The Cargo Agency is gaining national recognition for the role it plays behind the scenes of fast-growing businesses. The international marketing agency has been named an Inc. Power Partner Award honoree, joining a select group of B2B organizations recognized for helping entrepreneurs and enterprises navigate growth with confidence.

The Inc. Power Partner list spotlights companies that go beyond vendor relationships to become strategic allies—partners that founders and leadership teams rely on as they scale from early-stage operations to enterprise-level organizations. Honorees are evaluated based on client feedback, track record, and measurable impact on business growth.

For Cargo, the recognition reinforces an identity it has long emphasized: marketing not as output, but as advocacy.

What the Inc. Power Partner Award Represents

Inc.’s Power Partner Awards are designed to highlight B2B firms that consistently deliver value across the most complex stages of company growth. According to Inc., companies on the list received top client marks for helping leadership teams manage everything from infrastructure and compliance to cloud migration, hiring, and fundraising—freeing founders to stay focused on their core missions.

In a crowded B2B services landscape, the distinction is meaningful. It signals not just executional competence, but trust—earned over time by helping companies make high-stakes decisions and adapt as they scale.

That framing aligns closely with how Cargo positions itself in the market.

“At Cargo, growth has never just been about bigger numbers,” said Roger Beasley, President of The Cargo Agency. “We believe that advocacy is currency, and it is rewarding to be recognized for helping brands connect in ways that actually move people.”

Advocacy as a Differentiator in B2B Marketing

Cargo’s emphasis on advocacy reflects a broader shift in B2B marketing. As buyers become more skeptical of traditional messaging, agencies are being asked to deliver something more durable than campaigns alone—credibility, clarity, and connection.

Rather than focusing solely on reach or impressions, Cargo has built its reputation around helping brands articulate purpose, build trust, and create momentum across complex stakeholder ecosystems. That approach has resonated in industries where buying decisions are high-consideration and long-cycle, including technology, financial services, transportation, automotive, and food and beverage.

The Inc. recognition suggests that clients see Cargo not just as a creative or execution partner, but as a strategic extension of their leadership teams.

Momentum Across Enterprise and Emerging Brands

The award comes amid continued momentum for Cargo, including new and expanded client engagements. The agency recently began working with TFT Global, Inc., supporting brand development, marketing strategy, and business development initiatives. It has also expanded its role with Amazon Shipping and Amazon Air Cargo, deepening an already significant relationship with one of the world’s most operationally complex enterprises.

Cargo’s client roster spans both established global brands and fast-growing organizations, including Amazon, Lenovo, Burn Boot Camp, Purpose Financial, RBC, Fuddruckers, LG, and Mercedes-Benz. That diversity speaks to the agency’s ability to operate across different growth stages while maintaining consistency in strategic rigor.

For Inc., this breadth of impact is central to what defines a Power Partner.

“Whether they’re coordinating complex marketing campaigns or reliably supporting the day-to-day infrastructure of growing companies, these honorees aren’t simply B2B providers—they are true partners in helping businesses grow and succeed,” said Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc.

Why This Matters in Today’s B2B Landscape

The recognition arrives at a time when B2B organizations are rethinking their external partnerships. Economic pressure, shifting buyer behavior, and the rapid adoption of AI and automation have raised the bar for what companies expect from agencies.

Marketing partners are increasingly expected to:

• Understand business models, not just messaging

• Align with revenue and growth goals, not vanity metrics

• Scale with clients as they move from startup to enterprise

Cargo’s Power Partner designation suggests it has been able to meet those expectations consistently—something that is difficult to sustain as client needs evolve.

From Campaign Execution to Long-Term Growth Partner

One of the more telling aspects of Inc.’s Power Partner criteria is its focus on long-term impact. The award is not about one-off wins, but about sustained contribution to business growth over time.

For Cargo, that aligns with its philosophy of “solving hard problems together,” as Beasley describes it. Whether supporting brand repositioning, market entry, or enterprise-scale marketing execution, the agency’s value appears to lie in its ability to operate alongside leadership teams rather than outside them.

That positioning may become increasingly important as B2B companies seek fewer, more capable partners—mirroring a broader consolidation trend across MarTech and agency ecosystems.

