Employees feel accountable for customer experience, but few say their brands consistently deliver on that promise.

Google is enhancing its retail ad offerings with loyalty-driven personalization tools aimed at retention. New features include personalized pricing and shipping perks for loyalty members, a “loyalty mode” in Google Ads’ retention goal to optimize for high-lifetime-value customers, and personalized annotations in Performance Max campaigns. Sephora, an early adopter, reported a 20% lift in click-through rates from loyalty-focused annotations. The launch comes as loyalty ranks high on shoppers’ holiday priorities and as CMOs lean on loyalty programs to bolster first-party data. With Amazon pulling away from Google, the updates position Ads as a retention engine in the retail fight.

The news: When asked where they’re seeing the most return on their AI investments, 68% of Canadian banks cited a back-office implementation, while just 32% cited a customer-facing capability, per GFT’s 2025 Banking Disruption Index Report. Our take: Prevention is an obvious area for AI investment, given the rising costs of cybersecurity and fraud incidents. But it’s a good sign that banks are also investing in enhanced customer-facing capabilities that could help them attract and retain customers. They should prioritize these investments going forward, particularly with agentic AI on the rise. Customer-experience improvements are essential even if their value isn’t immediately quantifiable: Over half of Canadian banking customers say they would leave their bank due to a poor customer experience.

Retailers and brands are racing to deploy AI across the shopping journey, but trust, quality, and execution will define who wins.

The top B2B marketing trends in 2025 include AI-driven insights, first-party data strategies, and balancing automation with authenticity. In this report, marketers and agencies can learn how to embrace these evolving strategies in order to boost engagement, trust, and ROI.

As open banking nears, financial institutions should be thinking about its impact on customers who likely bank elsewhere, too.

“The holiday season really starts October 1,” Megan Gaffey, senior director of publisher partnerships at Rakuten Advertising, said on our Tech-Talk webinar Performance Marketing Playbook for Q4 Holiday Success. “And you see a lot of advertisers launch Black Friday promotions the Tuesday before Thanksgiving to get ahead of the noise.”

Community banks and credit unions were marked safe from the recent US regional bank collapses. But they’re still contending with unprecedented interest rates, an aging customer base, and disappointing core banking technology.

The CFPB's proposed Personal Financial Data Rights rule accelerates progress toward open banking in the US, changing the game for customer retention.

Casper’s subway ads give commuters fun puzzles to solve while increasing its brand awareness. Albertsons Companies leverages a game to entice consumers to play for discounts and rewards. And Nike’s mobile app earns the brand a spot in consumers’ everyday lives. Here are five ways brands are embracing gamification across different stages.

Marketers have a wealth of opportunities throughout the buyer’s journey to leverage generative AI. Here's how to use it effectively at each stage of the customer life cycle.

To survive the era of subscription fatigue, brands and retailers need to invest in models that bring customers value and convenience.

Economic uncertainty has slashed small and medium-sized business (SMB) satisfaction with their payment service providers (PSPs). This is intensifying competition between acquirers and processors, banks, fintechs, and the vendors that serve them. Providers must enhance and simplify access to cutting-edge solutions that solve key pain points—or risk losing share.

The recent shocks to the US financial system will undoubtedly create a ripple effect for consumers, with many zoning in on what these banking failures mean for their own bank accounts and whether the current state of banking is viable or trustworthy as it now stands.

The Great Tech Recession: Tech’s losses accrue with Twitter chaos and Big Tech bleeding money and workers. The industry is losing its connection with the consumers and talent who built it.

Today’s insurtech product leaders need to drive profitability with products and journeys that boost retention, simplify acquisition, and promote organic growth. And they must do so at a time when their organizations are cutting costs.

Eight banks and three other FIs will pay a combined $1.8B for their message retention failures, highlighting the need for better tech tools at work.

Money no longer fun at Google: Sundar Pichai faces off with employees over budget cuts. As a recession looms and tech’s fun money evaporates, there are other ways to keep employees happy.

Learning is the new retention perk: A survey shows that learning opportunities incentivize younger workers to stay at their jobs. It shows how Big Tech could close the skills deficit.