Constantine von Hoffman
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Articles by Constantine von Hoffman
Personalization knows what customers want, not who they are
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Personalization is pretty good at guessing what customers might want. It’s much worse at making them feel like the brand knows who they are. That’s the problem hiding inside a lot of otherwise respectable personalization programs.
ChatGPT has plenty of advertisers, but not much revenue
OpenAI has plenty of advertisers for ChatGPT, but that has yet to translate into significant ad revenue. The number of ChatGPT advertisers rose from about 20,000 at the end of August to roughly 60,000 in early October, according to Dan Salmon, a partner at New Street Research. Clicks cost about $5, compared with $30 to $50 for similar commercial software ads on Google.
Will Salesforce’s Braze deal bring clarity or chaos?
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Salesforce’s $5.7 billion deal for Braze is a bet that the next competitive advantage in marketing software sits in the few seconds between a customer signal and the action that follows. Braze specializes in using live customer behavior to trigger and adjust messages across apps, websites, email, SMS, and other channels. Salesforce plans to connect that capability with Marketing Cloud, Data 360, Customer 360, and Agentforce.
Retail media budgets are growing. Advertisers’ patience isn’t.
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Retail and commerce media budgets are growing, but advertisers are losing patience with what it takes to use them. Eighty-five percent of advertisers plan to increase spending on retail and commerce media networks over the next year, according to “The 2026 Commerce Media Investment Index” from GrowthLoop and Ascend2. At the same time, 86% say slow audience fulfillment would make them reduce spend or leave a partner.
Your AI visibility score may be hiding a problem
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Your AI dashboard’s single score is likely hiding two very different problems. Semrush’s “2026 AI Visibility Index” found that, across 22 categories and four AI platforms, fewer than half of the top 100 mentioned brands also appeared in the matching top 100 citation lists on average in every month measured.
Your brand can win the mention and lose the citation
Your AI dashboard’s single score is likely hiding two very different problems. Semrush’s “2026 AI Visibility Index” found that, across 22 categories and four AI platforms, fewer than half of the top 100 mentioned brands also appeared in the matching top 100 citation lists on average in every month measured. A single “AI visibility” score can hide whether the brand appears in the answer, whether its website supplies the evidence, or whether third-party sites carry most of the weight.
Salesforce buys AI analytics startup Loops
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Salesforce is buying Loops, an AI-powered analytics startup that tries to answer the question dashboards usually leave hanging: Why did the number change? Loops monitors business performance, flags trends and anomalies, and uses machine learning and causal analysis to identify what drove changes in metrics such as revenue, conversions, retention, and engagement.
Google changed its content guidance. Don’t expect a reset.
Google has updated its content guidance again, and marketers can be forgiven for thinking they’ve heard this one before. The latest change puts more explicit responsibility on publishers using generative AI. Google now says it is critical to manually fact-check and review AI-generated content before publishing, including titles, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt text. It also points publishers back to its long-standing rules against scaled content that adds little value.
AI budgets are growing faster than proof of ROI
AI is getting funded faster than marketers can prove its value. Two-thirds of enterprise organizations now have dedicated AI budgets, and 95.3% have AI agents on the roadmap, according to The Martech Weekly’s “Enterprise Martech Outlook 2026.” Yet only 10.8% of agent initiatives are fully scaled in production, while 40.2% of martech leaders still can’t show a clear financial contribution from their technology investments. Companies are spending. They’re experimenting, and they’re flailing.
OpenAI ads visuals to ChatGPT ad
OpenAI is adding visual ads to ChatGPT, expanding conversion measurement, and bringing more third-party measurement companies into its advertising ecosystem. At the same time, TrafficGuard found that ChatGPT’s ad clicks were three times more likely to come from bots than clicks from Google. The visual ads, which will appear during image generation, are being tested in the U.S. later this month with a group of advertisers.
AI is making customers expect more and tolerate less
AI is raising customer expectations faster than it is improving customer experience. Nearly six in 10 consumers say knowing a company uses AI makes them expect faster responses, according to Alchemer’s “2026 AI & Customer Expectations Study.” At the same time, 89% say AI has hurt their experience with a company in at least one way. That puts marketers and CX teams in a tough spot.
Salesforce buys AI customer research startup Listen Labs
Salesforce is acquiring Listen Labs, an AI customer research platform that automates interviews and analysis, adding another source of customer insight to its AI and CRM products. The companies announced a definitive agreement late Tuesday. Salesforce didn’t disclose financial terms, although many outlets are reporting a price of about $2 billion. The transaction is expected to close in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2027, subject to regulatory approval and other customary conditions.
