Link Archive

TL;DR — HubSpot Marketing outlines why Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) is the new north star over ROAS. Metric: calculate MER by dividing total revenue by total marketing spend (e.g., $500k / $100k = 5.0). Analysis: use MER to catch when high-ROAS channels are just cannibalizing organic traffic. Action: build a blended MER dashboard to report holistic growth health to leadership.

TL;DR — Rate (750+ locations, 2,500 loan officers) automated review workflows with Birdeye AI: 12% review frequency increase, 3,800 reviews collected in 10 months, 4.9-star average maintained. GreenEarth Cleaning (230 franchises) centralized social publishing with AI content generation: 833% reach increase (1.9M impressions), 1,687% engagement surge (85.9K engagements), 29.4K link clicks driving business. Five 2026 automation tactics: monitor brand visibility in AI search engines (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity), deploy review generation agents at peak emotional moments, automate listings accuracy across 50-200+ directories, use predictive sentiment analysis to catch issues pre-escalation, generate location-specific social content at proven engagement times. Impact: Multi-location brands automate reputation and reach at scale without sacrificing quality.

TL;DR — PCMag's on-the-ground preview confirms CES 2026 will be the year AI moves from software to hardware ubiquity. Key signals: 'AI-ready' is the new standard for laptops (Intel Panther Lake, Snapdragon X2) and displays. Beyond PCs, expect dedicated 'agentic gadgets'—wearables and handhelds designed solely to house AI assistants—to challenge the smartphone status quo. LG and Samsung are pushing RGB LED and Micro RGB tech, while smart home devices (vacuums, locks) finally get useful AI interoperability via Matter. The era of the 'AI PC' is over; now it's just 'the PC'.

TL;DR — A comprehensive 22-chapter playbook for 2026. Key frameworks: 1) 'Synthetic Personas' that evolve with real-time data to test messaging before launch. 2) 'Campaign Down' approach for rapid asset generation. 3) Multi-channel orchestration that adjusts timing/frequency based on individual fatigue signals (reducing unsubscribes by 20-40%). Warning: 'Most successful AI implementations take 6-12 months to show meaningful results.' Essential for teams moving from ad-hoc tools to integrated AI operations.

TL;DR — Kieran Flanagan (CMO, Sequoia Scout) breaks down 5 AI launches that transformed marketing. Content Remixing: Gemini 3 turns YouTube into a content repository by extracting competitor positioning and viral talking points. Visual Creation: Nano Banana Pro renders text-in-images correctly, ChatGPT Image 1.5 enables iterative edits. A/B test 20 ad variations in minutes. Video: Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 collapsed video production from weeks to prompts. Automation: OpenAI Agent SDK and Google Workspace Studio enable agent swarms for competitor monitoring and lead qualification. Vibe Coding: Replit Agent and Claude Code let marketers ship ROI calculators and dashboards without engineering. One AI-enabled marketer with agents will outscale traditional teams.

TL;DR — RLHF causes mode collapse because human annotators systematically prefer familiar, safe responses. The fix: instead of 'Tell me a joke' prompt 'Generate 5 jokes with their probabilities.' This distribution-level prompting restores 1.6-2x diversity, improves human-rated output by 25.7%, recovers 66.8% of pre-alignment creativity. Works across GPT-4, Claude, Gemini without retraining. Python package available at github.com/CHATS-lab/verbalized-sampling.

TL;DR — B2B Reddit communities (r/msp, r/sales, r/sysadmin, r/marketing) now influence AI citations more than vendor documentation for certain categories. LLMs treat Reddit as high-value training data because threads contain practitioner experiences, edge cases, and corrections that static docs lack. Community managers now sit at center of AI visibility strategy. Brands consistently mentioned in upvoted threads get categorized by AI systems even without explicit marketing positioning.

TL;DR — Meta acquired Singapore-based Manus for $2B+ to expand AI agent capabilities. Deal closed in 10 days. Manus hit $125M ARR eight months after launch. General-purpose agent handles research, coding, data analysis. Meta will integrate into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp alongside Meta AI chatbot. Manus will sever China operations post-acquisition. Fifth AI acquisition for Meta in 2025. Signals enterprise AI agents moving from niche to platform-scale.