marketing

SurveyMonkey: Why Marketers Must Look Beyond Gut Feel

We’ve all heard these words, and we’ve all used them. Whenever I give a talk for marketers, this quote from Jim Barksdale (former CEO of AOL) never fails to get a laugh: "If we have data, let's look at the data. If all we have are opinions, let's go with mine." Sure, that sentiment from a CEO resonates with everyone inside an organization. On the Marketing team, though, it’s a gut punch. Most...

Why Father’s Day Planning Needs to Move Away from a “Set and Forget” Approach

Unlike Mother's Day, where gifting tends to cluster around a narrower set of categories and a more predictable purchase window, Father's Day shopping is highly fragmented. According to Roy Morgan research (2025), popular gift choices span food and alcohol, clothing and footwear, grooming products, tech, and experiences like dinners or trips – each with a very different consideration window. While...

Tinkering Is Not Transformation: What Marketing Leaders Need for the Agentic Era

Most marketing teams spent last year doing AI. Licenses rolled out. Workshops run. A proud slide in the board deck showing adoption up and to the right. Twelve months on, I can tell you what most of that bought: faster first drafts, prettier decks, a team a bit more productive at the work it was already doing. What it did not buy, for most people, is a single decision made differently. The...

The Experience Generation Is Changing the Face of Event Marketing

By Ashleigh Cook, CMO at RainFocus A new generation of buyers is reshaping the way we think about events. Today’s attendees are looking beyond access to content or a great location. They want something more immersive, more personalized, and more meaningful. According to a recent Broadridge report, 77% of Gen Z believe it’s important for businesses to customize interactions based on what they know...

Impressions Are a 2014 Metric

The number that matters in 2026 is whether your brand appears when a buyer asks an AI engine a question that should be yours. By Ronn Torossian Every CMO I talk to is still measuring impressions. Reach. Share of voice. Those numbers made sense in a world where a human consumed media linearly — saw the ad, read the article, registered the brand. That world is closing. The buyer no longer assembles...

The Condé Nast CEO Said Plan As If Search Is Zero. SEO's Successor Already Has a Name.

The CEO of Condé Nast told his teams a year ago to plan as if search traffic is zero. This week he restated it publicly and told the Financial Times that Google search is "no longer a meaningful driver" of traffic to his properties. For the search community, this is not a doom headline. It is a mandate to retool. And the discipline that replaces search optimization already has a name: GEO —...

My firm audited the Condé Nast portfolio against that target — 300 prompts, 12,000 prompt-engine data points, graded with a five-metric framework: Citation Share, Prompt Coverage, Authority Density, Retrieval Persistence, Generational Advantage. The portfolio grades A−. The data is clear about what the engines reward.

What retools, concretely:

Entities over keywords. Engines reason about entities — brands, people, products, relationships — not keyword strings. Content has to be entity-rich and unambiguous, with structured data that makes those entities machine-legible.

Becoming a retrieval anchor. The engines repeatedly cite a small set of sources they trust on a topic. The work is to become one of them — through primary research, original data, and consistent authority across properties the model already weights.

Persistence, not spikes. A ranking can be won in a quarter. Retrieval persistence is earned over time and reinforced every time the engine cites you. Generational advantage is real — the brands cited today are more likely to be cited tomorrow.

Schema and source structure. Schema markup, clean source attribution, and answer-shaped content are no longer hygiene. They are how a page gets ingested and quoted.

None of this means SEO skills are obsolete. Technical fluency, content architecture, authority building — all transfer. What changes is the target and the metric. Rankings out. Citation Share in.

Lynch had the vision to say the search era is closing. The search profession's move is not to mourn it. It's to own the discipline that comes next.

Build the infrastructure before the crisis — not during it.

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Your SEO Budget Is Optimizing for a Box That's Disappearing

By Ronn Torossian More than a third of buyers now begin product research inside an AI engine — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews — not a search results page. Inside three years it will be the majority. That single fact should be rewriting marketing budgets. In most organizations it hasn't. For twenty years, marketers optimized for ten blue links. The entire discipline of SEO was built on...

The honest counter-argument is that SEO isn't dead, just diminished. Fair. But it misses the mechanics. The click is being intercepted by the answer. If your brand isn't named in the answer, your search ranking is irrelevant — nobody scrolled far enough to find it. Ranking number three on a page nobody looks at is not a marketing outcome.

The optimization target has moved, and the discipline that addresses it has a name: Generative Engine Optimization — GEO. It is to the AI engine what SEO was to Google.

This is not a new observation for me. In 2011 I published a book, For Immediate Release, that argued — in print, before any of this — that "search engines matter more than any individual story." The point then was that the algorithm outranks the article. The point now is sharper: the model outranks the algorithm. Same structural shift, one layer deeper.

What GEO actually requires is not mysterious. The AI engines build answers from sources they trust: earned media in tier-1 outlets, structured and dated content across owned properties, primary sources, clean schema. Marketers already know how to produce most of this. What they lack is the target — and the metric.

The metric is Citation Share: how often your brand appears when a buyer asks an AI engine a question that should belong to your category. It is measurable today. Most brands have never measured it, which means most brands do not know whether they own 70% of their category's answers or zero.

Start there. Audit your category inside the engines this quarter — not next year. The answer is being written now, and your SEO budget is pointed at the wrong screen.

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B2B Software Just Crossed the Line From Google-First to ChatGPT-First Buying

When 5W's tech practice was helping B2B SaaS companies fifteen years ago, the marketing math was simple. Rank on Google. Capture demo requests. Move them into a sales-qualified funnel. Nurture through email. Close. The channels were known. The attribution was imperfect but measurable. If you had a clean SEO operation and a clean paid search operation, you could build an inbound engine that would...