Hightouch has closed a $150 million Series D round led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures, valuing the company at $2.75 billion. Iconiq Capital, Sapphire Ventures, Amplify Partners, Y-Combinator, and TD7 — the venture arm of The Trade Desk — also participated. The raise is the most significant bet yet on agentic marketing as a distinct infrastructure category. The company has grown over 100% in each of the past two years, driven by enterprise adoption of AI agents that automate marketing workflows end to end.

PayPal has introduced PayPal Ads ID, a new advertising identifier designed to replace the probabilistic guesswork that underlies most digital identity solutions with signals drawn from verified, authenticated purchase relationships. The announcement addresses a persistent gap in digital advertising. According to the 2025 State of the Industry report, only 21% of brands, agencies, and publishers say they are very confident in their ability to accurately identify and reach target audiences across digital channels.

The Trade Desk has named itself the first demand-side platform partner for DramaBox, the vertical short drama app, opening programmatic access to one of the fastest-growing content categories on the open internet. Inventory is live globally. The numbers behind the deal explain why TTD moved quickly. Short drama apps are projected to generate roughly $3 billion in revenue in 2025, about three times the 2024 figure, with the United States now the largest market outside China.

Semrush used the Adobe Summit to announce a formal operating model built around what the company is calling “Brand Visibility”—a framework designed to replace channel-by-channel marketing execution with a coordinated system for managing how brands are discovered across both human and AI-mediated surfaces. The launch is accompanied by two research reports: Brand Visibility Orchestration: How to Execute on the Brand Visibility Operating Model and Brand Visibility in the AI Search Era: A Strategic Framework for CMOs.

The debate is usually framed as a zero-sum competition: more European identity means less French identity, less Polish identity, less Greek identity. This framing drives most of the political conflict around EU integration and produces a considerable amount of heat without much light. It is also empirically wrong. Surveys of European publics consistently find that strong national identity and meaningful European identity coexist without much tension in the majority of respondents.

Positioning is the most leveraged work in marketing and the most frequently skipped. Companies would rather launch a campaign than do the foundational thinking that determines whether the campaign can land. Here’s what real positioning work looks like — and why getting it right changes everything downstream. Positioning is not messaging. Messaging is what you say. Positioning is the place you occupy in the buyer’s mind relative to every alternative. You can have beautiful messaging built on confused positioning.

Everyone talks about marketing funnels. Fewer people actually know how to build one that moves buyers from stranger to customer without leaking revenue at every stage. Here’s the architecture that works. Top of funnel: create a reason to enter. The job at this stage is reach and relevance — getting in front of people who have the problem you solve, at the moment they’re starting to feel it. Paid social, SEO content, podcast appearances, referrals, and community presence all serve this function.

Content marketing has been oversimplified into a rhythm: publish three posts a week, share on social, watch the leads roll in. That’s not a content strategy — it’s a publishing schedule with no theory of change behind it. Here’s what content marketing looks like when it’s built to convert. Map content to buyer stage. Awareness content pulls people in. Consideration content builds the case. Decision content closes. Most brands publish almost exclusively at the awareness level — broad, educational, low-commitment — and then wonder why content doesn’t generate revenue.

Email marketing has been declared dead so many times that the obituaries have started to look absurd. The channel is alive — but the way most brands use it is not. The inbox is the most direct line to a buyer who has actively granted access. The average person checks email dozens of times a day. The question isn’t whether email works — it’s whether yours deserves to. Subject lines are the entire game.