States are rewriting the rules of social media
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Last week, Meta suffered another major legal setback when a New Mexico jury found Facebook liable for more than 43 million violations of the state’s consumer protection law. It follows the company’s $18 billion settlement about teen social media addiction last month. Two developments last week raised the possibility that Meta’s month-old settlement with state attorneys general could become a template for regulating other social platforms.
Shoppers will spend more and buy less this holiday season
Holiday sales are expected to grow this year, even as consumers say they plan to spend less, according to the many holiday shopping forecasts published in the past two months. Both of these seemingly contradictory predictions may turn out to be true. Higher prices are doing some of the work in the retail forecasts. Shoppers are also protecting spending on gifts while cutting back elsewhere, and ecommerce continues to grow faster than retail overall.
Marketing on LinkedIn: What you need to know
We’ve updated this guide with information on the new . Using LinkedIn personally is very different from using it for marketing. Fully understanding the business social media site can boost your marketing efforts, but there is a lot to learn. To help you, we’ve put together this guide. Listen to an AI-generated deep dive of everything you need to know about marketing on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is the largest social network for businesses and business people and anessential site for B2B marketing.
GTM teams are losing track of their AI agents
GTM teams already have AI agents acting on customer and prospect records, but many teams don’t know what the agents are doing. Ninety-three percent of GTM teams have deployed at least one AI agent, according to LeanData’s “2026 State of AI Go-to-Market Readiness Report.” Yet nearly one-third of respondents couldn’t say how many agents were taking actions on their records, and 30% had found actions taken without an audit trail.
B2B brands turn to creator video to fight AI slop and aid AI search
B2B brands are increasing their use of creator video to stand out from AI marketing slop, thereby improving their reputation with customers who rely on AI recommendations. Use of creator video by B2B companies jumped 55% over the past year and nearly quadrupled since 2023, according to creator marketing platform Billo. Real people talking about what they know give brands something harder to manufacture: credibility. That credibility carries weight when AI enters the buying process.
OpenAI testing third-party-style tracking in ChatGPT ads
OpenAI’s push into advertising now appears to extend beyond what happens inside ChatGPT. An independent researcher found that a cookie associated with ChatGPT can reappear when the same browser visits websites that use OpenAI’s advertising pixel. It is most likely designed to give OpenAI a way to link ad interactions to activity that occurs later on participating sites. The system centers on a cookie called __obi, according to a researcher who goes by the name Buchodi.
IAB sets new standards for agentic buying and measurement
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. IAB is pushing two pieces of digital advertising infrastructure toward standardization, one for AI agents buying media and another for the contracts behind advertising measurement. IAB Tech Lab announced AAMP 3.0, the latest version of its Agentic Advertising Management Protocols framework.
How to evaluate composable versus packaged CDP
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. In MarTech’s “MarTechBot explains it all” feature, we pose a marketing question to our very own MarTechBot, which is trained on the MarTech website archives and has access to the broader internet. Question: What are the editorial consensus criteria for deciding between a composable CDP built on a cloud data warehouse versus a packaged CDP?
AI is telling consumers not to buy your product
More than half of consumers who use AI have decided not to buy something based on information from a chatbot, according to a new Semrush survey. Among people who use chatbots when shopping online, nearly 81% have decided against a purchase based on AI guidance. That creates a problem for marketers that goes beyond getting their products into AI answers.
HubSpot rebuilds its platform around AI agents
On the first day of Unbound26, HubSpot unveiled updates to change how people work with AI on its platform. Instead of choosing an agent or tool for each job, users tell Breeze Assistant what they want accomplished, and it selects the agents needed to do it. This is part of a major overhaul of HubSpot built around what it calls “Growth Context,” which combines information about a company, its teams, and its customers.
IAB Tech Lab proposes new rules for programmatic
IAB Tech Lab is asking the programmatic advertising industry to weigh in on a proposed set of standard practices for how buyers and sellers conduct transactions. Programmatic Standard Practices v1, released for public comment today, establishes shared business rules, norms, and principles for using existing programmatic standards. The goal is to create more consistency between buyers and sellers, reduce unnecessary transaction costs, and improve transparency across the programmatic ecosystem.
Salesforce bets CRM experience can give its AI an edge
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Salesforce hopes its new tailored-for-CRM AI will be a boon for marketers and a moat against the general-purpose models of companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. At Dreamforce, the company introduced Koa, its first CRM reasoning model, developed with Nvidia to work through complex, multistep sales, service, and customer workflows.
