TotalEnergies is shaking up its North American leadership. The company has appointed Olivier Gauthier as President and Managing Director of TotalEnergies Marketing USA, based in Linden, New Jersey.

Gauthier steps into the role after serving as Managing Director of TotalEnergies Marketing Canada, where he helped expand the brand’s presence in a competitive energy market. He succeeds Franck Bagouet, who is moving into a new position within the broader TotalEnergies Group after a five-year tenure in the U.S.

Leadership Change, Same Strategic Mission

Bagouet described his time at the helm as marked by “meaningful human connections and the privilege of working alongside an exceptional team committed to customer satisfaction.” He expressed confidence that Gauthier’s expertise will continue driving the growth of TotalEnergies’ lubricants portfolio in the U.S. market.

For his part, Gauthier struck a forward-looking tone: “I am honored and proud to lead TotalEnergies Marketing USA. Together with our talented team, we will reinforce existing partnerships and explore new market opportunities.”

What’s at Stake

TotalEnergies Marketing USA is part of the company’s Americas Division, focusing on a range of lubricants and industrial products. Its portfolio includes Quartz Engine Oil, Hi-Perf Motorcycle Engine Oil, Rubia Heavy Duty Engine Oil, Kleenmold Glass Lubricants, and TotalEnergies Industrial Lubricants.

The U.S. remains a growth market for industrial and consumer lubricants, with increasing competition from both multinational giants and regional players. Gauthier’s challenge will be to expand market share while strengthening long-term distributor and customer partnerships—a balancing act that has defined TotalEnergies’ North American strategy.

The Bigger Picture

TotalEnergies, the world’s fourth-largest oil and gas company, has been leaning heavily into its Marketing & Services branch as a way to expand beyond exploration and production. Appointments like Gauthier’s highlight the company’s emphasis on localized leadership, ensuring global scale doesn’t dilute regional responsiveness.

With Gauthier now steering U.S. operations, TotalEnergies Marketing USA is set to continue pushing its mix of product innovation and customer-focused growth in one of its most competitive markets.

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Los Angeles’ PR scene is as competitive as it gets, but Marketing Maven has officially cracked the top tier. The bicoastal marketing and public relations agency has been ranked 10th among the Top PR Firms in Los Angeles by O’Dwyer’s, a long-standing authority in PR industry rankings.

This recognition places Marketing Maven alongside heavyweights like Edelman, Finn Partners, and Team Lewis—firms that have traditionally dominated the region.

A Broader Footprint

Beyond the Top 10 Los Angeles ranking, O’Dwyer’s also recognized Marketing Maven for its strength in multiple sectors, including healthcare, finance, professional services, nonprofit, travel, and technology. The firm’s reach isn’t limited to Southern California either—it operates nationally with offices in both Los Angeles and New York City.

CEO and President Lindsey Carnett, who founded the company 16 years ago, described the milestone as a full-circle moment: “I started Marketing Maven on the West Coast, and it has been exhilarating seeing it grow into a Top 10 Los Angeles PR firm. We are striving to bring our excellence in L.A. to our operations throughout the country.”

Why It Matters

O’Dwyer’s PR rankings are no small feat. Firms are required to submit tax documents verifying revenue, and results are segmented by both geography and vertical. Unlike some industry lists, O’Dwyer’s rankings emphasize PR-specific services like counseling and media outreach, rather than advertising or production-heavy revenue.

For Marketing Maven, this recognition not only validates its cross-sector expertise but also underscores its positioning as a mid-sized agency competing with global giants. With client needs evolving across social media, influencer marketing, digital advertising, and integrated campaigns, the firm’s hybrid offering of research, strategy, and execution seems well-timed.

The Competitive Set

O’Dwyer’s Top 10 Los Angeles PR Firms for 2025:

1. Team Lewis

2. Edelman

3. Davies Public Affairs

4. IW Group, Inc.

5. Lee Andrews Group

6. MMGY Wagstaff

7. Finn Partners

8. Blaze

9. Highwire PR

10. Marketing Maven

For a firm founded outside the traditional PR power hubs, Marketing Maven’s entry into this list signals not only its growth trajectory but also the growing demand for agencies that can blend traditional PR with modern digital marketing disciplines.