Looking Ahead

Being named an Inc. Power Partner is not just a milestone for The Cargo Agency—it’s also a signal to the market. As brands face more pressure to demonstrate authenticity, clarity, and measurable growth, agencies that can blend strategic insight with execution will stand out.

For Cargo, the recognition validates a long-held belief: that advocacy-driven marketing, when paired with deep partnership, can turn ambition into sustained momentum.

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TrackFunnels is formalizing what has quietly become a core part of its business: helping B2B marketing teams untangle broken tracking, unreliable data, and brittle automation across increasingly complex MarTech stacks.

The company announced it is expanding into focused MarTech consulting, building on years of hands-on work with teams struggling to make tools like GA4, attribution platforms, and marketing automation actually work together. The move reflects a broader reality in modern marketing: most problems don’t come from a lack of software, but from how systems interact—or fail to.

Originally, TrackFunnels gained traction with its UTM Link Builder, designed to bring discipline and consistency to campaign tracking. But as customers implemented the tool, deeper issues surfaced.

When Tools Aren’t the Problem

As TrackFunnels worked alongside marketing teams, a recurring pattern emerged. Campaign delays, reporting confusion, and data disputes were rarely caused by a single platform. Instead, they showed up at the seams—between analytics, automation, CRM systems, and internal teams.

“Teams don’t struggle because they lack software,” said Shadab Malik, founder of TrackFunnels. “They struggle because data doesn’t move cleanly between systems. Numbers need explaining. And teams either hesitate to launch campaigns, or delay the launch because they’re unsure what might break downstream.”

Those downstream risks often live in organizational blind spots. Ownership is fragmented across marketing, engineering, analytics, and RevOps. Dependencies are high, but accountability is unclear.

According to Malik, this is where execution slows—and where trust in data starts to erode.

Consulting Focused on Upstream Correctness

Rather than offering broad, agency-style services, TrackFunnels is narrowing its consulting focus to areas where upstream correctness has the biggest impact on speed and confidence.

The consulting practice will center on three core areas:

1. MarTech implementation and integrations
   Designing stacks where each tool has a clear role, intentional data flows, and documented dependencies.

2. Marketing measurement and GA4
   Establishing reliable tracking, attribution logic, and shared definitions so teams stop debating numbers and start using them.

3. Marketing automation and AI orchestration
   Ensuring workflows and AI-driven systems operate on clean, validated signals instead of brittle assumptions.

This targeted approach reflects how modern marketing stacks behave in reality. A small change in tracking or data definitions can quietly break reporting, automation, or downstream decisioning—often without anyone noticing until results look “off.”

Why This Matters More in the Age of AI

The timing of TrackFunnels’ consulting expansion is not accidental. AI-driven decisioning is rapidly becoming embedded across marketing platforms, from ad optimization to lead scoring and lifecycle automation.

While AI promises efficiency, it also raises the stakes.

“As stacks grow more complex, the real work becomes connective,” Malik said. “Someone has to define data, validate integrations, and ensure that changes in one system don’t quietly undermine measurement or automation elsewhere.”

He was more direct about the risk: “AI doesn’t change the fundamentals. Garbage in, garbage out still applies. If tracking and attribution aren’t sound, automation simply amplifies the problem.”

For B2B teams under pressure to “use AI,” that message cuts against the hype. TrackFunnels’ stance is pragmatic: fix the foundations first, or risk scaling the wrong outcomes faster.

A Different Kind of MarTech Partner

TrackFunnels’ consulting positioning is notable because it sits somewhere between tooling and traditional consulting. It’s not offering high-level strategy decks or outsourced execution. Instead, it’s stepping into the uncomfortable middle ground—where systems meet, assumptions collide, and things quietly break.

That middle ground is increasingly where MarTech success or failure is decided.

As marketing stacks expand, teams often accumulate tools faster than they establish shared definitions, documentation, or integration discipline. The result is a fragile system that technically “works,” but only as long as nothing changes.

TrackFunnels is betting there’s growing demand for partners who can help teams slow down just enough to make stacks resilient.

Product Development Continues—Informed by the Messy Reality

Importantly, the consulting expansion does not replace TrackFunnels’ product roadmap. The company says it will continue building tools informed directly by real-world implementation work.