AI is changing media faster than marketers can measure it
AI is changing where people discover products and how they move toward a purchase. The problem is that advertisers' measurement systems aren't changing nearly as fast. That's a major media investment headache, according to IAB's “2026 Outlook Study: September Update.” The survey of 211 U.S. brand and agency ad investment decision-makers found 44% cite adapting to changing consumer behavior, including AI-driven search, as a top media investment challenge.
AI is changing media faster than marketers can measure it
AI is changing where people discover products and how they move toward a purchase. The problem is that advertisers’ measurement systems aren’t changing nearly as fast. That’s a major media investment headache, according to IAB’s “2026 Outlook Study: September Update.” The survey of 211 U.S. brand and agency ad investment decision-makers found 44% cite adapting to changing consumer behavior, including AI-driven search, as a top media investment challenge.
The latest AI-powered martech news and releases
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Anthropic wants AI agents to do more than tell people what to buy. It released blueprints for Claude-based shopping and merchant agents that can search for products, compare options, add items to carts, and connect with checkout systems. The agents can tap into product catalogs, customer preferences, purchase histories, and other commerce systems.
The answer to your martech problem depends on the problem
Pop quiz: Which of these will improve marketing performance? Adding to the martech stack. Getting better at using what’s in it. Cutting the martech stack. All of the above. None of the above. The answer, according to a new report from the CMO Council and MartechTribe, is all of those. “The Apex Martech Matrix 2026” found that companies with higher revenue per employee did not consistently have more sophisticated technology or greater expertise using it.
Software buyers are moving faster than software sellers
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. B2B software buyers love how AI lets them make purchasing decisions faster while avoiding salespeople. However, they hate that after that, they are still stuck in a slower, sales-led journey. More than 80% of buyers used AI chatbots for software recommendations over the past two years, according to G2’s “2026 Buyer Behavior Report,” and nearly half said AI had its greatest influence during shortlisting and evaluation.
Google loses the ad monopoly case, but keeps the monopoly
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Once upon a time, the Justice Department’s ad-tech case looked potentially fatal for a significant piece of Google’s revenue. The DOJ wanted a federal judge to force Google to sell its ad exchange, separating parts of a system the court had already found illegally monopolized online advertising markets. Google lost the case, but kept the business.
OpenAI’s audacious ad revenue claim
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. On Monday, OpenAI announced the ability to build a ChatGPT campaign in under a minute, something it hopes will attract advertisers and generate much-needed revenue. The company says it is already doing well on both fronts, and that ChatGPT Ads has already reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate (ARR).
Your influencer marketing strategy is broken
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Even though consumers increasingly rely on influencers to inform purchase decisions, marketers overwhelmingly treat them as an awareness channel. Two-thirds of consumers made at least one purchase in the past year directly based on an influencer recommendation, according to Sprout Social’s “2026 Influencer Marketing Report.” Nearly a third did so 10 or more times, and 81% of Gen Z made at least one influencer-driven purchase.
Marketers know AI is using bad data to make decisions
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. Marketing teams are giving AI more authority over campaigns while feeding it CRM data they know isn’t ready for the job.
Anthropic partnership makes Salesforce’s interface optional
Salesforce is making one of the biggest pieces of enterprise software optional: its own interface. The company’s expanded partnership with Anthropic, called Claudeforce, puts Salesforce data and workflows directly inside Claude. Its first product, Salesforce in Claude, lets users query CRM data, update records, review deals, and run workflows without opening Salesforce itself.
B2B marketers don’t trust the data used to shape budgets
B2B marketing budgets are influenced by data that fewer than half of the people responsible for measuring marketing and communications fully trust. Only 49% of respondents are very confident in the accuracy and completeness of their data. Yet measurement influences strategy or budgets for 88% of respondents in paid social, 87% in paid media and digital, and 85% in owned content, according to a new study from 10Fold.
Google gives political email a lane around spam filters
Google is giving political campaigns a way around Gmail’s spam filters, creating a new class of bulk sender that gets different treatment. Beginning September 8, qualifying political organizations can join Gmail’s Verified Sender Program. Their policy-compliant messages can reach personal Gmail accounts without Gmail’s standard spam filtering, determining whether they go to spam. But the exemption comes with conditions.
IAB updates standard for disclosing AI in ads
The IAB released Version 2 of its “AI Transparency and Disclosure Framework” today, updating its guidance for when advertisers, agencies, publishers, platforms, and technology companies should tell consumers that AI was used in advertising and marketing content. The framework draws a line between AI that helps create content and AI that changes what consumers could reasonably believe is real.
