A few years ago, every team at Level created a mission statement. Our operations team chose five words: do the unseen work awesomely.
I've been thinking about that phrase again because Myles Biggs, our SVP of Agency Operations, published a book called “Unseen Work” a few years back. Different context, same idea: the moments nobody sees are usually the ones that determine whether the visible stuff holds up.
Marketing has the opposite problem in that everything is built to be seen. Dashboards, reports, quarterly reviews, the deck you send to the CMO. The visible stuff is what gets measured, which means it's what gets rewarded, which means it's what everyone optimizes for.
But the work that actually protects a client relationship rarely shows up on a dashboard. It's the account coordinator who catches a media issue before it becomes a major problem. It's the team that rebuilds a CRM handoff so a lead transfer that took minutes now takes seconds, and nobody outside the room ever knows there was a problem to fix.
If you're only measuring what's visible, you're only staffing for what's visible. And the people doing your best unseen work are the ones you're most likely to lose, because nobody's clapping for them.
AI is going to keep making the visible stuff like reports, decks, and dashboards faster. It won't do much for the unseen work. That's still going to come down to whether you built a team–and a culture–that celebrates the people and work that often go unnoticed.
Don’t let this week’s stories below go unseen…
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
Virtual Insider Session: AI-powered media buying, put to the test
Tuesday, September 22 | 1 PM EDT
AI now runs bidding, targeting, and budget allocation across most major ad platforms, and the pitch decks all promise the same lift. This Virtual Insider Session puts those claims on the table and asks a sharper question: when the platforms optimize themselves, where does a media team actually create an edge?
Join Level media leaders Ernie DeCoite and Anjlee Majmudar, alongside PubMatic's Harry Tong, as they walk you through a live career college campaign as the case study. Moderated by Level's SVP of Marketing Brad Stephenson, the session will show what AI-driven media buying delivered, where human judgment changed the outcome, and which signals the automation could not read on its own.
They're saving time at the end for a live Q&A where you can bring your own account questions to people who run this daily. One more reason to show up: every live attendee gets entered to win Apple AirPods Pro 3, and asking something in the Q&A doubles your entries.
Search is fragmenting, and unified search is the response I shared this Search Engine Land piece before, and I'm bringing it back for a reason. On September 17, Level is co-hosting a Virtual Insider Session with Search Engine Land on unified search and how it maps to the way people actually look for answers now. Consumers move between Google, AI overviews, social, and forums in a single buying journey, and treating those as separate channels leaves gaps competitors walk through.
Key takeaway: If your search strategy still treats organic, paid, and AI as separate lanes, this is the piece and thesession that reframes it.
Facebook Groups are now Google's No. 2 forum source Ahrefs analyzed over 500 million search results and found public Facebook Group posts show up in 38.3% of Google's Discussions and forums results, passing Quora and second only to Reddit. Every Facebook link came from a public Group, and these posts surface in Google even for people who never open Facebook. Glen Allsopp suggests joining the Groups Google already surfaces for your queries rather than building one from scratch.
Key takeaway: The Groups your customers already talk in are ranking in Google, so find them and participate instead of starting your own.
Amazon's Alexa will now nudge shoppers before they think to buy Amazon launched "Update Me When," an Alexa for Shopping feature that sends personalized alerts when a tracked brand launches a product, an artist announces a tour, or an author releases a book. Alexa historically answered product questions on request, and now it anticipates the moment a purchase becomes likely. The setup is user-configured today, but automatic, suggested alerts are an easy next step.
Key takeaway: Purchase intent is shifting to the assistant layer, so clean product data and clear launch signals decide whether you show up in these alerts.
Google's Demand Gen drop moves the conversation into the ad itself
Google is testing an in-stream DM link in YouTube Demand Gen ads that opens a direct conversation with the brand, allowing a viewer to move from ad to chat without a landing page in between. For lead-heavy accounts, that shortens the path from attention to a real exchange.
Two more pieces of the drop matter for specific verticals. Travel advertisers get live local activity, event, and offer data pulled from Google, plus personalized hotel ads that surface more relevant properties to the right audience. Creative also gets faster: Asset Studio's multimodal video creation, now open to every Google Ads advertiser, turns uploaded brand guidelines and images into both horizontal and vertical assets in a single workflow. The workflow runs on Gemini Omni, the multimodal model Google brought to Asset Studio in May.
The through-line is that Google keeps absorbing more of the funnel into the ad unit, from creation to conversation.
Key takeaway: A DM link inside a Demand Gen ad only pays off if someone answers fast, so test it where your team can respond in real time.
Marketers are handing the wheel to AI while feeding it data they don't trust
Validity's State of CRM Data Report 2026 puts a hard number on a problem most teams sense but don't measure. Nearly 91% of marketers say data readiness is critical for adopting AI, yet only 21% call their CRM data very well prepared for the tools they use. Meanwhile, 45% already run agentic AI that they say can act without human review, and two-thirds of organizations increased the decisions they delegate to autonomous agents over the past year.
The gap shows up in the outcomes. About 19% of marketers said they frequently acted on an AI recommendation they later suspected was wrong due to poor underlying data, and another 43% said it happened occasionally. The problem worsens with seniority: 92% of SVPs and VPs reported acting on a flawed AI recommendation, compared with 41% of individual contributors.
Bad CRM data used to mean a messy report someone would eventually catch. Now an agent scores the lead, sends the campaign, or reallocates the budget before anyone reviews it.
Key takeaway: Before you expand what AI decides, audit what it reads, because agents turn small data errors into automatic actions.
Google Pics is an AI image editor built on the Nano Banana model that lives inside Google Workspace, with object segmentation that lets you move, resize, or transform individual elements and edit or translate text inside an image while keeping the original font. It plugs straight into Slides and Drive, which makes it a fast option for posters, social graphics, and campaign visuals without leaving the tools your team already works in.
For a marketing team, the pull is precision plus proximity: you adjust one object or swap the text in a localized ad instead of regenerating the whole image, and the file is already where your deck lives. It rolls out to Workspace Business Standard and higher plans, along with Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers, in the coming weeks.
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