I’ve been working with agency leaders who are rethinking what Client Services is really there to do.Too often, CS teams are set up to deliver rather than lead.This case study demonstrates how one agency restructured the framework and expectations around Client Services and the resulting changes. More compelling briefs. Improved creative buy-in. More profitable projects. Genuine growth. Sharing this in case you encounter similar challenges.

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Too often, B2B brands chase clicks that don’t lead to real results. The fix?It’s not more ad spend—it’s aligning your systems and strategy.In our latest episode of Best Story Wins, Jason Lankow and I sat down with Deanna Adams, of Dropbox, who reveals how to make your brand show up across the entire customer journey—not just in a 15-second pre-roll. Deanna shares how her team re-engineered Dropbox’s content engine for agility, built emotional resonance through integrated campaigns, and created a structure that allows the brand promise to resonate from awareness to advocacy. It’s not theory—it’s game film from the frontlines of modern B2B marketing.We also cover:- Why the “brand vs. performance” debate is holding your team back- How AI is shifting from shiny feature to work-flow essential- What a truly integrated customer journey looks like in practice- How to structure agile teams that collaborateAnd a lot more. This was a great episode and a lot of fun to produce. A big thank you to Deanna for being on and for being a great guest!Best Story Wins is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Youtube.

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🚨 Big news. New ways to do POAS bidding in Meta with ProfitMetricsMeta is doubling down on optimizing for values that truly matter to your business. This is an exciting step forward for all marketers.For the past four years, we’ve enabled our customers to bid for profit in Meta, but it wasn’t native. Marketers had to choose between Revenue or Profit as the purchase event value. That’s about to change, making it much easier to optimize for either profit or revenue and shift between them seamlessly.We’ve been running a beta together with Meta, testing profit value vs. revenue value for a few clients and the early results are showing strong incremental increase in profit after ad spend 📈.This functionality is already built into the new Conversion Booster for Meta, which we’re launching in beta soon.Another important release from Meta: the ability to do value-bidding on non-purchase events. For e-commerce, this means you can now optimize for custom event values. For example, in Conversion Booster Meta you’ll be able to:✅ Bid for new customer profit or new customer revenue✅ Bid for existing customer profit or existing customer revenueI’m looking forward to sharing our beta results and launching the Conversion Booster for Meta, enabling bidding for values that truly matter to your business, while giving the algorithm the right signals to work toward your real objectives.👍 Follow me here for more insights on tracking, value-based bidding, attribution, POAS®, and customer lifetime value strategies.

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What a day at Meta’s Brand Building Summit where I shared the stage with the amazing Jackie Pimentel. Meta's goal with brand advertising is a big one: To build a brand marketing conversion engine that can optimize across the full marketing funnel. As Jackie shared, we’re getting there. Here are some of the biggest takeaways from our chat: ✅Consumer Behavior is Changing. The average person is exposed to upwards of 5K ads a day across all channels (not just Meta), which means getting attention is the most important ingredient in the modern commerce recipe. ✅Reels Trending Ads put your brand at the center of what’s happening. ​​When JCPenney teamed up with Dentsu to test Reels Trending Ads for their brand relaunch, they generated a 32% higher ad recall and 6x greater favorability compared to its business as usual ads. Best of all, Reels Trending Ads are expanding broadly in the US in October, just in time for the holiday season. 🎁✅Tools like Advantage+ Audience and Advantage+ Creative Enhancements (Gen AI) are helping brands personalize at scale and bridge the gap between inspiration and action.Jackie even shared a sneak-peek into other products we’re working on, including our new AI sticker CTA feature, which uses AI to make ads even more eye-catching and relevant. It was quite the brand-building day. For more, see ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eZNfCJrd

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Another conversation with an AI-Native CMO blew my socks off:- 80% of winning Facebook creatives on $50M+ spend are AI-generated, with expert humans polishing the final 20% (combo Eval + Edit)- Daily analysis on ~$250K+ of cross-channel media is now fully automated end-to-end. CMO just reads a reconciled daily report of insights (from AI) and approves recommended actions.- 2 expert specialists to monitor the system and provide critical feedback/evaluation data back to the engine to allow it to improve continuouslyIncredibly, this AI-Native CMO built this engine themselves with AI and automation tools. Company has nine-figure revenue, growing, profitable.Demand for “AI-fluent” marketing is exploding while true supply is tiny — our top 1% threshold for traditional marketers is looking more like 0.01% for AI-Native CMOs. This is why the CMO role is at an inflection point. If you can’t lead on data, automation, and AI-enabled org design, you’ll be in trouble or - worse yet- boxed out by other C suite titles claiming that they can.

