Happy hump day.
In 2028, PlayStation is ending physical disc production and just like that, the “physical vs. digital” debate is back.
Us? We’re pro-choice. We’ll whip out a Kindle, but still sniff a paperback like it’s fine wine. We stream music daily, but our vinyl collection is curated within an inch of its life.
Gaming discs, though? Apparently that choice is being made for us. Not nice.
AI giveth, and AI taketh away
Four platforms, one very AI kind of week.
Say cheese: Meta just launched Muse Image, its first in-house image model, live in Meta AI now.
It’s a prompt-driven creative engine that renders legible text and even functional QR codes. The best part? It’s coming to advertisers through Advantage+ creative.
Know your audience: OpenAI is rolling out audience list uploads on its new ChatGPT Ads platform.
You can feed it raw or hashed emails and phone numbers, giving you real first-party targeting on an emerging channel. Early days, but worth a look.
Now for the cleanup crew: Reddit has a bot problem. And it says its upgraded AI defenses are cutting spam exposure and revoking nearly 2M fake votes daily.
Suspicious automated accounts now get asked to verify their humanity. If you lean on automation for Reddit, expect a tighter, more human-vetted room.
And a legal plot twist: A German court ruled Google can be held liable for false claims its AI Overviews generate, treating them as Google’s own statements, not third-party links.
If that view holds, Google may be pushed to source and link out more to dodge liability, which could mean better attribution for publishers.
It’s anything but smooth sailing with AI developments…
TikTok goes streaming, Google goes social, X goes video editing, and a legal plot twist
Every update here either hands you social reach or threatens it.
TikTok’s playing matchmaker: Its new Streaming Ads pair high-intent users with specific titles from a streaming catalog, turning idle scrolling into signups.
Smart+ handles the bidding and optimization, so you focus on strategy.
And the pitch has numbers. TikTok claims 80% of Streaming Ads campaigns outperformed non-Streaming ones in early testing.
Google’s finally showing its work: Search Console added a property type that tracks Search-driven traffic to your social accounts.
YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram–you now see clicks, impressions, and top posts. Real attribution for how Search feeds your profiles.
X hands you a camera: Its OS video editor now includes green screen recording and multi-language captions.
Lower-friction production, plus captions that stretch your reach across languages. Worth a look if you post videos there.
And here’s the plot twist: A UK proposal could force YouTube and TikTok to prioritize public broadcasters like the BBC above independent creators during big events.
That means less algorithmic reach for your content in the UK, regardless of what audiences actually want. Consultation’s open until August 31.
And quite the timing after just Monday we mentioned how publishers are losing priority to creators. Things change fast.
Here’s how to save 40+ hours a month on your creator partnerships
Two-thirds of brands now manage influencer marketing in-house rather than through an agency, and spending is rising fast. 74% of marketers are increasing creator budgets this year, with some enterprise brands putting over 60% of digital spend behind creator partnerships.
However, going in-house doesn’t mean doing it all manually — creator discovery and vetting remains the most commonly outsourced process, since finding, vetting, and briefing the right creator doesn’t scale on a spreadsheet.
Insense fills exactly that gap:
- NutraChamps ran 322 creator collabs with just a two-person team
- Bones Coffee turned one brief into 54 ad variations (2.16 ROAS, 21% CTR)
- Particle for Men cut whitelisting costs 42% after switching platforms while sustaining a 1.3–2x ROAS.
Insense’s free guide, How to Find and Choose the Right Creators, offers a practical checklist for matching creators to your brand without agency help.
Download the free guide and book a strategy call by July 24 for $200 platform credit.
Hone these skills and you might future-proof your career
Tarek Reslan at CXL surveyed hundreds of B2B marketers and found a widening split.
Using AI tools no longer impresses anyone. But building systems around them… That’s hot.
Most marketers sit between AI-assisted and AI-integrated. The leap to native is where the career and performance upsides are. And five skill gaps mark the distance.
1) Production and content: 46% of marketing leaders want the content engine fully off their plate, while 42% name generic AI output as their biggest failure.
Filling a calendar is easy. The real skill is turning one brief into coordinated ads, landing pages, and emails that still sound human.
2) Research: 42% already use AI here, yet most still copy-paste between tabs like it’s 2023.
Why this matters: The jump is from doing research to building pipelines. Competitive intel that lands in your inbox every Monday beats three hours of manual digging.
3) Workflow redesign: A striking 55% rate themselves as beginners, and only 10% see it as a priority skill.
This is the meta-skill. Knowing which workflows to retire, rebuild, or scrap entirely decides how much value every other skill produces.
4) Experimentation and analytics: 42% call themselves beginners at running experiments, and 37% say hallucinated data is their number one AI failure.
The fix is lightweight analytics that pull data, flag anomalies, and surface experiments continuously, instead of waiting on a data team.
5. Operations and AI systems: 42% want this skill most, yet 65% remain beginners, the biggest desire-capability gap in the stack.
The Crew’s take: Personal productivity hits a ceiling fast. Team-level infrastructure with approval flows and governance is where output stops being capped by one person’s hours.
CXL built a free assessment to rate you across all five and flag your biggest gaps. Think you can get a perfect score?
Why good marketing fails (and how to fix it)
It’s frustrating. You follow the “best practices,” but your campaigns still flop. The problem usually isn’t the product—it’s how the brain perceives it.
Stop marketing blindly.
Psychology of Marketing bridges the gap between complex academic research and profitable campaigns.
We explain the quirks of human behavior so you can finally get inside your customer’s head.
How do you measure B2B content success?
The scoreboard is changing.
Organic search used to be the only game in town but there’s a new challenger:
For the first time, AI referral Traffic (17%) has overtaken organic traffic (16%) as the primary metric for B2B success. This is a seismic shift in how we value content.
Other key metrics include:
- Overall referral (13%): Links from other sites.
- Social Engagement and shares (13%): Viral potential and community buzz.
- Content pageviews (10%): Traditional “eyeballs” on the page.
The Crew’s Take: If you aren’t tracking how much traffic AI chatbots (like ChatGPT or Claude or Gemini) are sending your way, you’re flying blind.
The “search” era is evolving into the “answer” era.
What you can do: Check your analytics for “direct” traffic spikes or specific AI referral sources.
If it’s growing, your content is successfully “teaching” the LLMs that you are a credible authority.
AI MARKETING: This daily newsletter condenses the latest and greatest AI developments into a 5-minute read. They read the noise, pull out the signal, and explain what actually matters for work, strategy, and the tools your team is already using. Trusted by 700k+ readers. Subscribe right here.*
NETFLIX: Starting August 3, the platform brings web-native shorts from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, Hearst, and Penske brands to subscribers in the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. It’s a cheap test of whether bingers crave YouTube-style content on Netflix too.
GOOGLE: Spotted in the wild: a big “Visit site” button is being tested on your sponsored search ads. It’s the same treatment already given to organic sitelinks and Maps results. Could nudge click-through rates up, so keep a close eye on your CTR.
BING: Microsoft is testing product detail overlays that pop open when you click a listing, showing images, retailer prices, price history, and related items. The catch? It funnels shoppers into Bing Shopping, away from web results. Keep those product feeds sharp.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Australia’s under-16 ban is leaking badly. Testers opened 50 accounts claiming to be 16 across nine of ten platforms, and none asked for proof. And nobody is shocked, because this is just the initial phase of trying to get around the ban.
*This is a sponsored post.
When I’m first said,
I’m quite mysterious,
But when I’m explained,
I’m nothing serious.
What am I?
You can find the answer here.
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