TLDR Marketing 2026-04-22

Everyone says AI is a priority. Not everyone acts like it is.

Atlantic and Contentful's latest report contains insight from 425 marketing leaders — including 103 CMOs — on where AI investments are actually going, and who's getting results.

👀 Read it to see who's launching faster campaigns, personalizing at scale, and maximizing ROI — and what they're doing differently.

📑 The report includes a budget prioritization framework to guide your next moves.

⬇️ Get your (ungated) download of When Machines Make Marketers More Human

Marketing is becoming a core growth lever as fast-growing B2B startups invest heavily in team size, hiring, and new channels despite disruption from AI. At the same time, companies are shifting toward broader, cross-functional marketers who can execute across channels. Marketing teams average 13 people and make up about 4% of headcount. Hiring is strong: 87% of companies have open marketing roles and 100% of companies with over $500M funding are hiring. 34% of open roles focus on events and ecosystem channels as inbound declines. Growth and product marketing roles account for 37% of openings, which shows a continued focus on demand generation and positioning. AI is now a baseline skill - 84% of job descriptions mention it.

Experimentation is shifting from testing individual content to testing entire systems because AI has made variation cheap and abundant. Teams can now generate thousands of variants at low cost, so the bottleneck is no longer creation, but the infrastructure to evaluate and deploy them. Most companies remain stuck at basic A/B testing even though higher levels involve parameterized testing, automation, and self improving systems. Progress depends less on better tools and more on changing the organization's operating model, since feature-driven structures limit experimentation impact. Companies that align experimentation with decision making and decentralize ownership are more likely to advance and see meaningful gains.

Adding a clear “what next” section at the end of blog posts can increase conversions by 43% by guiding readers instead of leaving them at a dead end. A company had strong traffic from high intent visitors but lost them at the bottom of articles due to no clear next step. A simple section offered three options based on user intent, which included a newsletter, a group demo, and a personalized demo. This change unlocked value from existing traffic without extra cost and turned passive readers into leads. Similar tests across industries showed gains from 43% to 171%, which shows this is a repeatable pattern.

Most media plans undervalue discovery channels by focusing on awareness, even though purchase decisions happen earlier during planning. Pinterest captures that moment, and Circana data shows it drives real sales. 82% of campaigns generate positive incremental ROI and many outperform social benchmarks. Awareness here delivers lower-funnel impact. To capitalize, align campaigns to specific shopper missions and pair inspirational content with clear product cues and paths to purchase. Use incrementality testing like matched market tests to prove ROI.

Change your language in Google Maps settings, then use “Suggest an edit” to add your business name in that language. Repeat this for each language you want to target. This helps your business appear in the searcher's language and improves rankings for those searches.

This one-hour session walks through how the Slate team uses their own product to run their social content. They will share how they manage a UGC program with centralized assets and templates, highlight the features and workflows that save them time, and preview what's coming next on the product roadmap. It takes place today!

Extra is a new email app, created by former Pinterest designers and engineers. It reimagines the inbox around your daily life instead of traditional folders and subject lines. It uses AI behind the scenes to organize emails into a dynamic “Today” view that highlights what needs action, what's happening, and what's worth knowing, while sorting the rest into personalized tabs like events, shopping, and news. It turns email into a more visual and manageable experience.

Claude Design is a visual collaboration tool powered by Opus 4.7 that lets users build design systems, capture elements from live sites, and export finished work directly to Claude Code. The reception among early users was mixed, with the dominant criticism being that outputs default to a recognizable aesthetic of teal gradients, serif fonts, and card-heavy layouts regardless of the brief. The root cause is that Claude Design leans on a built-in set of default presets, which means outputs look nearly identical unless users supply reference screenshots or specific design tokens upfront.

For most of email marketing's history, getting into the inbox was the primary challenge and permission from a subscriber was a meaningful signal of intent. AI inbox management is changing both assumptions, inserting a filtering and prioritization layer that determines what a reader actually sees before they make that choice themselves. The implication is that the competition is no longer against the spam folder but against an algorithmic triage deciding what is worth a human's time. Email programs that survive this shift will be built around voice and reader relationships strong enough that subscribers actively seek them out rather than passively receive them.

Only 2 months into its advertising business, OpenAI is already operating at a pace that has surprised industry observers, with partnerships, hiring, self-serve tooling, and conversion tracking all launching in rapid succession. The urgency stems partly from competitive pressure, as Google can extend its existing search ad business directly into AI, and partly from OpenAI's own burn rate, estimated at over $111 billion through 2030. The company is drawing heavily on Meta's institutional knowledge, having hired several former Meta advertising leaders who bring a proven monetization playbook rather than requiring OpenAI to build the strategy from the ground up.

Marketing engineers map full business processes, identify where AI can remove bottlenecks, build those systems, and measure their impact on pipeline growth.

AI image models can now generate realistic, production-ready visuals with accurate text and design details.