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Marketing Brew

Ryan Barwick

marketingbrew.com

Why Coinbase never stopped advertising

As bitcoin surpasses its pre-crash levels, the brand’s CMO, Kate Rouch, walked us through the company’s marketing strategy. 

Why Coinbase never stopped advertising 

Jasmine Sheena

A robot arm reaching out and touching a screen displaying a web browser

Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts

“AI is just a very powerful weapon that was added to this arms race” between search engines and SEO efforts, one agency exec said.

Get ready: Generative AI is already transforming SEO marketing efforts 

Alyssa Meyers

Gen Alpha is online and developing sports fandom, report says

By age 8, most children spend up to three hours a day on social media, according to a report from Morning Consult.

Data & Tech

Kelsey Sutton

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself 

Didier Bizimungu is head of performance marketing, SMB, at Reddit, and has spent a decade working in digital marketing and media, including at software companies like Matterport and Community Brands.

 One of my favorite projects was promoting a niche enterprise software with a total addressable market of just ~200 organizations. We had to get scrappy, from joining Facebook groups to showing up at camping events, to reach the right people. Success was defined by securing just one or two new logos per year. But those wins felt massive because it was truly a full-funnel, team-driven effort. It made me feel connected to every part of the journey—from first touch to closed deal. That’s not typical in my field.

I’m absolutely obsessed with Liquid Death’s content. Their 

 is a masterclass in creative chaos, and is the kind of campaign that reminds you how far the boundaries of advertising can actually stretch when you let imagination lead.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile: 

I spend most of my 4am mornings either in a pool, on a trail, or out riding my bike. I’m currently training for a triathlon.

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least? 

AI—on both fronts. I’m excited about how it can help marketers become more well-rounded and productive. But I’m skeptical of the hype that it’ll reach AGI levels and become a plug-and-play “team member.” We’re not there…yet.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? 

 podcast is a go-to for me. As I spend less time hands-on in-platform, this podcast helps me stay sharp, reminding me of the fundamentals while also highlighting new features and strategies worth testing.

A portrait Didier Bizimungu, Reddit’s head of performance marketing in front of a light green background.

Coworking with Didier Bizimungu

He’s Reddit’s head of performance marketing, SMB. 

MKBR-GenAI in SEO audio embed

Google is all in on AI in its search results. For marketers who have long leaned on SEO best practices to show up in front of internet users, the old rules no longer apply.

“The guidelines that people were publishing even a year ago may not be relevant that much longer,” Simon Poulton, EVP of innovation and growth at the agency Tinuiti, told Marketing Brew.

Google users who are served AI-generated overviews at the top of their search results clicked on search-result links significantly less often than users who did not encounter AI summaries, according to a Pew Research Center 

 released in July. This shift, in which Google has essentially cut off search traffic to third-party sites, has been 

 “Google Zero” and is upending search and creating some major challenges for brands that have used SEO as a way to drive traffic and maintain engagement.

As a result, SEO marketers find themselves looking to engineer new ways to keep users engaged and revisit what metrics are best in a new era of search.

“The entire industry is going through a relearning process right now,” Poulton said.

Google’s AI Overviews, powered by its GenAI model Gemini, first rolled out widely in the US in May 2024, providing AI-generated summaries pulled from news articles or other sources on the web. While AI Overviews appeared on only 6.49% of Google searches in January, by May they showed up on nearly one-fifth of them, according to data compiled by the marketing platform Semrush.

That has had a considerable effect on web traffic for all kinds of sites, including publishers. At Business Insider, traffic dropped 55% from April 2022 to April 2025, according to Similarweb 

 cited by the Wall Street Journal; the “extreme traffic drops,” according to CEO Barbara Peng, were the impetus behind a significant staff cut in May, when the company laid off around 20% of its workforce. At the time, Peng also said the publication was committed to going “all-in on AI.” (Business Insider’s parent company, Insider Inc., is a subsidiary of Axel Springer, the same company that owns Morning Brew.)

Those traffic drops are also affecting brands that rely on search traffic to help drive their businesses. At agency Mediassociates, clients in verticals like healthcare and financial have seen drops in their organic traffic anywhere from 20% to 50% since May 2024, Tim Lathrop, VP, platform digital, said. For now, he said, the agency is advising clients to lean on paid search to complement organic search results.

Poulton echoed this sentiment, noting that there could be a convergence of paid media and organic media, which were once seen as separate.

“Organic is going to be influencing the future of paid and the quality of those experiences, because ultimately, Google’s going to try and drive what gets revenue, and it’s going to be the most related ad to the answer, not the query.”

