
Choose Your Adventure 🏹
Are custom algos the future?
The savvy marketer's hub for industry news, insights, resources, and culture.
You know the classic four Ps. Product, price, place, and promotion have guided marketing for decades. But we’re in a new era.
Algorithms, intelligent agents, and real-time data are forcing us to rethink how we create value, reach audiences, and maintain trust.
Let’s remix the 4 Ps:
✨Serendipity✨ happens when an experience is enjoyable, unexpected, and inexplicable. It feels almost magical because it resists easy explanation.
For marketers, this means resisting the urge to over-explain or over-engineer the “why” behind product experiences. Instead, the goal is to leave just enough mystery to spark delight.
Serendipity can deepen emotional connection to a brand. The art lies in balancing joy with ambiguity, ensuring the moment feels organic rather than orchestrated.

Here are some tips for unlocking serendipity:
Reddit has over 400 million weekly active users across thousands of niche communities. The Reddit Pixel offers a cost-effective alternative to retarget high-intent visitors and drive conversions.
Retargeting ads differ from standard Reddit campaigns because they focus on “warm” audiences—users who have already shown interest—rather than cold prospects. This enables more personalized, direct messaging designed to nudge users toward actions like demo requests or content downloads.
Here’s how to build an effective Reddit retargeting strategy:
This allows you to nurture prospects through long sales cycles, lower cost-per-lead, and maximize return on ad spend.
YouTube’s latest Culture & Trends report, “The Next Generation of Creativity: A Maximalist Moment Reshaping Culture,” explores how younger audiences (especially teens) are redefining content through creative maximalism.
This generation has grown up with YouTube as a constant and thrives on participatory, networked media. Rather than just consuming content, they actively shape it, curate it, and remix it.
Here are four defining elements of creative maximalism:
More than half of consumers don’t fully trust AI-powered search results, according to a new Gartner survey.
Fifty-three percent of U.S. respondents expressed skepticism about the reliability and impartiality of AI-driven summaries, while 41% said these overviews actually make searching more frustrating than traditional methods.
The survey of 377 consumers, conducted in June–July 2025, also found a strong preference for user control: 61% want the option to toggle AI summaries on or off. This reinforces that consumers don’t just want answers—they want choice in how they find them.
So, how can we respond?
Wimbledon’s social team is killing it.
Over six weeks, the tournament produced nearly 6,000 posts across platforms, generating 144 million engagements, 2.7 billion video views, and 2.3 million new followers.
The philosophy is simple: “Posted is better than perfect.”
Rachel Karten caught up with Will Giles, Managing Editor of Digital Content at Wimbledon, to get the download.
At the core of their system is a three-tier content framework they call Campfire, Bonfire, Firework:
And equally important are their operational principles:
The takeaway for social pros? Structure breeds freedom.
Reddit is now the #1 most cited source across major AI platforms, meaning customer recommendations are increasingly shaped by conversations happening in subreddits.
Consequently, Reddit is rolling out a huge update its business suite, going mobile to offer real-time monitoring, smarter insights, and practical guidance for engaging authentically.
Here’s what’s new in Reddit Pro:
Just one organic brand post per week can boost positive user conversations by 3.5%, while three thoughtful comments can lift sentiment by 2.2%. And we know that influence ripples beyond Reddit, shaping what AI tools surface when customers search.
Recession-proofing your brand starts with listening, and nowhere is consumer sentiment louder or faster than on social media.
Social is where users express financial anxiety openly, where thrift becomes aspirational, and where brands are scrutinized not just for price, but for their role in people’s daily lives.
Here’s a helpful framework from VaynerMedia North America’s senior strategist Estelle Levy:
Content needs to work for two different ecosystems: search engines and generative engines.
Search engines weigh everything from E-E-A-T signals to schema markup and link quality. Their inputs are usually short queries, and their outputs are lists of ranked URLs.
Gen AI, on the other hand, deals with richer prompts and provides human-like responses. But its citation layer is far simpler. Instead of ranking thousands of possible results, AI may pull from a much smaller pool of sources and often values co-citations (being mentioned alongside a term or brand) more than backlinks.
So, how do you serve both?
Think of SEO as the foundation and generative optimization as the new layer on top.

Rich O'Donnell

Rich O'Donnell

Shannon Sankey

Rich O'Donnell

Rich O'Donnell

Rich O'Donnell

Shannon Sankey

Shannon Sankey

Ian David