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THE IMPORTANCE OF EARLY BRANDINGThe brilliant Karen Nelson-Field PhD has a killer chart showing the "attention memory threshold" which at around 2.5seconds is the time needed to really ensure your Ad gets into memoryThe killer blow from her work is that 85% of digital ads never reach that amount of attentionIn our recent study 'The Long & The Short (form) of it" with TikTok for Business we match our System1 creative scores with data from TikTik to try and understand what style of Advertising & Creator work leads to the best resultsThis shows that branding early (fast fluency in System1 speak) leads to a x2.5 increase in awareness from Advertising and x2.3 increase in awareness from creator contentNow this doesn't mean putting a logo at the start!We measured the impact of many different kinds of branding assets and found the following to be most effective👉 Sonic Assets +191%👉 Logo in context +182%👉 Fluent Character +57%👉 Jingle +40%👉 Slogan +27%👉 Product +24%When designing digital advertising don't leave your brand reveal to the end but find interesting ways to introduce yourself from the startCreating 'fluent devices' as my esteemed colleague Orlando Wood coined it (characters, scenarios, sound etc) is the best way to achieve this and ensure that advertising regardless of platform is instantly recognisedTo download our report, which has quickly become the most downloaded in System1 history just click hereReporthttps://system1group.com/I also interviewed the wonderful Sofia Hernandez who leads TikTok's business marketing to get all her top tips on how to maximise advertising and creator partnership on the platform - see link in commentsLastly huge thanks to Josh Fruttiger and Andrew Tindall and all our friends at TikTok Esteban Ribero Isobel Sita-Lumsden Callum Mayfield Smith

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You know what I see companies often mix up within marketing & comms? (and it's not what you'd think)They mix up tactics in place of strategy.There is strategy - the overall objectives, aim and direction of what marketing & comms is focusing on for the company.And then there are tactics - the campaigns, plans and activities guided by the strategy.What often happens is that when companies worry about the monthly or quarterly numbers, they look to change tactics. "maybe more events", "maybe more ads", "let's try combing through the list again", "more ads", "let's try publishing a joint article with xxx", "maybe make jokes in copy to appear approachable", "maybe ads?".Across the board, most tactics can be good ideas depending on the context and how they are executed.  But notice how it's easier to switch and change tactics, especially when the numbers don't look good. (Also, notice how ads always becomes a next-resort tactic.)➡️ If the marketing & comms strategy is aligned to business objectives, then it needs to be clearly understood across the business.➡️ If the marketing & comms strategy is clearly understood, then the tactics can be built to be aligned with the overall strategy.➡️ And if all of that is done, and the tactics do not show up with short term results, you'd likely need to:(a) check if you are rushing the tactics and constantly switching directions before it has the given runway to generate results (ie. constantly changing tactics and direction, in a rush for results)OR(b) check if the tactics need tweaking or fine-tuning, while you continue to execute in one direction.To discern the difference at any point, would be a combination of experience, clarity of vision and teamwork.  And in some cases, an element of risk.  Which is why, even if you're not ready for a full-capacity CMO, a fractional CMO of senior expertise would be able to build alongside the company, while having an eye on tactics vs strategy.Managing marketing & comms is an art and a science. Often overlooked.  Curious on what support a fractional CMO can do for your go-to-market (GTM) requirements? Let's chat.📷: Andie AI------Follow me here 🔔 Andrea T. as I write about building a body of work through ambiguity and change:• As a fractional GTM lead / fractional B2B CMO• Through speaking engagements and educaitonal workshops• As a certified coach for love, intimacy, relationships