For marketers looking to improve their SEO results amid the shift to AI Overviews, there are a few strategies that experts recommend. It may be helpful for brands to refresh the content on their website more often—Lathrop suggested at least once a month—and adjust content based on the information people are currently looking for, encouraging users to click through to their sites.

Lathrop also recommended that brands continue building or strengthening their structured data, which Google Search uses to understand the content of a page and can lead to improved search results. If a web page has a recipe listed on it, for example, providing more detailed information, like ingredients and cooking time, can make it more likely that users will click on the link while also making it easier for Google to understand the content on the page.

These existing SEO best practices can be useful for sites seeking good positioning in Google Search results, but also in its AI features, according to a Google Search Central post.

The AI Overview presents the real estate that may be the new frontier for SEO marketers to lay claim to, as brands look to appear in those overviews and provide guidance to users on specific products or services. Poulton predicts that future SEO marketing will focus more on driving overall awareness of a brand or product (what he called “influence and sentiment”) rather than “clicks and rankings.”

“That’s what the future of SEO is. It’s not ‘black hat’ or ‘white hat,’” he said. “It’s purely ‘How do we influence opinion with multiple types of information,’ be it reviews, be it content we’ve created, be it what other folks have said.”

As SEO marketers look to master AI Overviews, there are still yet other challenges Google’s AI may present. For example, the content Google generates in an AI Overview may not always be suitable for a brand—especially if it suggests information that could lead consumers to develop a negative opinion of a brand, Poulton said.

Another challenge is measurement. Some users prefer to read the AI Overview instead of directly clicking on a search result, and measurement platforms are still evolving to gauge web performance with fewer users directly clicking through, Lathrop said.

“In the past, you’d be able to look at clicks to your website and [use]…analytics to understand the engagement of content,” he said. “Now we’re in this era of basically zero-click advertising and just zero-click in general, where people are just reading [the AI overview]...versus clicking and engaging.”

A search bar with colorful digital squares filling it up with AI stars surrounding it

How GenAI is changing the SEO marketing playbook, one AI Overview at a time

We spoke with experts to hear strategies for improving SEO results and the challenges that lie ahead.

WhatsApp once promised to have No Ads! No Games! No Gimmicks!” on 

. Last month, the news that ads were in fact coming to WhatsApp, which parent company Meta 

 at Cannes Lions, prompted plenty of questions about user privacy and concerns about how user data could be used for ad targeting. (Meta has said that ads on WhatsApp will be targeted based on user details like location, language, followed Channels, and interactions with other ads.)

There are plenty more questions about ads on WhatsApp—but advertisers are already thinking about ways to leverage the new channel.

“The holistic ecosystem is evolving to connect different ways to interact with brands,” Grant Parker, president of ad-tech platform Innovid, told Marketing Brew. “This is just another addition to that that I think needs to be obviously threaded very carefully, in terms of the needle, between relevancy and offering value to consumers versus making sure that they feel really good about their personal communications remaining private.”

 With limited targeting options available on the platform, Parker said that brands looking into the channel will likely put “a lot of emphasis on the creative message, because there's going to be less understanding of who the person is.” He also recommended advertisers consider contextual factors, including time of day or whether target users are on the desktop or mobile versions of WhatsApp, to inform ad campaigns in the absence of more granular audience data.

As is often the case with newer channels, there may be some brand hesitation, especially given users’ privacy concerns, Parker told us.

With that said, some early adopters are piloting ads on the platform while others wait to see how public perception continues to shake out, he said. Clients in the retail, tech, and telco space usually show interest in testing ad offerings like this.

According to two media buyers, CPMs for WhatsApp Status ads, which show up in the Updates tab on the platform,

“An irrelevant ad is actually worse than an unviewable one,” Parker said. “You’re going to have brands trying to connect with consumers in WhatsApp without a lot of understanding of who that person is...Brands are really going to have to get their creative right.”

Shatesha Scales, paid social supervisor at Rain the Growth Agency, said that while WhatsApp ads could potentially be useful for targeting users by location, Scales sees it as potentially being a more valuable channel for branding, building upper-funnel awareness for a brand, and generating leads and traffic.

She compared WhatsApp ads to sponsored messaging on Snapchat, saying the agency has been leveraging more conversational ad formats.

 While WhatsApp may have some ad targeting limitations, it does present a new opportunity. It’s embracing AI agents, which brands can use to directly engage with consumers, and Parker said that he expects AI agents to grow in use among consumers, presenting a potential opportunity for brands.