Recent product releases include:

• A GA4 internal traffic filter Chrome extension

• A HubSpot attribution validator

• Email open tracking integrated into the TrackFunnels UTM Link Builder

The feedback loop is intentional. “Working closely with teams exposes what actually breaks in practice,” Malik said. “Consulting improves our tools, and tools make our consulting more grounded.”

This product-plus-practice model mirrors a broader trend in MarTech, where vendors increasingly differentiate by showing they understand operational reality—not just feature checklists.

The Bigger Picture

TrackFunnels’ move highlights a shift happening across B2B marketing. As stacks grow more powerful, they also become more fragile. The bottleneck is no longer software capability, but connectivity, clarity, and confidence in data.

By formalizing its consulting practice, TrackFunnels is positioning itself not just as a tool provider, but as a partner focused on making modern marketing systems trustworthy again.

In a landscape obsessed with speed and automation, that focus on upstream correctness may prove to be a competitive advantage.

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Chinese color measurement specialist 3nh (Guangdong Threenh Technology Co., Ltd.) is accelerating its global expansion with a formal entry into Japan, one of the world’s most demanding markets for industrial precision and quality control. The company has launched a fully localized Japanese website, marking a significant milestone in its overseas strategy—and signaling growing confidence in the global competitiveness of Chinese-made measurement technology.

The move follows a breakout year for 3nh. In 2025, sales of its flagship NH310 colorimeter surpassed 100,000 units worldwide, a rare feat in a category long dominated by established international brands. For the company—and for China’s precision instrumentation sector more broadly—the milestone represents a clear shift in market dynamics.

Why Japan Matters for 3nh

Japan is not an easy market to crack. Its manufacturing sectors—from automotive and electronics to textiles and coatings—are known for uncompromising standards, rigorous certification requirements, and deep loyalty to incumbent suppliers.

That makes 3nh’s entry notable.

“Entering the Japanese market is a key milestone in our international development strategy,” said Miss Liu, Deputy General Manager of 3nh. “Japan’s focus on quality control and technological innovation aligns closely with our core values of precision, reliability, and continuous improvement.”

Rather than testing the waters quietly, 3nh is making a deliberate push. The newly launched Japanese-language website is designed specifically for local users, with fully localized content, navigation, and support information. It provides detailed coverage of 3nh’s product range—colorimeters, spectrophotometers, light booths, and quality control solutions—along with industry-specific application cases across textiles, food, plastics, automotive, printing, and cosmetics.

The goal is simple: remove friction for Japanese buyers and present 3nh not as a low-cost alternative, but as a serious, technically credible partner.

A Breakout Year for Color Measurement

The Japan expansion builds on momentum generated in 2025, when 3nh made major strides in both product development and commercial scale.

The standout achievement was the NH310 colorimeter surpassing 100,000 units sold globally, propelling it to the top of global sales rankings in its category. In an industry historically controlled by European and Japanese brands, that figure represents more than volume—it signals trust.

The company also introduced multiple new color measurement instruments during the year, alongside continued investment in next-generation color measurement technologies. Collectively, these advances helped position 3nh as a credible challenger in a market where precision, repeatability, and long-term stability are non-negotiable.

Localized Strategy, Global Ambition

Japan is just the first step in a broader localization push planned for 2026. According to the company, 3nh intends to expand regional services by:

• Establishing offices in key markets including Japan, South Korea, the UK, Germany, and Italy

• Expanding local agent and distributor networks

• Organizing offline color measurement technology training sessions to support industrial users

To support the Japanese market specifically, 3nh has already conducted extensive research into local regulations, industry norms, and customer expectations. A dedicated team has been formed to handle sales consultation, technical support, and after-sales service in Japanese.

Future plans include partnerships with local distributors and participation in Japanese industry exhibitions—critical channels for credibility in the country’s manufacturing ecosystem.

Inside 3nh’s Core Measurement Technology

Behind the expansion is a deep technology stack built on optics and color science. 3nh is a national high-tech enterprise with more than 100 technical patents, serving customers in over 60 countries and regions.

Its product portfolio spans spectrophotometers, gloss meters, and coating thickness gauges, widely used in automotive, electronics, textiles, and industrial manufacturing.