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It's 2025. If you're still doing SEO like it's 2024, you're already invisible. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot are creating a parallel search universe.They care about one thing: whether AI engines understand and trust your content enough to recommend you.AI search is eating traditional SEO, Google's AI Overviews already draw 1.5 billion users monthly - proof that answer-style results now rival classic blue links for reach (Reuters, 2025).OpenAI crossed 400 million weekly active users for ChatGPT, up from 300 million just two months prior. One of our clients jumped from 0% to 11% AI visibility in their category within 30 days by restructuring content for AI comprehension.Here’s how to take action and get noticed:1. Write for answers, not keywordsTraditional SEO: "Best CRM software 2025" scattered throughout your page. AEO: Clear statements like "Salesforce reduces sales cycle time by 23% for B2B companies with 50-200 employees." AI engines need definitive answers, not keyword soup.2. Structure for extractionNo more fluff. AI engines parse bullet points, numbered lists, and clear headers. Put your most authoritative claims up front. Companies embedding gen-AI into seller workflows saw conversion rates rise 40% and lead-execution speed improve 30% within months (McKinsey, 2025).3. Monitor seven engines, not oneChatGPT (400M weekly users), Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, plus Copilot and emerging platforms. Each values different signals. Track citation patterns across all seven daily.4. Build topical authority clustersGoogle rewards domain authority. AI rewards topical depth. Instead of 100 blog posts on everything, create 10 comprehensive guides that answer every question about your specific solution. AI engines pull from sources that demonstrate complete expertise, not scattered keywords.5. Enterprises are already movingMcKinsey's March 2025 Global AI Survey finds 71% of enterprises now use generative-AI in at least one business function - marketing and sales leading adoption. You're creating comprehensive content for them to find once instead of constantly tweaking.6. 2026 is the deadlineGartner projects 30% of all searches will happen inside AI chat interfaces by 2026. Google's AI Overviews serve 1.5 billion monthly users, but only 1% click through. The audience has already moved.TAKEAWAY:At Metajive, we just launched AEO services because the search playbook is unrecognizable.Stop optimizing for keywords. Start optimizing for answers.Stop writing for crawlers. Start writing for comprehension.Stop tracking rankings. Start tracking citations.In 12 months, there will be two types of companies:1. Those visible to AI engines.2. And those wondering where their customers went.Time to choose.

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🤔 𝐖𝐞 𝐧𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐭𝐚𝐥𝐤 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐩𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦... I've been looking into marketing technology spending lately, and something jumped out at me: we're investing $215 billion globally in martech by 2027, but we're only using about 33% of what we buy.That's down from 58% just a few years ago.𝐒𝐨 𝐰𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲 𝐠𝐨𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞?After reading multiple studies and talking with other marketing leaders, I've noticed we're all dealing with the same problem - we don't really know the TRUE cost of our tech stack. It's not just about that monthly subscription. Here's what often gets missed:𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐡𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐞𝐧 𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐭𝐬▪️ Infrastructure takes up 28% of martech budgets (the biggest chunk!)▪️ You need 25-100% of someone's time just for setup▪️ Integration headaches that nobody mentioned in the demo▪️ Old tech decisions that keep causing problems▪️ Training time (poor adoption costs ~$12,500 per employee each year)𝐓𝐡𝐫𝐞𝐞 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐧𝐠𝐬 𝐰𝐞 𝐤𝐞𝐞𝐩 𝐬𝐞𝐞𝐢𝐧𝐠: 1️⃣ The "maybe this one will work" trap - We buy new tools instead of fixing what we have. One analyst compared it to "gamblers trying to win back losses with the next bet." 2️⃣ The "one tool to rule them all" myth - 83% of companies use other tools even when their main platform has that feature. Why? Better user experience, lower cost, or it just works better. 3️⃣ The vendor trap - Companies report 3-5x price jumps when vendors get bought out or change their pricing. Switching becomes so expensive that you're stuck.𝐓𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐡𝐨𝐩𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞The teams that nail this follow what Avinash Kaushik calls the "10/90 rule" - spend 10% on tools, 90% on people. They check their stack twice a year. They bring different departments together to evaluate tools. They track what they thought things would cost vs. what they actually cost.Most importantly? They've stopped asking "what can this tool do?" and started asking "what do we need to get done, and what will it really cost us?"𝐒𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐲𝐨𝐮:▪️ How does your team figure out the real cost of martech? ▪️ What hidden costs caught you off guard? ▪️ Are you consolidating tools or keeping specialized ones? What's working?Would love to hear what you've learned. With 1a gazillion martech products out there now, we're all trying to figure this out together.What's your take on balancing what tools can do vs. how complex they make things?P.S. If you're looking at new martech, here's what's helped me:▪️ Look at costs over 3 years, not just year one▪️Count the time your team will spend, not just the price tag▪️Think about what happens when you grow (usage adds up fast)▪️Get all the right stakeholder in the room early▪️Know what "success" looks like before you buy#MarketingTechnology #MarTech #MarketingROI #DigitalTransformation #CMO

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