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Real estate’s marketing conversation is getting a new name. 1000WATT, the branding and marketing agency known for shaping some of the industry’s boldest identities, has rebranded its flagship Brand & Marketing Summit as “Signal.”

The newly christened event will take place June 2–4, 2026, at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, putting storytelling, differentiation, and brand strategy center stage.

Why the Rebrand?

According to 1000WATT co-founder Brian Boero, the industry is at a “make-or-break” moment. Consolidation, AI, limited inventory, and intense competition have created conditions where standing out isn’t optional—it’s survival.

“Signal is for those companies, organizations, and practitioners that seek to break through the noise and seize the opportunity in this moment,” Boero said.

Marc Davison, fellow co-founder, added that real estate has always been about meaning and story. “From household names to neighborhood agents, consumers seek beacons of meaning that help them make choices. Signal is where those who feel that truth come to gain inspiration they can turn into action.”

What to Expect at Signal 2026

The event builds on the success of the 2025 summit, which drew over 500 leaders spanning brokerages, proptech startups, franchises, MLS organizations, mortgage firms, and associations. For 2026, attendance will be capped at 600 participants, keeping the conversations focused and high-value.

Details on sessions, speakers, and workshops will be rolled out in the coming weeks, but the overarching theme is clear: real estate brands can no longer just exist—they need to cut through.

Industry Context

The rebrand isn’t just cosmetic. As AI tools reshape how agents reach buyers and sellers, and as proptech startups disrupt long-standing business models, storytelling and brand differentiation are becoming as crucial as market data. Events like Signal put those soft-power levers front and center, giving leaders a forum to sharpen their message before competitors do.

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Avenue Z, one of marketing’s fastest-scaling agencies, has planted a bigger flag in New York. The firm has opened a new office at 156 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District—nearly doubling its footprint in the city and signaling its ambitions to become a national powerhouse in marketing and communications.

The new office isn’t just real estate bragging rights. It’s designed as a central hub for Avenue Z’s integrated campaigns, blending earned, owned, and paid media. The move also marks a decisive expansion of its public relations division, giving the firm a strategic edge as brands look for communications partners that can seamlessly combine traditional PR with digital and AI-driven strategies.

Why This Matters

PR has become increasingly intertwined with performance marketing, as companies seek visibility across both human and machine audiences. Avenue Z is leaning into that convergence, making PR part of its broader “AI Optimization” model—aimed at helping brands recover traffic and visibility in a search landscape reshaped by generative AI. It’s a timely bet, as competitors scramble to update their offerings for the AI era.

The People and Clients Behind the Push

Founder and CEO Jeffrey Herzog called the Flatiron office “a reflection of the momentum we’re building,” pointing to recent client wins including Republic Technologies, Prospero, Ualett, and Core VC. The agency continues to service long-term partners such as Sagard, Torch Capital, Athena Capital, and Tassat.

Leadership has also been beefed up, with new hires across media, strategy, and content, alongside internal promotions. VP and Managing Director Libbie Wilcox will anchor the Flatiron team, bringing deep expertise in strategic communications for tech, finance, venture capital, and private equity.

“We’ve built the PR team from the ground up, mixing outside hires with homegrown talent,” Wilcox said. “This office gives us a space to move fast, think big, and deliver meaningful outcomes for clients who are reshaping finance and technology.”

The Bigger Picture

The expansion places Avenue Z squarely in the middle of Manhattan’s competitive agency landscape, where rivals like Edelman, Finn Partners, and Highwire are also fighting for dominance. But with its integrated model—PR fused with performance media, digital marketing, and content strategy—the agency is betting that convergence, not specialization, will define the next chapter of communications.

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Google and PayPal are deepening their relationship in a new multiyear partnership designed to push the boundaries of digital commerce. The collaboration spans everything from AI-powered shopping experiences to embedded payments across Google’s ecosystem—setting the stage for a new era of agentic commerce.

“This is about making online transactions simpler and more secure,” Google CEO Sundar Pichai said, noting PayPal will leverage Google’s AI to enhance services and security. In return, PayPal’s payments infrastructure and branded checkout solutions will be embedded more widely across Google products—from Cloud to Play to Ads.

