Link Archive

TL;DR — Kieran Flanagan (CMO, Sequoia Scout) breaks down 5 AI launches that transformed marketing. Content Remixing: Gemini 3 turns YouTube into a content repository by extracting competitor positioning and viral talking points. Visual Creation: Nano Banana Pro renders text-in-images correctly, ChatGPT Image 1.5 enables iterative edits. A/B test 20 ad variations in minutes. Video: Sora 2 and Veo 3.1 collapsed video production from weeks to prompts. Automation: OpenAI Agent SDK and Google Workspace Studio enable agent swarms for competitor monitoring and lead qualification. Vibe Coding: Replit Agent and Claude Code let marketers ship ROI calculators and dashboards without engineering. One AI-enabled marketer with agents will outscale traditional teams.

TL;DR — RLHF causes mode collapse because human annotators systematically prefer familiar, safe responses. The fix: instead of 'Tell me a joke' prompt 'Generate 5 jokes with their probabilities.' This distribution-level prompting restores 1.6-2x diversity, improves human-rated output by 25.7%, recovers 66.8% of pre-alignment creativity. Works across GPT-4, Claude, Gemini without retraining. Python package available at github.com/CHATS-lab/verbalized-sampling.

TL;DR — B2B Reddit communities (r/msp, r/sales, r/sysadmin, r/marketing) now influence AI citations more than vendor documentation for certain categories. LLMs treat Reddit as high-value training data because threads contain practitioner experiences, edge cases, and corrections that static docs lack. Community managers now sit at center of AI visibility strategy. Brands consistently mentioned in upvoted threads get categorized by AI systems even without explicit marketing positioning.

TL;DR — Meta acquired Singapore-based Manus for $2B+ to expand AI agent capabilities. Deal closed in 10 days. Manus hit $125M ARR eight months after launch. General-purpose agent handles research, coding, data analysis. Meta will integrate into Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp alongside Meta AI chatbot. Manus will sever China operations post-acquisition. Fifth AI acquisition for Meta in 2025. Signals enterprise AI agents moving from niche to platform-scale.

TL;DR — Bain survey of 1,100 US consumers: 80% rely on zero-click AI results for 40%+ of searches. Adobe reports 1,200% increase in AI-referred retail traffic (Feb 2025 vs July 2024). AI-referred conversion rates now 23% below traditional search, down from 49% gap in January. Discovery, evaluation, and shortlisting now happen inside AI tools before brands see the customer. HubSpot reports up to 30% traffic decline to company sites. Optimize for machine-readable content, structured data, and third-party validation.

TL;DR — Google's third 2025 core update rolled out December 11-29. E-E-A-T signals and AI content quality remain central evaluation criteria. New documentation confirms Google rolls out smaller, unannounced core changes continuously. Sites hit by September 2023 HCU saw partial recoveries during June update. No specific recovery actions; focus on helpful, people-first content. Health, finance, news, and shopping sectors experienced highest volatility.

TL;DR — Stop freestyle prompting Claude Code. Three-phase system: Spec (define marketing outcome, launch milestones, create project spec with marketing and technical requirements), Stack (seven-step config including claude.md with brand guidelines, tracking standards, integration patterns, MCPs for analytics/CRM/deployment), Ship (three workflows: general for single pages, campaign-based for multi-asset launches, multi-agent for parallel development). Key insight: 15 minutes of speccing saves weekend debugging. Always verify tracking before considering anything done. 'Page is live' is not done. 'Conversions recording correctly' is done.