The AI Marketing Companion

Bots are clicking your ads, and AI is making buying decisions you never approved. How do you benefit from AI agents without losing control of your ad budget? In this episode of The AI Marketing Companion, Sandy Carter talks with Brad Wardell, founder and CEO of Stardock and creator of Clairvoyance AI, about bot traffic, click fraud and what happens when Google, Microsoft and Meta turn AI-run ad buying on by default. Brad explains how bots differ from agents, why suspicious clicks deserve a closer look, and where marketers should keep a human in the loop.  WHAT YOU'LL LEARN - The difference between AI bots and AI agents - How bot traffic wastes ad budgets, and how to spot it - How agents can monitor campaigns, reviews and lead quality - When to let AI work alone and when a human should approve - Why human-written content still matters, and why attention is marketing's scarcest resource - How to plan for AI costs rising THE BIG TAKEAWAY Automation without oversight introduces new risks. The goal isn't to give AI more control. It's to know what you're delegating, monitor the results and keep your tools working toward real business outcomes. Are you using AI to improve your marketing decisions, or handing it control without knowing what it's doing? Tell us in the comments. Subscribe to The AI Marketing Companion for weekly conversations on AI marketing, automation and digital strategy. Guest: Brad Wardell | Host: Sandy Carter Sponsored by DaVinci Commerce, an agentic commerce platform that helps brands get discovered and bought inside LLMs. #AIMarketing #AIAgents #AdFraud #MarketingAutomation #DigitalMarketing

What happens when your personal AI agent starts shopping with a brand's AI agent? Sandy Carter talks with Diaz Nesamoney, CEO of DaVinci Commerce, about the shift from GEO to Agentic Commerce Optimization, why "mentioned is not bought," and how personal agents, brand agents and richer product context could reshape the customer journey. They explore what Meta Muse, OpenAI Dots, ChatGPT and the rise of agentic commerce mean for marketers, and what brands need to do now to make their products understandable, trusted and recommendable by AI agents.

CMOs are putting more than 15% of their marketing budgets into Al. But 70% say their own marketing processes aren't ready for it. Where Does Your Next Marketing Dollar Go? Before you spend your next marketing dollar on Al, look at what Gartner found when it asked 401 CMOs about their budgets this year. They are putting more than 15 percent of the marketing budget into Al, and 70 percent of them say their own processes aren't ready for it My guest on this episode of The AI Marketing Companion has an explanation for that gap. Marie Bahl is the CMO of Uptempo, whose software helps marketing teams at companies like IBM and IKEA plan and track every dollar they spend. She has marketed enterprise software for 30 years, and she writes for both CMOs and CFOs. Who Wires Together Every Marketing Dollar? A quick primer first. A point solution is software built to do one job: send email, run webinars, score leads, report attribution. Marie counts more than 15,000 of them sold to marketers. A large team might run 50, each bought at a different time by a different person, and few of them share numbers. In finance or HR, IT or a consulting firm connects the systems. In marketing, that wiring job landed on the CMO. Marie's description of the result: "We've allowed this crazy patchwork quilt of solutions to ineffectively represent us, and what happens in the mix is we lose credibility." Her one-line summary of the job today: "The CMO job today is mostly defensive. We're playing defense instead of offense." Marketing Is a Business, So Defend the Marketing Dollar Like One Marie argues that marketing is a business inside the business. Marketers build the market, and they create a series of products that deliver that market on behalf of what the company sells. Running it that way means trading impressions and clicks for measures a CFO already uses. She told me the story of IBM seeing its entire marketing budget in one view for the first time. The Kentucky Derby sponsorship couldn't justify itself next to everything else on the page, so IBM walked away from it. Could your biggest line item survive that same view? Play Along: Keep, Kill, or Hand It Back I asked Marie to sort five tasks that sit on a typical CMO's desk: Choosing and wiring the marketing software Reconciling the budget with finance Buying AI tools for the team Cleaning customer data Building the attribution report for the board Sort them for your own desk before you listen. Then hear which one Marie still owns herself, and the sentence she thinks every marketing leader should say to their CIO this week. Her challenge to all of us: "It's time to stop and ask for the underpinning that you need in order to be credible on behalf of your business." [Listen to the full episode] Hear Marie out, then decide where your next marketing dollar goes.

