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Growth & Strategy

The press release said the inventory was automated, intelligent, and fun. The internal memo, nine months later, said the baristas could go back to counting it themselves.

A Muck Rack study has been getting passed around PR teams for weeks, and most people are taking the wrong lesson from it.

Somewhere in your organization right now, a quiet sorting is underway. Not a restructuring. Not a reorg. Something more permanent.

Trade media is collapsing. Google referral traffic is in freefall. And a new class of companies is responding by doing something that would have seemed absurd five years ago: becoming publishers themselves.

Despite a decade of growth advice built entirely on audience size, the latest algorithm data shows follower count barely predicts how any single LinkedIn post performs.

In the span of a few weeks this spring, some of the largest and most watched companies in tech announced they were restructuring around the same idea: fewer people, completely different roles, and organizational models.

For 25 years, Google Search has worked the same way. You type something. You get a list of links. You click one. That's over.

State of Brand runs on the same infrastructure we deploy for our customers. This was never a marketing decision.
Your Follower Count Stopped Driving Your LinkedIn Reach. The Data Proves It.
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The AI Caste System Your Company Is Building on Purpose
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If this caught your attention, that’s not accidental.
The best editorial systems don’t happen by accident. Outlever builds them.


AI & Technology

The question floating around every SaaS boardroom right now: if we bolt AI onto our existing product, will the market ever view us the way it views companies that were built on AI from the ground up?

A single product conviction became a category-defining brand position.

Anthropic says Claude is now accelerating the creation of Claude. The data is interesting. The timing is more interesting.

Anthropic had a busy Thursday. It closed a $65 billion Series H at a valuation just under $965 billion, which is probably its last private round before going public, and it shipped Claude Opus 4.8.

NVIDIA's CEO went on international television and called the AI layoff excuse "lazy" and "irresponsible." One week after DeepMind's CEO said the same thing in different words.

On May 5, OpenAI removed the $50,000 minimum spend and launched a self-serve Ads Manager at ads.openai.com. Any U.S. business can now buy ads inside AI conversations.

The most consequential AI policy document the White House has produced since taking office was scheduled to be signed Thursday afternoon. CEOs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and Apple were invited.

NVIDIA reported earnings today. Revenue came in at $81.6 billion for the quarter, up 85% from a year ago, beating analyst expectations for the fifteenth consecutive time.

Meta built a leaderboard. It ranked every one of its 85,000 employees by how many AI tokens they consumed. The top slot earned the title "Token Legend."

In the last seven days alone, the two biggest AI companies on the planet shipped, announced, acquired, partnered, and leaked more than most tech companies manage in a full quarter.
Brand & Creative

"Billboards can be beautiful." That's how Cary Hudson, design director at OpenAI, announced the company's newest out-of-home campaign on LinkedIn.

There is a moment in every technology cycle when the industry settles on a word and then wears it down to nothing.

Somewhere on your commute this week or scrolling across your feeds, you may have passed an ad for a company called Goofstump.

LinkedIn announced its Creator Marketplace on June 10, and the timing says as much as the product does.

The Times asked whether LinkedIn is entering its "post-cringe era." We think the sharper question is a brand one. What happens when the most boring platform on the internet decides it wants to be fun?
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