1. What is a use case and when should you use one?

Kicking off this quarter with this piece from our very own Bill Clark, who lays out the important distinctions between two essential marketing resources: use cases and case studies.

 

2. How to protect your most important (and undervalued) marketing asset

Whether or not you’re using AI at work, humans should be the loop, the Content Marketing Institute’s Robert Rose says. They’re ‘the spark, the judgment, the strategy that gives every tool meaning’.

 

3. 8 emerging trends CMOs need to watch: What’s next in content marketing

This Search Engine Journal piece is worth exploring: lots of ideas for how to connect your content with audiences in today’s increasingly Google Zero, AI search-powered world.

 

4. AI slop fatigue and analog intelligence

Enjoy this compilation of cartoons on the theme of ‘thoughtstipation’ (‘when we skip the messy, human part of creativity’) from Marketoonist Tom Fishburne.

 

5. AI Overviews cite AI-generated content more than human writing

Successfully bringing your content to the top of AI-generated search results is challenging, and this finding from Ahrefs raises worries that ‘we’re watching AI eat its own tail in real time’.

 

6. The rise of the creator conglomerate

What are creator conglomerates? This piece from Digiday explores how creator-owned businesses aren’t just creating content, but branching out into IP licensing, events and even consumer products.

 

7. I wouldn’t hire a content engineer, and you shouldn’t either

Another thought-provoking post from Ahrefs: yes, AI can let you scale content to unprecedented levels, but that’s not what we need. What do we need? ‘Weirdness and irregularity.’

 

8. 15+ ideas for remixing, recycling and repurposing content

The rapid rise of AI-powered search is creating a greater need than ever to refresh older content. This piece from the Content Marketing Institute offers some good suggestions for how to get started.

 

9. Why content is the most underestimated loyalty tool in B2B and beyond

Solid advice here: content marketing is about more than generating clicks and sales over the next quarter. It needs to be driven by a long-term goal of building trust.

 

10. Marketing career path report: What 100+ marketers told us about growth and job security

Lots of findings to chew on in this HubSpot report, including a trend that’s seeing some marketers trimming their tech stacks: “Cutting unnecessary tools was the best thing I did for my productivity.”

 

11. Zero-click content isn’t the enemy of ROI – it’s the future

We recently shared this link in a blog post about GenAI search and think it’s worth sharing again. Amanda Natividad, VP of marketing at SparkToro, tells a compelling story about how she stopped worrying about clicks to focus instead on building ‘algorithmic capital’ and value on investment.

 

Why 11 links? We had to ‘go to 11’ to mark the recent release of Spinal Tap II: The End Continues!

 

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