News & Community Updates

The last decade has created a jaded customer. We consume more media than ever at the same time, our minds generally understand that we shouldn’t completely trust what is being said to us. That said, most people actively pursue and transact with companies that they feel they can trust. But don’t take that as loyalty because as soon as that trust breaks they will be quick to leave and never return.

Campaigns that pair brand building with performance returned between 25% and 100% more revenue than performance-dominated ones, with a median uplift of about 90%. The finding underneath the numbers is a reframe: marketers tend to budget as if brand and performance add together, but the data says they multiply.For years, marketers have debated the value of brand versus performance. The brands that

It didn’t take long. Virtually every senior marketer globally now uses AI in their daily work. But only about 12% have reached builder-level fluency, the point then can design the workflows and systems rather than just writing good prompts. Among the most advanced marketers (the 12%), roughly 80% are using AI to build automation and operations, even more than are using it for content.That reframes

Acquisition is pulling hard on the budget these days for most companies. While the ratio of spend across the funnel is a pendulum in response to economic and market conditions, marketing teams now point 63% of media spend at conversion and awareness, up roughly 10% from two years previous. The pressure to prove that every dollar converts into new revenue is real, and it is steering money toward th

Caution has stopped functioning as risk management. The instinct to hold position, trim ambition, and wait for things to settle is, for a lot of brands, quietly multiplying risk rather than containing it. There is a real gap between what leaders know to be true and what their organizations are actually doing.Many of the successful B2C and B2B CMOs and brand division executives we talk to who have

Only 28% of CMOs describe their influence inside their own organization as very high. Fewer than half feel they operate with real autonomy, and 84% say it is hard to align peers around a shared marketing vision. The mandate to drive growth and lead AI keeps expanding, while the internal standing to act on it has not kept pace.The instinct under that pressure is to win credibility through short-ter

The conversation around GEO is naturally very tactical. For search teams discovery draws from a wide and shifting mix of sources, formats, citations, product data, third-party mentions, reviews, structured content, and category language. But for CMOs managing real brands, real catalogs, and finite teams, the more important question is not simply how to optimize for every AI engine.It is where the

The headlines and the conversations over the last few years have circled around whether and how much AI would hollow out the marketing function. The more useful question turned out to be who would control it and how quickly. Roughly half of CMOs now hold AI investment authority inside their own function, deciding what to fund and deploy without having to wait for sign-off from other departments or

The anxious read in the news is that starting roles for marketers are being eliminated as AI picks up the work once done by new college grads and entry level workers. The data tells a more complicated story. Entry-level roles are now seven times more likely to call for senior-level skills like judgment, creativity and leadership. PWC reports postings with those requirements have grown 35% since 20

AI isn’t replacing senior marketers. It’s absorbing the work that junior marketers were hired to do: the research, the reporting, the first-pass analysis, the repetitive operational tasks that no one loved but everyone learned from.That matters more than it appears to. Those tasks were never just about getting the work done. They were the mechanism through which early-career talent built judgment,

CMOs are at the table. New research from Arketi Group and JM Search finds that marketing leaders are operating with stronger executive relationships, broader scope, and deeper involvement in revenue and AI strategy than at any point in recent memory.But influence and infrastructure are not the same thing. Only 38% of active CMOs say the role is actually structured to support the mandate they’ve be

SignalOnly 4% of marketing and creative leaders say they have the talent they need to complete priority projects. Nearly two-thirds report that skills gaps have widened over the past year.Making It Make SenseThe skills marketing teams need today may not be the skills they need in six months. CMOs who build a bench alongside internal upskilling will stay ahead of a gap that permanent hiring alone c

Signal97% of the brands consumers ranked as most entertaining posted revenue growth. Nearly half achieved double-digit gains. The correlation held across categories, from challenger brands to legacy household names.Making It Make SenseCMOs who build content and context that is imaginative, distinctive and emotionally worth their customers’ time will bui… Read more

At the Portrait HQ stage at POSSIBLE 2026, Zach Newcomb of Vurvey and Eirasmin Lopez-Cobo of Republica Havas joined moderator Danny Wright of Portrait Media Group to make a case that most marketing organizations aren’t ready to hear: the consumer majority has already shifted, and the infrastructure built to understand it hasn’t kept up.The numbers aren’t projections. Multicultural populations repr

In a fireside conversation at POSSIBLE 2026, Shelly Palmer of The Palmer Group joined Bonin Bough of Portrait Media Group to deliver a message most enterprise leaders aren’t ready for: the barrier to meaningful AI deployment isn’t technical capability. It’s organizational design.Large enterprises are running thousands of AI initiatives simultaneously, with massive duplication and no unified archit

At POSSIBLE 2026, a panel featuring leaders from OpenX, Human Security, and TriCoast Media, and hosted by Danny Wright of Portrait Media Group put a number on something the industry has been circling for a while: roughly half of all internet traffic is now synthetic. That includes LLM scrapers, AI agents acting on behalf of humans, and the usual bad bots. And each of those categories behaves diffe

Of the CMOs who departed S&P 500 companies between 2021 and 2025, 62% moved to equivalent or larger roles. Nine percent became CEOs. The exits weren’t endings — they were transitions, and mostly upward ones.The implication for sitting CMOs is worth sitting with. The role is increasingly functioning as a platform, not a destination. How you run the curre… Read more

At a recent closed session co-hosted with NextNW in Seattle, we asked senior marketing leaders a simple question: what are you dealing with that most people never see?The answers had almost nothing to do with campaigns, channels, or tech stacks. They centered on the invisible architecture of the role: influencing board-level mandates that arrive as directives rather than discussions, navigating in

Board composition at large public companies has historically skewed toward CEOs, CFOs, and operators with direct P&L accountability. That is changing, but not as fast as the enthusiasm around it suggests.Functional leaders including marketing, sales, and operations now account for 25% of new S&P 500 director appointments, up from 18% fifteen years ago. … Read more

The pressure to show returns on marketing AI investment is is coming from boards, CFOs, and shareholders. According to the KPMG Global Tech Report 2026, 55% of tech executives say they struggle to demonstrate the value of AI to stakeholders and shareholders. Only 24% report achieving ROI across multiple use cases, a figure that has dropped seven points from the year before. Adoption is acceleratin