Advertising & PR
Where the money goes, who moves it, and what happens when a brand’s story gets away from it.
Advertising and PR follows the spend and the reputation it buys. Ad budgets and media buying, agency news, programmatic, and crisis and reputation are the beats, and the Funny lane keeps the campaigns that earned a laugh. Three stories each weekday at 11, summarised in our own words with a link to the publisher who broke them. We choose for the reader who plans, buys or defends: the head of media watching a platform change its rules, the agency lead deciding which team owns a new channel, the communications director reading someone else’s crisis for the lesson. Under the day’s lead the editor’s note explains the choice and names the thing to watch. Sponsors and advertisers on The First Click are disclosed on every story they touch and have no say in this page.
Every story we have kept in Advertising & PR, newest first. Headlines link to the publisher; the tags below narrow the list.
Media Briefing: Overheard at the Digiday Publishing Summit, Sept. ‘26 ‘Google Zero’ edition
Publishers at Digiday's summit said declining Google search traffic will not recover, criticised opaque AI licensing deals, and described shifting revenue toward subscriptions and events.
Editor's notePublishers saying search traffic will not recover is no longer a prediction, it is a planning assumption, and that shift is the story. The same room criticised AI licensing terms it cannot see, which tells you the replacement revenue is not arriving from the companies that took the traffic.
HubSpot rebuilds its platform around AI agents
HubSpot unveiled a platform overhaul at Unbound26, centring Breeze Assistant to orchestrate specialised AI agents across CRM, marketing and sales tools, replacing manual tool selection with outcome-based automation.
Editor's noteEvery martech vendor announced agents this year; HubSpot has rearranged the product around one. Replacing tool selection with stated outcomes is a real change to how a marketing team works day to day, and it commits the company to a bet its competitors have so far only described.
Who owns your AI agents after they launch?
Marketing teams deploy AI agents widely but lack clear post-launch ownership; research finds most organizations report unclear accountability for maintaining, monitoring and retiring agents, risking governance gaps.
The answer to your martech problem depends on the problem
A CMO Council study of 988 martech stacks found revenue leaders do not consistently use more sophisticated tools, urging marketers to audit existing features before buying new platforms.
Apple Maps Has Ads Now. They Might Not Be Terrible, but You Can’t Turn Them Off
Apple Maps is now showing sponsored business listings in the US and Canada. While the ads are relatively unobtrusive and privacy-focused, users cannot disable them, marking the end of Apple Maps’ longstanding ad-free experience.
