TLDR Marketing 2026-07-17

94% of marketers use AI, but only 3% of executives see a clear ROI. Bug or feature?

Join Atlassian marketing leaders Ashley Faus and Liz Fosslien for an open and frank conversation on what they've learned from bringing AI deeper into day-to-day workflows. They'll share:

• How their teams are using AI - with examples from demand generation, brand, and performance.
• What surprised them and what required more iteration than expected.
• Why more AI-generated output doesn't always lead to better outcomes.

Discover practical ideas for building the right context, deciding where human judgment matters, and identifying the most impactful AI use cases.

Join live on July 29

Studios respond to fan demand with more content, but audiences are looking for participation, not passive viewing. Fans raised on games and creator culture remix, extend, and interact with story worlds. Data shows deeper fans want new ways into a franchise, not just more of the same. Companion formats like podcasts keep attention but lack agency. The real gap is participatory infrastructure, and the next phase of entertainment will let fans actively shape worlds between releases.

Search intent isn't disappearing, it's being intercepted before it reaches a company's website. AI overviews answer the query directly inside Google, and GenAI assistants like ChatGPT and Perplexity now guide most B2B buyers through research and shortlisting without a single visit to a vendor's blog. That interception is why SEO leads that once arrived weekly now arrive monthly, and why the fix has to happen on the social platforms and communities where B2B buyers now spend that research time instead. The way through is repurposing what SEO already built, turning the case studies, reports, and articles into video, carousel, and thought leadership formats.

Customer census surveys are an underused marketing motion that helps teams collect customer insights and build a stronger evidence library. The best surveys are cross-functional, tightly scoped to around 10-15 questions, and targeted to active users for higher-quality responses. Treat the send like a campaign with follow-ups and incentives, then move quickly on responses to turn feedback into testimonials, reviews, and advocacy opportunities.

TV advertising is becoming a viable growth channel for B2B as digital ads get more expensive and saturated. Connected TV lets companies retarget existing audiences with 15 to 30 second storytelling, often using repurposed content like founder videos or customer testimonials. Budgets can start small, around $50 per day, and performance improves once traffic scales. TV also lifts other channels, with reported gains like a 25% increase in branded search. Test early and treat TV as a long-term, compounding channel.

TLDR writers cover the tools and companies our 7M+ tech readers actually use, so your brand may already be showing up organically. Drop in your domain and a free tool scans every issue from the last 12 months, then tells you how many mentions you got and how many readers saw them. See your number.

Sauce helps teams measure and prove how off-site and creator-led content drives AI visibility and search performance. It shows which posts appear in engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity, who created them, and for which queries. A 7-day free trial is available.

This guide walks through building a Gmail triage agent with Hermes and the read-only IMAP tool Himalaya. The agent sorts incoming mail into five labeled folders, scores each by urgency, and pings Slack only when something crosses a genuinely urgent threshold, staying silent otherwise.

Anthropic is hiring a Standards Editor for around $300K to oversee grammar, tone, and clarity across its communications. The role highlights a broader trend as AI makes content generation cheaper and human judgment more valuable. While models can produce endless drafts, companies still need editors who can protect brand voice, simplify complex ideas, and decide what is worth publishing. The hiring trend suggests editorial judgment is becoming a premium skill in an AI-driven content market.

AI chatbots work best when shoppers need help comparing products or sorting through large assortments. Across four experiments with 1,339 people, chatbot recommendations increased purchase intention by 44.7% for products that are hard to evaluate, such as apparel that varies by fit, size, and style. Chatbots also increased engagement for simple products that have many options, but reduced purchase intention for simple products that have small assortments because they added unnecessary friction. Use chatbots where they simplify complex decisions and organize choices instead of adding another step to an easy purchase.

DJI used GoPro's brand to make consumer drones easier to buy, then replaced GoPro by building the complete product itself. The GoPro mount gave DJI product validation and customer demand without camera R&D or category education. DJI walked away after GoPro asked for two-thirds of the profits because it believed flight technology created a stronger competitive advantage than cameras. DJI then launched four new drone generations over 30 months while GoPro built a competing product, which let it stay years ahead before GoPro's Karma drone failed and left the market.

Use Brave's "Submit URL" tool to get content indexed faster by Anthropic/Claude.

Polaroid recodes film's slow development and lack of editing as premium benefits, mindfulness, authenticity, pitting one unrepeatable print against an iPhone's vault of near-identical shots.

Most sites only track ‘view_item', ‘add_to_cart', and ‘purchase', but you should also track ‘view_item_list', ‘select_item', ‘view_cart', ‘begin_checkout', ‘add_shipping_info', and ‘add_payment_info'.