“As these AI agents start to become a source of heavy communication with consumers, there’s an opportunity for brands to create relevancy again, but it has to be a great value exchange for consumers to find that to be something that they’re willing to trade for.,” he said. “I think we’ll see this continue to evolve, where brands are looking for ways to be relevant in those spaces.”

Meta is leaning into WhatsApp AI agents, announcing a test of Business AI in WhatsApp earlier this month. The AI agents are designed to make personalized product recommendations and direct users to brands’ sites, all while communicating with consumers within a WhatsApp chat.

 Parker expects the platform’s ads operations to get more sophisticated over time. Likewise, he said, as the platform’s monetization grows, “there’s going to be, ultimately, demands from advertisers to measure and capitalize on it,” to get a better understanding of engagement.

“There will be evolution, as you’ve seen from all of Meta’s offerings over time,” he said.

How advertisers are approaching ads on WhatsApp

The platform’s limited targeting capabilities mean that brands are putting “a lot of emphasis on the creative message,” an ad-tech exec told us.

The venture-capital world seems to be betting big on generative AI creative tools, and it wants adland to buy in, too.

A number of buzzy, AI-related startups have gotten financial backing from major VC firms. However, with an influx of tools that claim to make ad creation easier, some agencies are approaching them with caution.

“On the one hand, we have a lot of enthusiasm, and our creatives are always very excited to try out these new tools,” Michael Horn, global head of AI at Omnicom Advertising Group, said. “Then we have a lot of responsibilities from an ethical, regulatory, and privacy perspective.”

 What are some of these tools? Look no further than Cartwheel, a generative AI tool focused on 3D animation that was started by OpenAI and Google alums and is backed by Khosla Ventures and Jeffrey Katzenberg’s firm WndrCo. The company 

 a cool $10 million in May. Or Captions, an AI video startup that’s 

 over $100 million from VC firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital, which debuted a set of advertising tools called Mirage Studio last month that can create video content from scratch.

“[For] pitches you don’t have a big budget, and you need to do it fast, and you need to try a bunch of stuff quickly. Speed is what Cartwheel is designed for. 3D character animation is the type of animation we’re doing, and that’s the most expensive type of animation,” Jonathan Jarvis, Cartwheel co-founder and CEO, said. “The director will have an idea, and they’ll assign something to an animator. The animator goes away for three days or a week, animates it, and comes back to the director. The director gives notes, repeat, repeat, repeat. That’s a big reason why it’s so expensive.”

While startups like Cartwheel may be buzzy, performing due diligence is key, Horn said. For context, Omnicom already has agreements in place with what he called “hyperscalers” like OpenAI and Google, he said, “and we have indemnification agreements with those companies.” Tools from those companies are made available across the agency. The agency has also already put out work for clients like McDonald’s and Nike that was created with the use of AI.

For the new wave of emerging GenAI creative tools, Omnicom only plans to work with “companies that can offer indemnification [and are] not going to generate material that is trained on copyrighted inputs ,” Horn said. Newer tools can also be leveraged more to fulfill bespoke client needs. Creatives are allowed to test them, but Omnicom is more selective when it comes to choosing which ones to use for clients.

“We are simultaneously evaluating literally dozens of these types of new generative tools, and each of them have their special sauce,” Horn said. “At the same time, we have a very rigorous governance process before we can use any of this on commercial work.”

Do agencies want to use new generative AI creative tools? 

 Venture-capital firms are betting on startups like Cartwheel, a 3D animation tool powered by AI.

Everyone’s talking about that Coldplay jumbotron couple, but here’s something slightly more worthwhile to focus on.

The internet ad market in the US grew 14.9% last year to $258.6 billion, significantly more than the 7.3% growth it saw in 2023, according to a new report from the consulting firm PwC.

The report, released this week, projects an 8.5% compound annual growth rate for the internet ad market through 2029, bringing the total value to $389.1 billion by the end of the decade, and noted particularly strong growth in social, retail media, and connected TV.

While it may not be nearly as spicy a subject as an apparent coworker affair, the report lays out several important advertising growth areas and trends, which we dug into below.

 Digital video continued to gobble up ad dollars in 2024, increasing 19.2% year over year to $62.1 billion, the report read. That growth came in part from short-form video: revenue from video ads that appeared within social media feeds, which PwC dubbed “social outstream video advertising revenue,” grew 19.7% in 2024 to $27.4 billion.

While TikTok was a major contributor to the growth, its 

 in the US could result in media buyers shifting ad spend to other platforms like Meta’s Reels and Google’s YouTube Shorts, the report noted.