Agentic Commerce: Beyond the Buzzword

The centerpiece of the partnership is “agentic commerce”—AI-driven shopping and payment flows where intelligent agents handle discovery, purchasing, and personalization on behalf of users. PayPal brings the payments muscle, trusted identity solutions, and global reach; Google contributes AI horsepower and its proposed Agent Payments Protocol, a scalable industry standard for secure agent transactions.

This isn’t just a technical alignment. If widely adopted, agentic commerce could upend how consumers shop, shifting the decision-making from browsers and apps to intelligent intermediaries. That creates both opportunities and challenges for merchants, who may find themselves competing for algorithmic attention instead of shelf space.

PayPal Gets Deeper Into Google’s Stack

As part of the deal, PayPal Enterprise Payments will process card transactions across core Google platforms including Ads, Cloud, and Play. Meanwhile, Google Cloud will support PayPal in reimagining its payments infrastructure—suggesting that PayPal, like many fintechs, sees cloud scale as essential for staying competitive.

PayPal’s branded checkout, Hyperwallet, and Payouts solutions will also be embedded throughout Google products, potentially giving billions of users more consistent and streamlined experiences.

The Big Picture

The tie-up underscores how payment companies and tech giants are jockeying to control the future of digital commerce. Apple has pushed aggressively into payments, while Amazon continues to refine its own checkout and merchant services. For Google and PayPal, this alliance is a chance to create a differentiated standard for AI-driven shopping before rivals define the space.

As PayPal CEO Alex Chriss put it: “Together with Google, we are leading the way for digital commerce, ensuring greater opportunities for merchants and users worldwide.”

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Hightouch, the $1.2 billion data and AI agent platform for marketers, is planting deeper roots in New York City with a new office and a key leadership hire. The company, which helps brands activate their data for personalized, AI-driven marketing, has also doubled its presence in EMEA and now employs more than 250 people worldwide.

NYC Hub for Growth

The new Flatiron-area office is already home to 45 staff across sales, marketing, customer success, and engineering. Co-founder and co-CEO Tejas Manohar called New York “a hub for sophisticated businesses that want to harness their data to grow faster,” noting Hightouch’s east coast momentum.

The company’s distributed workforce model continues to expand globally, with headcount in EMEA doubling to meet demand for localized support.

New HR Leadership

Chelsea Williams joins as Head of HR to scale culture and people operations across Hightouch’s international footprint. Williams, who previously led People & Culture at Cordial, brings a decade of experience building HR programs for high-growth tech firms. Her mandate: strengthen hiring, onboarding, leadership development, and employee experience as Hightouch scales.

“My focus will be to scale a culture where every team member can thrive,” Williams said. “As we expand in New York and globally, we’ll invest in the people and practices that help our teams do the best work of their careers.”

CDP Challenger With AI at the Core

Hightouch is carving out a space as a warehouse-native alternative to legacy customer data platforms (CDPs). By enabling marketing and data teams to work off the same infrastructure, the company promises faster, more flexible personalization without the bottlenecks of older systems.

Recent innovations include AI-powered Adaptive Identity Resolution and expanded AI Decisioning, which automate campaign choices and scale personalization. The company’s backers—Snowflake Ventures, Capital One Ventures, and Databricks Ventures—reflect its role at the heart of the modern marketing stack.

The Bigger Picture

As enterprise marketers wrestle with fragmented data and the rising costs of customer acquisition, platforms like Hightouch are positioning AI not just as a performance enhancer but as an operating system for modern marketing. With its NYC expansion and a people-first approach under Williams, Hightouch seems intent on scaling as fast as the AI-driven marketing movement it champions.

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Klaviyo (NYSE: KVYO), best known as the CRM built for consumer brands, just picked up a major industry win. The company has been named a Leader in the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide AI-Enabled Marketing Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment for Small Businesses, and a Major Player in the corresponding midsize business category.

The recognition cements Klaviyo’s reputation as one of the few platforms purpose-built for consumer brands—and not just retrofitted with AI, but architected around it.

AI Built Into the Core

Plenty of legacy marketing platforms have scrambled to bolt AI onto their existing systems, but Klaviyo’s pitch has always been different: the intelligence is native. Its Klaviyo Data Platform (KDP) processes over 2 billion events daily across 7.3 billion profiles, giving consumer brands real-time insight into customer behavior.

