Data fuels marketing, but it’s tough to track and even harder to make sense of. Businesses juggle measuring customer behavior, respecting privacy, and personalizing experiences—all while marketers try to prove their campaigns are worth the investment. Analytics and attribution tools help by showing what’s working, where to focus, and how to improve.

Sponsored content from influencers can help the payments network as it tries to build brand awareness among younger consumers

On today’s special edition podcast, we talk about how brands are rising to the challenge of finding the right influencers and creators for campaigns. Listen to the discussion with Senior Analyst, Minda Smiley, as she hosts N’Yaisha Aziz, Global Social Media Lead at Uber, and Rodney Mason, the Head of Marketing and Brand Partnerships at LTK. Listen everywhere and watch on YouTube and Spotify.

Ramping up marketing spend and integrating Cash App, Afterpay, and Square should put it in a stronger position in 2025

As marketers integrate generative AI (genAI) into their creative workflows, they must ensure the technology enhances, rather than replaces, creativity. Creatives must be active in AI policy development, maintain transparency of AI use, and be thoughtful about the way they use genAI. Brands that balance AI efficiency with human insight will stand out.

A lot happens in a week, so every Friday we're going to analyze all the new data and provide you with some of the key takeaways. Welcome to the Friday 5.

This year's Sundance Film Festival featured Creator Day, a full day of programming dedicated to the creator economy and innovations in branded content. The unique event, crafted by Sundance's BrandStorytelling and sponsored by YouTube, aimed to highlight the creator industry’s development beyond sales-driven social posts into long-term brand partnerships.

Google made its marketing mix model (MMM), Meridian, available to the public last week and launched a program of over 20 trained and certified measurement partners to help marketers use the tool.

As consumers get bored of brands—72% said that “very few really stand out as different,” according to VML’s 2025 Future 100 report—marketers are turning to creative campaigns to attract attention.

DeepSeek’s affordable AI is a game-changer for marketers, but DeepSeek’s data privacy practices may scare off companies wary of Chinese server storage and security gaps

Affordable AI is a game-changer for marketers, but DeepSeek’s data privacy practices may scare off companies wary of Chinese server storage and security gaps.

As marketing becomes more directly tied to revenue goals, the ability to measure and report on its impact has declined. Some of that can be attributed to signal loss as the industry moves away from third-party tracking to more privacy-safe identifiers. Today’s audiences are also spread across multiple channels and devices. This makes it harder to track the customer journey and attribute results to specific marketing efforts.

Between navigating a TikTok ban that s been looming since 2020 and the unreliable nature of social media algorithms, brands and creators in influencer marketing are accustomed to diversification.

In the last 12 months cookies got a stay of execution, TikTok did not (yet), AI exploded, and viral content cluttered our feeds. So much happened in marketing in 2024, it can be difficult to cut through the noise and take stock of what to focus on in 2025.

Halfway through the current decade, retail media has bled into the wider concept of commerce media, which will be a $68.69 billion industry in the US this year, per our December 2024 forecast.

Last year, marketers' priorities included navigating a rising connected TV (CTV) landscape, using AI to optimize budgets, and questioning whether traditional measurement strategies like last-click attribution could use improvement.