Brian McCarthy

40% of Agentic AI initiatives are set to fail. Read from Kelly O'Hara on how to be at the right side- building data foundation for success. #merkle

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 In the telecommunications race, the battle for market share isn’t just fought on airwaves, it’s fought in the mailbox. For national brands, the challenge is cutting through digital noise while reducing churn. Our President, Dina Kessler, recently shared insights on why direct mail remains the "anchor" of a successful omnichannel strategy in 2026. From hyper-personalization to automated retargeting, we’re showing how data-driven print scales telecom growth. Is your current strategy working as hard as your network? Read the full insight here: https://lnkd.in/eyzauxVP #TelecomMarketing #DirectMail #Omnichannel #GrowthStrategy #KesslerCreative #DataDriven

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CMOs demand guaranteed delivery, lowest CPMs, strategic flexibility, and outcome-based pricing. Physics says you can't have all four simultaneously. Principal media delivers three of them. The question is which three matter most. Forrester's new principal media report from the inimitable Jay Pattisall is very much worth a read, and it's going to trigger the predictable debate. Critics will argue agencies are creating conflicts. Evangelists will tout cost savings. Both will miss the strategic reality: CMOs facing compression don't have the luxury of perfect markets. I've watched boards push CMOs for guaranteed outcomes while slashing budgets. In that environment, academic arguments about strategic flexibility mean nothing. The anti-principal media argument assumes unlimited client patience, perfect information, and rational markets. Reality looks different. Reality is: your board wants cost certainty so they can model P&L without media volatility. Reality is: your CFO wants guaranteed delivery so you're not scrambling for Super Bowl inventory in scatter markets. Reality is: your CEO wants outcome-based pricing that ties media spend to business results. Principal media trades strategic flexibility for the three things boards actually care about: cost certainty, delivery guarantee, and outcome alignment. The Forrester report shows 80% of marketers are interested in principal media advantages. That's not because CMOs are naive about conflicts of interest. It's because they're making rational trade-offs under real constraints. The criticism of principal media comes from people who've never faced the impossible triangle. They can afford to optimize for strategic flexibility because they're not accountable for the P&L impact when media costs spike or inventory disappears. Yes, principal media requires transparency. Yes, it needs contractual controls and performance accountability. Yes, clients should cap how much spend flows through principal arrangements. But the mechanism itself? It's agencies finally building inventory positions that enable the outcome-based pricing we've demanded for years. I'm a big supporter as, for two decades, I've watched CMOs demand that agencies move from billing hours to pricing on outcomes. "Put skin in the game," they said. "Share the risk." Now agencies are doing exactly that with principal media, and the industry is calling it a conflict of interest. We can't have it both ways. Forrester predicts principal media will grow to one-third of billings by 2026. Read their report, then decide which three variables matter most for your business. https://lnkd.in/eKHg5qmk #PrincipalMedia #MediaBuying #CMO #MarketingLeadership #MarketingStrategy

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Lauren Evans and I recently were interviewed by Akash Pathak on his Growth Amplifier podcast about how marketing teams can Futureproof with AI. We covered a lot of ground in 20 minutes: - how experimentation velocity is becoming a critical KPI for organizations - how we’re using an AI + Expert workflow called Grounded Intelligence to harness the power of synthetic audiences and accelerate our path to insight by 80% - why and how leading brands are using AI to drive customer obsession - how Traction is building an agencyOS to operationalize how we’re using creating superhumans consistently empowered by AI at Traction and helping clients do the same - how to overcome fear and turn the revolution of work happening right now into your own competitive career advantage Definitely worth a listen with your morning coffee! Thanks, Akash, for having us on! #aimarketing #experimentationvelocity #syntheticaudience #agencyoperatingsysytems #groundedintelligence

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An effective tech stack is crucial for CMOs to capitalize on martech’s impact. Think beyond conventional RFPs and accelerate your martech vendor selection: https://gtnr.it/3VsXANG Gartner for Marketing & Communications | #GartnerMKTG #CMOs #RFPs

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This is an excellent article. Anyone responsible for MLM or direct selling ecommerce strategy should read it carefully. Most in-house builds don’t fail loudly. They quietly become a growth constraint. Launches slow. Promotions queue up. Market expansion turns into engineering dependency. Over time, flexibility disappears. Direct selling absolutely has real complexity — attribution, enrollment, autoship, commissions. But complexity doesn’t justify architecture that hardcodes today’s decisions into tomorrow’s limitations. At some point, leaders have to step back and ask a harder question: Are we protecting our business model… or protecting our past build decisions? You have to seriously consider Shopify. Not as a trend. Not as a buzzword. As infrastructure. Modern commerce innovation is happening there first. The question isn’t whether direct selling needs its own requirements — it does. The question is how those requirements are layered in without slowing the business down. If ecommerce feels politically hard to change, technically fragile, or slower than the market, this is worth your time. I'd love to get your thoughts. #DirectSelling #MLM #EcommerceStrategy #Shopify #CommerceLeadership #Infrastructure

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Modern loyalty lives in the palm of your hand. Merkle’s new partnership with Airship and Salesforce Agentforce Marketing empowers marketers to turn mobile signals into action, creating faster, more connected customer loyalty experiences. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3LnAd5e

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