Why LinkedIn doesn’t really care about AI slop
LinkedIn wants you to believe it’s serious about cracking down on AI slop. To prove it, they’ve removed the button for generating AI slop and added one to call it out. “AI slop is a top priority for all of us. We really care about this,” CPO Hari Srinivasan wrote. “People come to LinkedIn to connect with real people and share their real perspectives.” Really? Where? People come to LinkedIn to connect with people higher up the org chart in the hopes of selling a product and/or themselves.
Is your martech stack costing more time than it saves?
Companies keep buying technology to make sales and marketing teams more productive. Yet much of the workday still goes to finding information, updating systems, entering data, and handling administrative tasks. Pipedrive’s 2026 “CRM trends report,” based on a survey of 1,000 sales and marketing professionals, shows how widespread the underlying problem is.
When marketers should ignore the data
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. The availability of more granular, real-time data means marketers can see performance change almost constantly. But more signals also mean more noise, and reacting to every change is a surefire recipe for failure. Marketers need to measure investments based on the value they’re supposed to create, give them enough time to work, and be ready to move money when a real opportunity appears.
When marketers should ignore the data
The availability of more granular, real-time data means marketers can see performance change almost constantly. But more signals also mean more noise, and reacting to every change is a surefire recipe for failure. Marketers need to measure investments based on the value they're supposed to create, give them enough time to work, and be ready to move money when a real opportunity appears. Research on the financial impact of marketing in the Marketing Strategy Journal offers a way to address this.
IAB Tech Lab releases new privacy standards
Today, IAB Tech Lab released new versions of its privacy standards. The move comes in response to evolving state privacy laws and the operational challenges of handling consumer data-deletion requests. The standards body released proposed changes to its Global Privacy Protocol (GPP) and finalized Version 2.0 of its Data Deletion Request Framework (DDRF). The GPP changes are open for public comment through Sept. 11, 2026.
OpenAI adds technology to compete for ad dollars
OpenAI is adding product carousels to ChatGPT ads, while an AppsFlyer integration lets advertisers attribute app installs, purchases, and subscriptions to them. The additions give OpenAI two capabilities needed to compete for performance budgets: shoppable ads built from product catalogs, and conversion measurement. They follow the recent introduction of automated product feeds.
Here are the marketing skills AI is making more valuable
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. AI isn’t eliminating the need for marketers as much as it is changing what companies value them for. The American Marketing Association’s “2026 State of Marketing Careers Report” finds growing demand for AI skills alongside pressure on execution-heavy marketing work. The share of marketing job postings mentioning AI nearly doubled during 2025, rising from 8% in January to 15% in December.
6 steps to protect your data from being stolen by vendors
Marketers have spent years defending against hackers, but the bigger risk may come from the software marketers use. Now that research has found martech vendors routinely taking companies' customer data , marketers must put an end to it. That will require a sea change in how marketers think about vendors and solutions. It starts with understanding that every new integration is a security issue — not simply a software purchase.
Time’s AI-only ads may be marketing’s next frontier
Time magazine is serving ads directly to AI crawlers rather than human readers. If it catches on, it could change how brands influence AI-generated answers The magazine has a separate version of its website that delivers sponsored content to AI crawlers from companies including Anthropic, OpenAI, and Perplexity.
How agencies are evolving to overcome AI
AI is forcing content marketing agencies to evolve or go out of business. The technology is commoditizing content production and making routine marketing assets faster and cheaper to create. To compete, agencies have to compete on something AI can't easily replicate: judgment, creativity, and business strategy.
Is your intent data being sold to your competitors?
The findings come from Clark Barron, founder of Blackout, a company that provides GTM threat intelligence through forensic analysis of marketing software. His research examines browser code, JavaScript, network traffic, and application behavior to compare what vendors say their products do with what the software actually does after it’s installed. “The thing that really opened the floodgates for me was when I uncovered an actual defeat device in the source code of [a vendor],” he said.
OpenAI ad experiment could change what happens after the click
OpenAI appears to be experimenting with a new ChatGPT advertising format that replaces the traditional destination website with a conversational AI agent tailored to each business. Instead of sending users to a landing page, clicking an ad would open a business-specific ChatGPT conversation equipped to answer questions, surface products, and capture leads. So, OpenAI is laying the groundwork for what could be a fundamentally different type of online advertising.
Four holiday reports reveal one big divide over AI
Get traffic data and keyword intel on competitors instantly. As marketers plan holiday campaigns, vendors are releasing reports on what consumers are expected to do this shopping season. Four arrived last week, and they tell much the same story about shoppers. Where they part company is AI.
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