Key technical strengths include:

• Multi-angle color measurement:
  Instruments like the Cooltai MS3012 support up to 12 measurement angles, including critical automotive angles such as 45as-15° and 15as-45°. The system complies with standards like ASTM D2244 and ISO 7724, delivering repeatability as tight as ΔEab ≤ 0.02—essential for metallic and pearlescent coatings.

• High-precision sensor design:
  Devices such as the Taishuang TS7700 use dual-array silicon optical sensors and a dual optical path to collect SCI and SCE data simultaneously. This improves data consistency, with repeatability errors of ΔEab ≤ 0.03.

• Industrial adaptability:
  3nh instruments are built with industrial-grade MCUs, shock-resistant designs, and operating ranges from -10°C to 50°C, allowing stable performance in harsh production environments.

Innovations such as simultaneous multi-angle measurement, ETC real-time calibration, and automotive-specific light source libraries further differentiate the platform. Built-in standard whiteboards ensure long-term calibration stability, with traceability to national metrology institutes.

Challenging a Long-Standing Status Quo

For decades, global color and appearance measurement has been dominated by a small group of international brands. 3nh’s rapid rise—and now its expansion into Japan—suggests that balance is beginning to shift.

The combination of competitive pricing, expanding technical depth, and aggressive localization is allowing the company to compete not just on cost, but on capability and reliability.

If adoption in Japan follows the trajectory seen in other regions, 3nh could further redefine perceptions of where high-precision industrial measurement technology comes from.

For now, the company is focused on execution. But the signal is clear: 3nh is no longer content to be a regional success story—it’s aiming to be a global standard.

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OKNO Investments LLC, a South Florida–based small business development firm, has announced the launch of what it calls the first fully integrated AI marketing ecosystem, aimed at delivering faster execution, lower marketing costs, and outsized revenue growth for businesses across industries.

The new offering combines artificial intelligence with established marketing, sales, and creative frameworks to replace traditional agency models—long criticized for high retainers, slow turnaround times, and inconsistent ROI.

Rather than operating as a single agency, OKNO has structured its AI-led services across three specialized divisions: OKNO Digital, MediaGrowthGurus, and PsychInteractive. Together, they are designed to function as a unified growth engine, covering everything from demand generation and paid media to creative production and conversion optimization.

“Traditional marketing agencies were built for a different era,” said Gilberto Marcano, Founder of OKNO Investments LLC. “AI represents the same kind of inflection point the iPhone created over a decade ago. We rebuilt our services with AI at the core—not as a feature, but as the engine driving smarter, faster, and more affordable growth.”

From clicks to revenue outcomes

A key differentiator of OKNO’s approach is its focus on business outcomes over vanity metrics. Instead of optimizing for impressions or clicks, the ecosystem is built around sales, repeat purchases, and customer lifetime value—supported by automation and AI-led decisioning.

That strategy is already showing results. In a recent case study with Altitude Trampoline Parks, OKNO reports delivering more than 1,000% return on ad spend (ROAS) across multiple franchise locations. According to the company, participating locations also saw sales increase by over 75% in the first year, while email open rates jumped from under 0.5% to more than 20%.

“By embedding automation and optimizing for real conversions, we’ve helped business owners reframe marketing as a growth center instead of a cost center,” Marcano said.

Inside OKNO’s AI marketing ecosystem

Each division within OKNO’s ecosystem addresses a specific layer of the modern marketing stack:

• OKNO Digital focuses on replacing legacy agency structures with AI-driven marketing execution.

• MediaGrowthGurus delivers AI-powered demand generation, paid media, GEO/SEO, and conversion optimization designed for predictable revenue growth.

• PsychInteractive accelerates creative output, including web design, video, and animation, reducing production timelines while improving engagement.

OKNO emphasizes that it is not a software platform, but a hands-on team using multiple AI technologies behind the scenes to deliver personalized, data-driven strategies.

As AI adoption accelerates across marketing platforms, OKNO’s launch reflects a broader industry shift: automation alone isn’t enough—execution speed, data intelligence, and measurable revenue impact are becoming the real differentiators.

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Web Loft Designs, a U.S.-based web development and digital strategy agency with more than two decades of experience, has launched a new Lean Website + Local SEO Solution aimed at businesses navigating economic uncertainty, tighter budgets, and rapidly shifting consumer behavior.

