Good morning {{first_name|friends}},

Look, I get it—Q4 planning has everyone convinced they need just one more tool to hit their numbers. But what if I told you that half of your existing stack is literally sitting there untouched? The real edge in 2026 isn't going to be who has the most tools—it's who actually knows how to use them.

There's a fascinating paradox forming in 2025: we're building more tools than ever, but using less of what we already have. The Gartner stat (49% utilization) isn't just a budget problem—it's a strategy problem. Companies are buying capabilities they don't have the organizational maturity to deploy. Meanwhile, the brands that are winning (Disney with OpenAI, Keen with real-time MMM, the 71% on first-party data) are all doing the same thing: betting big on fewer, better-integrated bets. The 2026 winners won't have the most tech—they'll have the most aligned tech.

Brace yourself, CMOs: the utilization rate for your beloved MarTech tools has cratered to 49%.

That means more than half of what you're paying for is essentially expensive shelfware. Gartner's 2025 Marketing Technology Survey is a wake-up call—organizations are drowning in solutions but starving for actual value. Before you sign that next SaaS contract, maybe audit the 15 tools you already have licenses for.

(Via Gartner)

Mickey Mouse is officially an AI influencer now.

Disney has invested $1 billion in OpenAI and signed a licensing deal that lets ChatGPT users generate videos featuring over 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, and Pixar. CEO Bob Iger called it "responsibly extending storytelling through generative AI"—which is corporate-speak for "we're not letting this train leave without us." For marketers, this signals the IP floodgates are opening. Get ready for AI-generated brand collabs at scale.

(Via MarTech)

Here's a brutal truth: your reps are out there on LinkedIn crafting their own "thought leadership" posts while your brand team screams into the void about messaging consistency. Meanwhile, your competitors are running coordinated social selling plays that actually convert.

Olli Social fixes the chaos. It's the platform that turns your scattered sales team into a synchronized social selling machine—centralized content, AI-powered personalization, and analytics that actually connect posts to pipeline.

Stop hoping your AEs remember the brand guidelines. Start orchestrating.

👉 Turn your team into social selling champions →

Finally, MMM that doesn't require a PhD and three months of consulting fees. Keen Decision Systems has partnered with MADTECH.AI to launch a marketing mix decision engine that offers real-time measurement, planning, and execution. The platform combines Keen's AI models with MADTECH's data decision intelligence, promising to collapse the gap between "here's what happened" and "here's what to do about it." If your current MMM vendor takes six weeks to deliver insights, this is the competition you should be worried about.

(Via MarTech.org)

Your website just got its own ChatGPT.

Wix.com unveiled AI Site-Chat, a virtual assistant that provides businesses with round-the-clock customer engagement directly on their sites. It's trained on your specific content, answers inquiries in real-time, and handles the 2am "do you ship to Alaska?" questions that would otherwise die in your inbox. For SMBs who can't afford a support team, this is the democratization play we've been waiting for.

(Via MarTech.org)

If you needed more proof that this industry isn't slowing down: the global MarTech market is projected to balloon from $175.95 billion in 2025 to $296.88 billion by 2030—an 11% CAGR that would make most SaaS founders weep with joy.

The growth engine? AI-driven personalization, CDPs, and the relentless march toward omnichannel everything. Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, and HubSpot remain the titans, but there's plenty of runway for the niche players who can solve actual problems.

(Via GlobeNewswire)

The cookie is dead, and marketers have finally stopped mourning.

A new report shows that 71% of companies have now adopted zero or first-party data strategies—a seismic shift from the "spray and pray" retargeting era. The drivers? GDPR, CCPA, Apple's ATT, and the slow-motion deprecation of third-party tracking. But here's the kicker: the brands that built real relationships (email lists, loyalty programs, community) are now reaping the rewards while everyone else scrambles to figure out consent management.

(Via MarTech AI)

Video is eating the internet, and AI is eating video production.

New data shows that 41% of brands have adopted AI tools for video creation—up from virtually zero two years ago. We're talking automated captions, instant translations, short-form content generation, and even full-on synthetic spokespersons. The implications for creative teams are profound: the barrier to entry for video content just dropped from "hire an agency" to "subscribe to a tool." Whether that's democratizing or terrifying depends entirely on which side of the invoice you're on.

(Via ClickZ)