The pace of change in marketing right now is not normal. Tools, processes, leadership, expectations, all moving at once. If I asked any marketer I know how the past year has felt, I think every single one would say the same word. Overwhelming.
So here is the most useful thing I can share with you this week. Take a break. Even a five-minute one, once an hour.
Get up, walk around, get some fresh air. The health benefits, both physical and mental, are extraordinary, and almost nobody does it.
What we do is not easy. If it were easy, the brands we work for and the teams we lead wouldn't need us to do it. The hardest part of this moment isn't learning the new tools or rebuilding the workflow. It's staying clear-headed enough to make good decisions while everything is moving.
Please take care of yourself first. Everything else comes after that. If you are not advocating for your own health, the rest of it is going to suffer no matter how good the strategy looks on paper.
Block the time on your calendar. Walk away from the screen. The work will still be there when you get back.
Now for this week’s stories.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
Don't miss this: Cut through the measurement noise with Level and Google
Thursday, May 21 | 1 PM EDT
We're hosting a Virtual Insider Session on May 21 that I think every senior marketer on this list should have on their calendar.
The measurement conversation in marketing is overdue for a reset. Too many signals, too many platforms, and too little agreement on what actually counts.
Ernie DeCoite, Level's SVP of Media, and Alana Parsons, Google's Regional Product Lead for Advanced Measurement for Agencies, will give you a practical framework for identifying what's actually moving the needle and keeping your strategy intact when the platforms shift.
They'll be covering:
How to identify which signals actually correlate to growth and which ones are noise
How to make faster decisions without sacrificing rigor
How to maintain measurement continuity when Google, Meta, and third parties change how they grade the work
They'll also host a 15-minute Q&A at the end of the session. Bring your hardest measurement questions and get them answered directly by a Google measurement expert.
What POSSIBLE 2026 made impossible to ignore The Level team was at POSSIBLE this year, and the recap covers what the room was actually talking about. The throughline across sessions: the brands winning right now built systems before they needed them. The ones still improvising at the platform level are losing ground every quarter.
Key takeaway: If you weren't at POSSIBLE, the recap is the next best thing. Read it before the conversations from that room make their way into your next client meeting.
Reddit shares key trends for in-app financial services research Reddit published data on how users research financial products inside the platform. 74% of Reddit's financial community say the platform influences their decisions, and financial services is one of the fastest-growing verticals for search-driven discovery on the platform.
Key takeaway: If you are in financial services and not actively managing your Reddit presence, you are not in the conversation your prospects are already having.
The numbers behind Meta's 'decline' tell a different story The "Meta is dying" narrative resurfaces every few years and has been wrong every time. DAUs are up, ad revenue is accelerating, and Reels is compounding. The piece is a useful gut check against the platform panic that tends to spread faster than the actual data does.
Key takeaway: Every platform looks vulnerable when a newer one captures attention. Read this, then go back to running your Meta campaigns.
Ahrefs tracked 1,885 pages adding schema. AI citations barely moved. Ahrefs ran a controlled study and found that adding schema markup had virtually no effect on whether AI overviews cited a page. A lot of advice over the past year pointed the other direction. The variables that actually correlate with AI citations are content authority, topical depth, and source credibility.
Key takeaway: Schema is not the shortcut to AI visibility. If your GEO strategy starts and ends with structured data, the data says you are optimizing the wrong thing.
YouTube released a brand growth playbook this week, and the framing is more honest than most platform content. The core argument is that reach and attention are not the same thing, and that most brands optimize for one while assuming they're getting the other.
The playbook walks through how YouTube is measuring brand lift differently than it did three years ago, and why connected TV viewing is changing the attribution math for campaigns that weren't built with that environment in mind.
The section on creative formats is practical rather than aspirational. YouTube is candid that the 15-second non-skippable and the 30-second skippable produce different outcomes not because of format but because of how creative is built for each. Repurposing a TV spot and calling it a YouTube campaign is still happening at every budget level, and the data shows exactly where that decision costs brands.
Claude Skills for SEO and marketing: what they are and how to use them
Ahrefs published one of the more practical breakdowns I've seen on Claude's Projects and custom instructions feature and what it actually means for SEO and content teams. The short version: you can now give Claude persistent context about your brand voice, your audience, your keyword strategy, and your editorial standards, and it retains that context across every conversation inside a project.
For teams producing high volumes of content, that's a meaningful shift. It's the difference between re-explaining your brand every session and having a collaborator that already knows the brief. The piece walks through specific setups for keyword research, content auditing, and brief creation, with enough specificity to actually implement rather than just inspire.
The part worth your attention is the section on limitations. Ahrefs is honest that Claude Skills do not replace human editorial judgment, and that the outputs improve significantly when a skilled editor is involved in the workflow rather than reviewing at the end of it. That distinction between AI in the loop versus AI running the loop is one I keep coming back to.
The AI content wave has made one problem worse: a lot of what gets published is technically correct and genuinely hard to read. Hemingway is the fastest fix I know for that.
Paste any piece of writing into the free web editor and it immediately color-codes every issue. Yellow for sentences that are too long. Red for sentences that are hard to read. Green for passive voice. Blue for adverbs you don't need. No interpretation required. The feedback is visual and instant.
Where it earns a permanent place in a content workflow is the final pass before anything goes out. Ad copy, landing pages, email subject lines, briefs. Anything where clarity is the difference between someone reading further or not. Paste it in, fix the red and yellow, and move on. The whole thing takes two minutes.
What does ChatGPT actually say about you?
When a potential buyer asks an AI agent for a Top 5 list in your category, do you make the cut? More importantly: Why or why not?
Don't leave your brand’s reputation to an algorithm you haven't audited. Our scorecard pulls back the curtain on how AI platforms frame your brand sentiment and which sources they use to vet your authority.
Inside your custom report:
Sentiment analysis: Is the AI's summary of your brand accurate or outdated?
Citation audit: Discover which third-party sites are feeding the AI your info.
AEO roadmap: Immediate steps to improve your "AI discoverability."