As companies across the U.S. reassess spending amid inflation, political uncertainty, and cautious growth forecasts, many are delaying full-scale website rebuilds. Yet the need for online visibility, credibility, and lead generation remains urgent. Web Loft Designs’ new offering is designed to bridge that gap by delivering high-conversion, one-page websites combined with results-driven local SEO, without the cost or complexity of traditional multi-page builds.

“As budgets tighten nationwide, businesses aren’t stopping marketing—they’re spending smarter,” said Marina Marsh, Strategic Director at Web Loft Designs. “We’re seeing strong demand for fast, professional digital solutions that generate leads without requiring a major upfront investment.”

Lean by design, focused on ROI

According to the agency, demand for streamlined digital solutions has grown steadily over the past year, particularly among home services, contractors, professional services firms, new entrepreneurs, and established businesses pivoting or rebranding. In many cases, companies are choosing lean digital strategies not because they can’t afford larger websites—but because they want faster returns and lower risk.

The Lean Website + Local SEO Solution includes a professionally designed, mobile-first one-page website built around conversion psychology, along with local search optimization to drive immediate visibility. Features include clear calls-to-action, brand-aligned design, service overviews, image galleries or portfolio previews, and Google Business Profile optimization.

On the SEO side, the package incorporates local keyword targeting, citations, micro-content, trust signals, and AI search optimization to help businesses surface quickly in local search results—even without a large website footprint.

“A smaller site with strong messaging and local SEO can outperform a large site that lacks focus,” Marsh said. “Clarity and speed matter more than ever.”

Built for economic uncertainty—and future growth

Web Loft Designs positions the new solution as a response to broader market conditions, where inflation, hiring slowdowns, and cautious spending have made efficiency a priority. The agency argues that maintaining visibility during downturns is critical, and that lean digital strategies can help businesses stay competitive without overextending resources.

Importantly, the solution is designed to scale. As businesses stabilize or expand, the one-page site can be converted into a full multi-page website while preserving SEO foundations and user experience elements.

By offering a lower-commitment entry point with room to grow, Web Loft Designs aims to help businesses protect cash flow today while remaining positioned for future expansion.

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Instagram is quietly rewriting one of social media’s most familiar playbooks: hashtags. The platform now advises creators and brands to use no more than five hashtags on posts and Reels, a notable departure from the long-standing practice of stacking tags to maximize reach.

The change reflects Instagram’s broader push toward AI-driven content discovery, where relevance and engagement matter more than keyword stuffing. While hashtags aren’t disappearing, they’re being repositioned as a supporting signal rather than the primary discovery engine.

What’s changed and why it matters

For years, creators were encouraged to use up to 30 hashtags to boost visibility. In practice, that often led to cluttered captions and diminishing returns. Instagram’s updated guidance suggests that fewer, more relevant hashtags help the algorithm better understand content context—without overwhelming users.

This shift aligns with Instagram’s increasing reliance on machine learning, visual recognition, and in-caption keywords to surface content in feeds, Explore, and Reels recommendations.

What this means for creators and brands

The new limit forces a more strategic approach:

• Quality over quantity: Five highly relevant hashtags now outperform broad or generic tag lists.
• Caption SEO matters more: Keywords in captions and on-screen text play a larger role in discoverability.
• Cleaner creative: Shorter hashtag lists reduce visual noise and improve readability.

For marketers, the update is another signal that content relevance and engagement velocity, not tactical hacks, drive distribution on modern social platforms.

How to adapt your Instagram strategy

Creators should rethink hashtags as categorization tools, not growth levers. Choosing niche, intent-driven tags and pairing them with strong hooks, clear visuals, and keyword-rich captions will be essential to maintaining reach.

In short, Instagram isn’t killing hashtags—it’s downsizing their influence. And for creators willing to adapt, five may be all they need.

For years, B2B marketers have been told to trust the dashboard. If impressions are up, intent scores are climbing, and leads are flowing, performance marketing must be working—right? According to DemandScience’s newly released 2026 State of Performance Marketing Report, that confidence may be badly misplaced.

As digital platforms flood advertisers with more video, more creators, and more ambiguity, brand suitability has quietly become one of marketing’s hardest technical problems. Zefr thinks it has found a better way to solve it—and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office agrees.