 Retail media advertising also continued to take off, according to the report. Digital retail media performed well in 2024, and 16.2% of US retail sales in Q3 last year were from e-commerce, up slightly from 15.4% in Q3 2023, according to Census Bureau data cited in the report.

More importantly, PwC expects retail paid search to reach $64.7 billion by 2029, making up just under half (44.2%) of all paid search ad revenue.

 The over-the-top (OTT) video sector continued to grow last year, and the US market, despite its maturity, has continued to see double-digit revenue growth, according to the report. In 2024, domestic subscription video on demand (SVOD) revenue increased 18.3% year over year to $56.1 billion, and OTT video subscriptions overall rose by 9.5%.

Part of that revenue growth came from streamers hiking subscription prices: revenue per subscriber grew 8% last year, according to the report. Subscriber growth was also partially attributed to streaming services taking part in bundled offerings aimed at bringing in new customers.

The total US OTT market is expected to reach $112.7 billion by 2029, about half (44.1%) of global SVOD revenue, PwC projects.

In contrast to OTT advertising, traditional TV advertising took another hit in 2024, according to the report. Total revenue from “pay-TV” (defined in the report as “cable, satellite, and IPTV services”) and linear TV advertising in 2024 totaled $126.1 billion, down more than $20 billion compared to 2020 figures, and PwC projects that the sector will see a compound annual growth rate of -5.4% through 2029, marking “one of the most pronounced declines among its global peers.”

 Physical out-of-home (OOH) advertising may not be growing at the same clip as OTT, but it increased a modest 1.6% in 2024, the report found. For advertisers looking to avoid digital ad fraud, OOH could be a viable option, the report noted, and growth is expected to come mostly from digital OOH. Last July, nearly all (96%) of US marketers and agencies said they planned to maintain or increase OOH spending in the next year, according to a survey from the Digital Place-Based Advertising Association cited in the report.

Increased integration between CTV and digital out-of-home (DOOH) that allows for multiplatform campaigns combining TV ads with billboards could encourage further investment, the report noted. AI is also expected to further support DOOH growth if the tech can support more customizable and targeted ads.

“Although only in its early stages of development, AI has the potential to make DOOH a more targeted, dynamic, and measurable medium,” the report’s authors wrote.

Business hand handing money over to AI hand representing venture capital funding to AI startups.

US internet ad market climbs to $258.6 billion: PwC 

Social, retail media, and connected TV are fueling continued growth. 

Morning Brew Staff

Read these exclusive, real-time insights from Morning Brew’s Breakroom research community and uncover what’s shaping the future of AI, the economy, and culture.

Cannes confidential: AI's evolution, economic uncertainty, and Gen Z preferences

Leslie Walsh is head of strategy at RYA, an AI tool from the New York-based ad agency Episode Four. Prior to joining Episode Four, she’s also worked at agencies including BBDO and 360i Europe.

I have had the opportunity to work on some pretty great creative projects in my career. I’ve helped build a bacon dating app for Oscar Mayer, I’ve helped Charles Schwab build muscle cars to give away to the winner of their PGA Tour every year, and most recently I’ve helped Invesco QQQ create a cooking show. But I’d have to say, my favorite project has been leading the strategy and development of Episode Four’s creative AI tool, RYA.

With Cannes Lions right around the corner, I’ve been reflecting on the kind of work that makes a lasting impact in culture. The best campaigns don’t just sell a product. They challenge norms and spark conversations. One campaign that really stuck with me this year is Bobbie’s “

.” It’s the first-ever campaign to feature a breastfeeding mom in Times Square, and it boldly reframes something natural and necessary as something powerful and worthy of public attention. As a mom, I felt a deep connection to this message. Feeding your baby, however and wherever you choose to do it, should come with confidence, not shame. And this campaign helped make that possible.

I’m not sure if it’s entered at Cannes this year, but in my eyes, it’s already won.

I am obsessed with sharks. As an avid scuba diver, I’ve had the opportunity to swim with great whites (in a cage) and swim alongside bull, lemon, reef, black tip, white tip, and nurse sharks on my dives. I’d love to add tiger sharks to the list!

I am most optimistic and passionate about AI and its power to supercharge our creativity, not replace it. That may be a cop out, as I’d argue that AI isn’t a trend or even the future; it’s a reality. On the flip side, I am least optimistic about “brain rot” content and generative AI’s role in exacerbating it.

For anyone in strategy, I highly recommend Mark Pollard’s 

 podcast, Instagram account, Facebook, and WhatsApp group. He’s built a great 

 for strategists to connect and learn from one another—something that is greatly needed, as far too often strategists can feel like lone wolves when in reality we thrive in a pack.