That data foundation supports features like Smart Send Time, which pinpoints the best moment to reach a customer, and the new MCP server, which connects AI tools directly to customer data pipelines. The result: campaigns that move faster, adapt in real time, and scale personalization beyond what manual marketers can keep up with.

As Surabhi Gupta, CTO of Klaviyo, put it:

“AI isn’t just a technology shift—it’s a business growth engine. Our vision is to make advanced AI accessible to every brand, so they can compete at the highest level.”

What IDC Saw

According to IDC’s research, Klaviyo’s strengths include:

• Omnichannel automation across email, SMS, WhatsApp, and push notifications.

• Unified data and analytics through the embedded KDP for personalization at scale.

• Tight integrations with commerce platforms like Shopify that strengthen customer engagement and retention.

• AI-driven optimization for campaign strategies and performance.

In a space where consumer expectations are rising and every click counts, IDC called out Klaviyo’s ability to deliver measurable growth by embedding AI directly into workflows.

Real-World Impact

For brands, that’s more than analyst talk. AS Beauty credited Klaviyo’s AI with helping it move “beyond guesswork” to achieve 4x year-over-year revenue growth during peak sales moments. The platform’s predictive insights and automation allowed the company to personalize at scale and act on customer data instantly.

That kind of outcome reflects what’s at stake in AI-driven marketing: not just efficiency, but competitive survival. As Roger Beharry Lall, Research Director at IDC, put it, “Brands must operate with greater speed and precision to stay ahead.”

The Bigger Picture

The IDC MarketScape evaluations matter because they signal a shift from AI hype to measurable business impact. Platforms that can operationalize AI—not just experiment with it—are likely to shape the next decade of customer engagement.

Klaviyo’s positioning as a small-business leader with midsize traction suggests it’s punching above its weight against rivals in the broader AI CRM space, from Salesforce’s Einstein to Adobe’s Sensei-powered marketing cloud. Where those incumbents lean on sprawling enterprise portfolios, Klaviyo’s focus on consumer brands—and tight commerce integrations—could be its competitive edge.

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StackAdapt just pulled off a programmatic advertising hat trick. In G2’s latest quarterly reports, the demand-side platform (DSP) claimed leadership across three hotly contested categories: Best Connected TV (CTV) Advertising Platforms, Best Digital Audio Advertising Software, and Best DSP overall.

For those tracking adtech trends, the recognitions land at a pivotal moment. Streaming and digital audio are two of the fastest-growing channels in programmatic, and advertisers are desperate for ways to reach increasingly fragmented audiences. StackAdapt’s dominance across these touchpoints suggests it’s not just keeping up—it’s setting the pace.

CTV: Breaking Through the Streaming Noise

Connected TV remains a crowded space where advertisers battle for viewer attention across Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and beyond. StackAdapt’s CTV offering is designed to deliver scale and measurable outcomes, giving brands the tools to stand out amid the streaming surge. G2’s customer-driven ranking indicates advertisers trust the platform to cut through the clutter.

Audio: Turning Up the Volume

Digital audio, whether it’s podcasts, music, or live radio streams, has quickly become a favorite channel for brands chasing engaged audiences. StackAdapt’s platform aims to capitalize on that momentum with dynamic, contextually relevant campaign tools. Landing the top spot in G2’s Digital Audio Advertising category reflects how advertisers see real value in those capabilities.

Still #1 DSP

Perhaps the bigger story is StackAdapt’s continued hold on the Best Demand-Side Platform category. In a field that includes heavyweights like The Trade Desk and Google DV360, staying at the top signals sustained confidence from advertisers across industries.

Why It Matters

G2’s rankings are powered by customer reviews, not industry hype. That makes these recognitions a reliable pulse check on how platforms actually perform in the field. For StackAdapt, it’s further validation of its strategy: keep expanding into emerging channels while doubling down on measurable performance.

The company has built a track record here. From appearing on G2’s Best Software Awards lists in both 2024 and 2025 to maintaining leadership in multiple programmatic categories, StackAdapt has consistently managed to stay in front of shifting advertiser needs.

With CTV and digital audio accelerating, the takeaway is clear: StackAdapt isn’t just along for the ride. It’s steering the conversation about where programmatic advertising goes next.

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