpenAI and Anthropic stands for - rightly or wrongly. Both CEOs played a big role in this evolution. Speaking of CEOs and big companies and their 'products,'.... Nah, that'd be too easy. https://lnkd.in/gyfapkyF

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Want to stay ahead with AI? Google’s new resource center for SMBs is packed with tools and guidance built for business growth. https://lnkd.in/gFZ5vkBx

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Big News: Nowspeed + Longview Launch the GEO Authority Builder to Help Brands Win in AI Search The way we “search” is being completely rewritten. At Nowspeed, we’ve been watching closely as generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews shift how people discover and trust information. The traditional SEO playbook isn’t enough anymore. If your brand isn’t cited by these platforms, you’re invisible — even if your site ranks #1 on Google. That’s why I’m thrilled to announce the launch of the GEO Authority Builder, a powerful new solution we’ve created in partnership with Longview Strategies to help brands earn visibility and credibility in AI-driven search. What is GEO — Generative Engine Optimization? GEO is a new discipline focused on helping brands appear in generative search results, where AI summarizes and cites information directly. Unlike SEO, which focuses on ranking web pages, GEO helps your brand become a trusted source that AI platforms want to reference. And that’s where the GEO Authority Builder comes in. The GEO Authority Builder includes three core services: 1. GEO Visibility Audit – We assess how your brand shows up in AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini. Are you being cited? Are competitors taking your space? 2. Source Influence Mapping – We identify which publishers, authors, and types of content AI platforms are citing — giving you a clear roadmap for increasing your visibility. 3. Credibility-Building Campaigns – Longview uses its earned media relationships and editorial strategy, combined with Nowspeed’s digital expertise, to build the authority signals generative engines rely on. Why now? As I said in the press release: “The game has changed. Brands that fail to adapt to AI search will disappear from the buyer journey.” We built the GEO Authority Builder to give companies a proactive path forward — one that aligns content, PR, and digital marketing for a new kind of visibility. What makes this different? This is more than an audit or a one-time SEO tweak. It’s a full visibility strategy built for AI-first discovery. You’ll get measurable insights into your current presence, and a real plan to improve it — including the articles, mentions, and sources that matter most. Ready to see where you stand? We’re offering a free GEO Visibility Audit to help you benchmark your AI presence and take your first step toward becoming an authority in generative search. 🔗 Request your audit and let’s build your authority — before your competitors do. Evan Zall #GEO #GenerativeSearch #AISEO #DigitalMarketing #ThoughtLeadership #Nowspeed #LongviewStrategies #AuthorityBuilder #MarketingInnovation #AIvisibility https://lnkd.in/eK7FSVgS

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Impression-level AI is powerful only if the data inputs are clean and the incentives are aligned. Moving intelligence upstream doesn’t eliminate opacity by default. If agentic systems are making micro-decisions in milliseconds, transparency and governance become even more critical especially as AI-driven optimization increasingly determines pricing, prioritization, and access. There’s also a structural implication. When optimization lives at the impression layer, differentiation shifts from bulk inventory to signal quality and predictive modeling. The competitive edge is who can predict value most accurately at the micro level.

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Advanced measurement is moving from a “nice to have” to a requirement for brands that want to prove how marketing drives real business outcomes.✅ Nowhere is this more visible than in Retail Media Networks. RMNs like Instacart give brands access to closed-loop performance data tied to actual purchases. That data is powerful, but it also raises an important question for marketing leaders: How do we validate results beyond platform-reported metrics and understand true incremental impact? This is why third-party measurement is becoming a critical part of the RMN conversation. Circana has emerged as a leading independent measurement partner for retail media performance, including Instacart. By combining retailer point-of-sale data with broader market and category intelligence, Circana helps brands understand not just what sold, but what actually changed because of advertising. https://lnkd.in/gp4CghWf For food and beverage brands, this matters because RMN performance rarely exists in isolation. Retail media influences household penetration, repeat rates, brand switching, and category growth, not just attributed sales within a single platform. Third-party measurement helps separate signal from noise by providing a consistent view across retailers, channels, and time. The broader industry trend is clear. As RMN budgets grow, marketers are being asked to answer harder questions around incrementality, brand impact, and long-term growth. Platform dashboards alone are no longer enough. At Effective, we see advanced media performance reporting as a layered system. Platform data shows what happened. Third-party measurement helps explain why it happened and whether it was truly incremental. Together, they create a clearer connection between media investment and business results. This is how performance reporting evolves from tracking activity to proving impact. Jeff O'Shaughnessy Joelle Kaplan #MarketingMeasurement #RetailMedia #MediaPerformance #Incrementality #F&B #MarketingEffectiveness

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