The brand suitability and media intelligence company has been granted a new U.S. patent for its AI-driven approach to content annotation and model distillation, a system designed to dramatically improve how digital content is analyzed, classified, and ultimately deemed safe (or risky) for advertisers.

This is not just another incremental AI filing. The patent formalizes how Zefr combines large language models (LLMs), AI agents, and targeted human review to tackle one of the industry’s most persistent challenges: understanding context at internet scale without sacrificing nuance.

Why content annotation still breaks at scale

Most content classification systems today fall into one of two camps. On one side are heavily manual operations, where large reviewer teams label content with human judgment—but at a cost that doesn’t scale with YouTube, TikTok, or emerging video platforms. On the other side are fully automated systems that scale beautifully, right up until they misclassify satire as harm, fiction as reality, or cultural references as violations.

Zefr’s newly patented approach aims to close that gap.

Instead of using humans to annotate everything—or machines to decide everything—the company deploys AI agents to scan massive video datasets and actively look for uncertainty. Ambiguous cases, underspecified scenarios, or content that sits at the edge of policy definitions are flagged and escalated for human review. Clear-cut cases are handled automatically.

The result is a system that focuses human expertise where it matters most, rather than wasting it on obvious calls.

Teaching machines when they don’t know enough

At the core of the patent is the idea that AI shouldn’t just classify content—it should understand when its own confidence breaks down.

Zefr’s system uses LLMs to query and explore large volumes of video content, surfacing examples that challenge existing policy boundaries. These edge cases are then reviewed by human experts, whose decisions don’t just resolve individual annotations but are fed back into the models through a process known as model distillation.

In practical terms, this means the AI gets smarter over time—not by brute-force labeling, but by learning from the hardest, most instructive examples.

It’s a sharp contrast to traditional annotation pipelines that rely on volume rather than insight, and it reflects a broader shift across enterprise AI toward more deliberate, human-guided learning loops.

Context over keywords—and why advertisers care

One of the most compelling aspects of Zefr’s approach is its ability to distinguish between content that looks similar on the surface but means something very different in context.

A fictional crime scene in a TV show trailer is not the same as footage of real-world criminal activity. A news report discussing extremism is not extremist propaganda. For advertisers, those distinctions determine whether campaigns appear next to content that aligns with brand values—or sparks backlash.

By combining automated discovery with human policy guidance, Zefr’s system can make these finer distinctions consistently, at scale. That translates into more confident media buying decisions, fewer false positives, and less blunt exclusion of entire content categories.

In an era where advertisers are demanding both reach and responsibility, that balance is increasingly non-negotiable.

A signal of where brand safety tech is heading

Zefr’s patent arrives at a moment when brand safety and suitability are being reshaped by three converging forces: the explosion of short-form video, the growing use of generative AI, and increased scrutiny from regulators and brand leaders alike.

Competitors across the ad verification and media intelligence landscape are racing to incorporate AI, but many still rely on opaque models or legacy taxonomies that struggle with modern content formats. Zefr’s emphasis on transparency, explainability, and peer-reviewed research positions it differently—closer to an AI lab with commercial instincts than a traditional verification vendor.

“This patent represents another major step forward in our mission to bring transparency and trust to the digital ecosystem,” said Jon Moora, Chief AI Officer at Zefr, pointing to the company’s focus on accountability as much as automation.

That framing matters. As AI increasingly governs where ads appear, advertisers are asking tougher questions about how decisions are made—and who is responsible when systems get it wrong.

Building an IP moat around responsible AI

The newly granted patent is Zefr’s eighth overall and its second specifically focused on AI, adding to a growing intellectual property portfolio that spans content understanding, brand suitability, and machine learning systems.

More importantly, it signals a strategic commitment to defensible, responsible AI development at a time when many ad tech players are bolting generative models onto existing workflows without rethinking the fundamentals.

Zefr’s approach suggests that the future of brand suitability won’t be fully automated or fully manual, but intentionally hybrid—machines handling scale, humans providing judgment, and systems designed to know the difference.

For marketers navigating an increasingly complex media landscape, that may be less flashy than pure automation, but it’s far more useful.

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