Andy Crestodina has asked more than a thousand content marketers the same questions every year since 2014, which makes him the only person holding a twelve-year record of whether content marketing works. This year's answers are the worst he has ever published.   Only 13.9% of marketers report strong results from their blog, down from a range of 20% to 30% that held for nine straight years. Another 18.9% say they no longer know whether their blog works at all.   What makes it stranger is everything that happened alongside it. Posts got 115 words shorter. Time spent per post fell by 50 minutes. And 92.4% of marketers adopted AI, which his data shows correlates with no improvement whatsoever.   Andy joins Sandy Carter to explain what is actually driving the decline, which tactics still outperform, and why marketers are abandoning those exact tactics. Influencer collaboration runs at 2.6 times the benchmark and adoption dropped 22%. Guest blogging fell 29% in the same year AI systems started deciding which sources to cite.   The episode closes with a round called Dead or Alive, where Sandy names a content tactic and Andy has to rule on it using his own numbers.   Andy Crestodina is co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer of Orbit Media Studios and the author of Content Chemistry, now in its seventh edition.   Read the full 2026 report: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/ Connect with Andy: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/   YouTube   Title: How to Lose Readers and Influence Nobody | Andy Crestodina on the Worst Year in Blogging Data   Description:   92.4% of marketers now use AI for content. Results just hit a twelve-year low. Those two facts are related, though not in the way you would expect.   Andy Crestodina has surveyed over a thousand content marketers every year since 2014. His 2026 report shows strong results falling to 13.9%, the lowest number he has ever recorded, in the same year effort dropped across the board and AI adoption hit an all-time high.   In this episode he tells Sandy Carter what is behind the decline, which tactics still outperform the benchmark, and why marketers are walking away from exactly those tactics. We also get into what belongs on a content dashboard instead of traffic volume, and why blocking AI crawlers hurts the brand doing the blocking.   Chapters (producer: adjust to the final cut) 0:00 Trees, scuba, and why he started counting in 2014 4:00 The worst year in twelve years of data 11:30 The least popular tactics work best 18:30 You are counting the wrong thing 25:00 Dead or Alive: eight tactics, eight rulings   The numbers from the report   • 13.9% report strong results, an all-time low • 18.9% do not know whether their blog works • 92.4% use AI, with no correlation to better results • Average post: 1,312 words, down from 1,427 in 2023 • Influencer collaboration: 2.6x the benchmark, adoption down 22% • Guest blogging adoption: down 29% • AI citations convert at 4.55%, Google search at 0.71%   Links Full 2026 report: https://www.orbitmedia.com/blog/blogging-statistics/ Andy on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andycrestodina/ Orbit Media Studios: https://www.orbitmedia.com/   Subscribe for new episodes of The AI Marketing Companion with Sandy Carter.   #ContentMarketing #AIMarketing #SEO #MarketingStrategy #AISearch

Creators are dead. Long live creators. The experimental era of creator marketing is over, and 40% of marketing budgets now flow to creators. The brands still treating that spend like a test are already behind. Jeff Barrett has lived every side of the creator economy: Shorty Award winning creator, creator partnerships lead for Fortune 500 brands like Adobe and Oracle, It's No Fluke columnist on Yahoo Creators, and board chair of the Creator Guild of America. In this episode of The AI Marketing Companion, Jeff and Sandy Carter get into why trust is pulling budgets toward creators, how creators became the new creative department, and the mistake brands make when they pay for authenticity and then script it away. WHAT WE COVER: ▶ The lesson Jeff learned wearing all three hats: creator, agent, and brand buyer ▶ Why 40% of marketing budgets now flow to creators ▶ Trust and the parasocial relationships brands can't manufacture ▶ Creators as the new creative department, involved from ideation ▶ The "ick": what happens when brands over-script creator content ▶ Why Jenny Hoyos is the blueprint for the next generation of creators ▶ How to select the right creator: motivation and niche fit over raw metrics CONNECT WITH SANDY CARTER: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sandyacarter/ The AI Marketing Companion is a top 1% podcast globally and a 5-time podcast award winner. #CreatorEconomy #InfluencerMarketing #AIMarketing #MarketingStrategy #JeffBarrett