Black Friday 2024 vs Black Friday 2025: What This Year’s Data Tells Us and How Brands Should Prepare for the Holiday Rush
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Fly By News 1.9.26: Visibility, Velocity, and the New Rules of Winning
January 9, 2026
Marketing leverage has changed shape. It used to come from distribution, from buying reach, from ranking first on Google. Today, leverage is quieter and more brutal. Machines decide what exists. Algorithms decide what spreads. Entertainment decides what gets remembered. The last week made this shift painfully clear. Three stories surfaced across AI, commerce, and media. [...]
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If AI Can’t Summarize Your Brand, You’re Invisible
January 7, 2026
There was a time when brand visibility was a game of inches. You fought for rankings, optimized headlines, refreshed metadata, and hoped your click-through rate edged out the competition. That era rewarded patience and polish. Today, visibility is binary. Either an AI system can confidently explain who you are and why you matter, or it [...]
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In 2026 Growth Is No Longer About Traffic. It’s About Visibility.
January 6, 2026
For most of the past two decades, growth marketing followed a familiar rhythm. You drove traffic. You optimized conversion rates. You scaled what worked. The playbook rewarded brands that could attract clicks at volume and monetize attention efficiently. That era is closing. In 2026, the growth curve is bending away from raw traffic and toward [...]
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GEO Is the New SEO: Year-End Learnings
December 23, 2025
For most of the last decade, SEO lived in a relatively stable universe. Algorithms evolved, but the core mechanics stayed familiar. You researched keywords, built content clusters, optimized technical hygiene, earned links, and waited patiently for rankings to compound. Search rewarded discipline and scale. It was slow, but it was predictable. Then generative search arrived [...]
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Budget Reforecasting for Q1 Success
December 23, 2025
January has a way of clarifying things. Pipelines reset. Dashboards look cleaner. The chaos of Q4 promotions, year-end spending sprees, and “just get it out the door” decisions finally subsides. For marketing leaders, Q1 is not just the beginning of a new quarter. It is the moment when strategy either sharpens or drifts. Budget reforecasting [...]
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Budget Reforecasting for Q1 Success
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December 23, 2025
January has a way of clarifying things. Pipelines reset. Dashboards look cleaner. The chaos of Q4 promotions, year-end spending sprees, and “just get it out the door” decisions finally subsides. For marketing leaders, Q1 is not just the beginning of a new quarter. It is the moment when strategy either sharpens or drifts. Budget reforecasting [...]
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High-Velocity Creative Is Making You Look Like Everyone Else
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December 22, 2025
How Modern Marketing Teams Win Without Tearing Their Brand in Half Marketing leaders are living inside a contradiction. On one side, platforms demand speed. Algorithms reward freshness. Performance channels penalize hesitation. Creative that worked six weeks ago is already tired. On the other side, brand equity compounds slowly. Trust is built through repetition, recognition, and [...]
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Why Most AI Personalization Feels Creepy, Broken, or Useless
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December 22, 2025
A couple years ago, “personalization” meant swapping in a first name and praying your ESP didn’t merge “Hi {{first_name}}” into “Hi ,”. Now it’s tied to your margins, your inventory position, your customer support load, and whether your CMO has to explain to finance why CAC went up while conversion stayed flat. AI personalization is [...]
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Selling Meaning, Not Metal: How Modern Jewelry Brands Actually Win
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December 18, 2025
Jewelry is one of the few categories where marketing still has permission to be emotional without apology. A ring can represent commitment, status, rebellion, nostalgia, grief, ambition, or all of the above at once. That emotional range is why jewelry brands can scale into nine figures or quietly die with perfect margins and no demand. [...]
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Inside Golf’s Trust Economy and How Brands Break In
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December 18, 2025
Golf does not behave like most consumer categories. It moves slower. It signals status without shouting. It rewards patience, consistency, and trust over novelty and volume. And it has one of the most tightly knit, influence driven communities in modern commerce. That combination makes golf incredibly valuable and incredibly unforgiving for brands that approach it [...]
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Fly By News - Week of 12/15
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December 16, 2025
Picture a Monday morning where your CFO is asking one question that is half budget, half existential: “Are we still paying for creative, or are we about to start paying for permission?” That is the through-line behind this week’s Fly By News. The biggest platforms are quietly turning “content” into “licensed inventory,” “discovery” into “paid [...]
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The 2025 Social Media Trends That Actually Mattered (and the Playbook to Operationalize Them in 2026)
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December 16, 2025
Social media is not “just a channel” anymore, and 2025 made that impossible to ignore. This year, social didn’t simply shape brand perception. It shaped demand planning, customer service queues, creator contracts, and the accuracy of your revenue forecast. When a platform can go dark and come back before lunch, your social strategy starts looking [...]
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Google Says “No ads in Gemini,” but Ad Roadmap Still Moving Toward Chat
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December 15, 2025
Adweek’s report is simple and spicy: Google reps allegedly told at least two advertising clients that ads are targeted for Gemini in 2026, separate from ads in AI Mode, and without prototypes or tech details shared yet. Then the immediate counterpunch landed. Google’s VP of Global Ads, Dan Taylor, publicly called the report inaccurate and [...]
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Disney + OpenAI Is Not “Just an AI Deal.” It’s a New Model for Monetizing IP, Managing Risk, and Manufacturing Demand.
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December 15, 2025
If you run a growth org, you’ve probably had this moment: Sales is pushing for more pipeline, finance is pushing for better margins, ops is warning about fulfillment and support load, and brand is begging you not to flood the market with weird creative that breaks trust. Then someone walks in and says, “Also… AI [...]
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From Disruptor to Gatekeeper: The Strategic Story Behind Netflix’s Bid for Warner Bros
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December 8, 2025
On Friday, December 5, 2025, Netflix stopped being “just” the disruptor in the lobby and walked into the studio boss’s office. The streamer agreed to acquire Warner Bros Discovery’s studios and streaming division for about 72 billion dollars in equity value, 82.7 billion including debt, in a cash and stock deal that would fold Warner [...]
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