For years, digital marketers became very, very good at pushing buttons. Adjust the bid, change the audience, test another keyword, move a little budget from here to there, refresh the dashboard, celebrate a tiny improvement in CTR. Somewhere along the way, this became so central to the job that we started calling it strategy. And then Google looked at all of this and basically said: Cute. We can automate that. That is where things get interesting. Because the current wave of

For years, marketers were told that first-party data would save everything. Cookies were disappearing? No problem. Platforms were becoming less transparent? Relax. Just collect your own data, build a customer data platform, create a “single customer view” and wait for personalization heaven to arrive. Naturally, it did not. Brands now own enormous amounts of customer data. They have dashboards, loyalty programs, CRM systems and enough behavioural signals to know that you look

Every time I come here I say to myself that I won't talk about AI but I seem not to be doing that promise well. Last week, we all read...