budget allocation

Jul 22

Five Budget Bets Marketing Teams Should Make Instead of Broad AI Spending

Rather than throwing incremental budget at generic "AI tools," sophisticated marketers are carving out dedicated line items for specific problems: AI visibility (understanding where models actually add value), trust verification (proving claims to skeptical audiences), distribution engineering (controlling where content lands), human oversight (maintaining brand voice and safety), and measurement rebuild (fixing attribution models broken by AI). This reframing matters because it forces teams to stop treating AI as a cost center to automate headcount and start treating it as infrastructure that requires new operational expertise. Organizations that build these capabilities early will have an advantage over competitors still debating whether to hire an "AI person."

theme-brand marketing strategy attribution modeling budget allocation

Jul 14

Search's hidden dependency on paid social spending

Source: Search Engine Land

Search performance metrics are systematically misleading because they ignore the upstream funnel work that paid social performs—awareness, consideration, and audience qualification that converts into high-intent search traffic. When marketers cut social budgets based on ROAS comparisons alone, they're cannibalizing the demand generation that makes search efficient. Search ROAS often deteriorates months after social budget cuts, despite appearing as the stronger channel. This attribution gap creates a structural incentive for budget misallocation, favoring the last-click channel while starving the channels that create searchable audiences in the first place.