
State of Brand — brand, owned media and go-to-market coverage for marketing leaders

Marketing Keeps Inventing Engineers. Is Any of It Real?
Profound has built a manifesto, a course, a job board and a podcast around the marketing engineer. The title will become a real job only when people with nothing to sell start paying for it.
PR vs. Owned Media: Which One Is Still Working in 2026

Banks Never Really Needed Great Marketing... Until They Did

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Growth & Strategy
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PR vs. Owned Media: Which One Is Still Working in 2026
PR still lands mentions, but the brands keeping their audiences in 2026 are the ones publishing their own.
Marketing Keeps Inventing Engineers. Is Any of It Real?
Profound has built a manifesto, a course, a job board and a podcast around the marketing engineer. The title will become a real job only when people with nothing to sell start paying for it.
AI Can Now Copy Everything Except Your Data and Your Opinion
AI made average content free, so a sourced opinion is the last scarce asset in marketing.
As Discovery Fragments, OpenTable Wins Attention By Putting Someone Else In The Spotlight
OpenTable CGO Robin Chiang on how the platform stays authentic by amplifying the restaurants and creators diners trust.
How to Build an Owned Media Strategy: A Step-by-Step Framework
How to build an owned media strategy in eight steps: define your reader, launch an industry publication, feature real executives and earn an audience.
OpenAI Is Betting on In-Person, Which Tells You Something About AI
The company that taught machines to write your emails is hiring a Global Head of Events to bring people together in person. It says a lot about what gets more valuable as everything else gets automated.
ChatGPT Ads Seem to Lift Organic Traffic. Is Paying to Be Found the Future of AI Search?
Marketers say ChatGPT ads lift their organic traffic, and OpenAI says ads can't touch its answers. Nobody outside OpenAI can check which is right, and that may shape AI search more than the ads.AI & Technology
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Meta's AI Agent Sold a User's Keyboard for $10 and Shared His Address. Today Meta Pitched It to Businesses.
Meta's Muse haggled away a used keyboard, sent a stranger to a seller's building and told the buyer "Yep I'm here!" while the seller was out. On Monday morning, Meta started selling the same technology to companies.
Clay Put $1 Million Into a Job Title. Profound Is Running a University to Rename It.
Clay coined the GTM engineer. Profound calls the same person a marketing engineer. The naming fight decides whose product the role gets built around.The Great Convergence: Everyone Sounds the Same. Now They're Becoming the Same Company.
Everyone bought the same capabilities from the same vendors on the advice of the same firms. Now the only thing left to compete on is scale.The FTC Is Now Fining Companies Over the AI Claims in Their B2B Marketing
In every FTC AI enforcement action this year the deceived buyer was a business, and the firms that supplied the marketing materials were charged too.
265 Million People Still Love Canva. The Market Took $11 Billion Off Anyway.
Canva's brand did nothing wrong and still watched more than eleven billion dollars come off the mark in a week. The lesson is about what kind of love it was holding.
Sam Altman Has Solved the Problem of Talking to Your Children
Altman pitched an AI podcast for the drive to school. An eight-word reply beat him 13 to 1, and it exposed a positioning problem the whole industry shares.More Than 200 Economists Sign Open Letter Urging Action on AI Job Displacement
More than 200 economists and 16 Nobel laureates just warned that AI could reshape the economy faster than institutions can respond. The reputational bill lands on brands first.
AI Just Hollowed Out the MarTech Stack. Winners Are Racing to the Last Mile.
Data platforms are swallowing the CDP. The tools that actually reach customers just became the most important part of the stack.HubSpot Spent 20 Years Selling Trust. It Took Four Days of Fine Print to Put It on the Line.
Today HubSpot published a post to its community titled "We Got This Wrong. And We Are Fixing It." The company says it will not move forward with the terms of service changes it communicated on July 1.
Brand & Creative
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As Layoffs Climb, More Professionals Are Building Audiences Their Employers Can't Take Away
Tech layoffs in 2026 have already passed last year's total. More professionals are responding by writing in public, building owned audiences that don't disappear with their work login.
a16z Is Hiring Scriptwriters. Its Media Team Is Turning Into a Production Company.
Two months after Andreessen Horowitz doubled down on its New Media team, the firm is recruiting producers, creative directors, editors and scriptwriters in Los Angeles, and pitching them with a film screening.
CEOs Don't Trust AI Creative Yet. Waymark Is Betting That Changes by November.
Advertisers remain wary of AI-made ads, even as the output improves. A look at the trust gap, and at Waymark's new premium tier built from brands' own photos and footage.
Demandbase, Adobe and a Wave of Launches Are Putting AI in Charge of Campaigns. Who Signs Off?
Demandbase, Adobe and Multiply are handing B2B campaigns to AI agents. Few teams have decided who approves the work, or how their brand stays distinct.






