By Jim O’Leary

Like many communications and marketing executives, I’ve spent a lot of time listening, learning, and thinking about where our industry is heading.

What you need to know: The next five years will transform communications more dramatically than the previous five decades. Chief communicators and marketing executives face a once-in-a-generation shift as technology fundamentally reshapes how attention is captured, how information spreads, and how reputations are shaped under intensifying pressure.

Here’s the deal: The changes that are needed to survive in this environment map to what I call 5X: five seismic shifts that are reshaping the future of our profession.

1. The Attention Economy: Earned renewal

Traditional PR asked, “How do we get coverage?” Now the question is, “How do we create ideas people feel compelled to share?”

At Weber Shandwick, our Chief Creative Officer is fond of saying that traditional advertising creates work for controlled environments, like admiring animals in a zoo. Yet in today’s world, ideas get injected directly into culture’s slipstream and either survive the jungle or die.

• The strategy: Companies can’t buy attention the way they used to — they must earn it by creating ideas that move through culture, not just media.
• The impact: Winning ideas spread because they let people express their identity and values. Breakthrough concepts don’t just reach communities — they form them.

2. The Creator Economy: Influence redefined

Creators are no longer just a media channel; they’re culture itself. Their content consistently outperforms brand-owned content because audiences trust them more.

• The new reality: Brands must co-create with those who shape culture, measuring actual influence over vanity metrics.
• Why it’s important: Creators increasingly drive earned strategies, capturing attention that attracts traditional media coverage and fuels broader cultural conversation.

3. The Stakeholder Economy: Business meets culture

Political shifts and media fragmentation have created an environment where external posture materially impacts business results. Issues escalate faster, stakeholders expect more, and leaders must constantly balance the tensions between cultural relevance and cultural resilience to drive outcomes.

• Take note: This isn’t traditional “corporate comms” anymore. It’s about helping leaders navigate fluid, high-stakes situations where business strategy and cultural fluency must merge.
• The benefits: Modern corporations can now engage in predictive issue forecasting and real-time stakeholder intelligence, but only if they have the right partners.

4. The Experience Economy: Digital, integrated

Digital worlds crafted in games, virtual reality or augmented reality are moving beyond early awkwardness and clunky hardware to blend physical and digital activations into immersive brand experiences. The cameras, screens and speakers in our pockets will continue to take new forms.

• What this means: Audiences, who increasingly live their waking hours connected, expect personalized, participatory experiences across physical and digital touchpoints. Moments must be felt, not just seen.

• The challenge: Brand experiences and activations that only live in the physical world lack reach and don’t effectively reach a new generation of consumers.

5. The Intelligence Economy: AI as accelerator

Artificial intelligence isn’t just changing our information environment and business — it’s supercharging all four other shifts. Communications leaders and teams aren’t immune. Every executive should be contemplating how to use these tools for anticipatory decision-making instead of reactive responses and agentic orchestration of routine work.

• How it’s done: The ready availability of tools to create custom agents through platforms like ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini signals a future where every agency and communications team will need proprietary AI systems as a core competitive differentiator.
• The breakdown: The companies that succeed in this AI generation will look nothing like those that succeeded in the last one. If you haven’t changed your playbook, you’re already behind.

Why this is important now

For communications leaders: This confluence of shifts redefines how the value of communications gets measured, what skills teams need, and how reputation management works in a fragmented, increasingly-AI-paced media landscape.

For agency leaders: In today’s world, nothing is siloed. The separate disciplines of earned media, digital, advisory, influence, and intelligence have converged. Only those who operate seamlessly across all areas will survive the shifts reshaping our profession.

Looking ahead: Intelligence isn’t just another economy — it’s the force multiplying all others. Communications leaders who understand this will lead the transformation. Those who don’t will be transformed by it.

By Jim O’Leary

Chief Executive Officer, North America, and Global President, Weber Shandwick

Sourced from AXIOS

By Lowe’s Creator Contributor

The creator economy has moved beyond niche marketing – it’s now central to how brands build trust and grow. It’s a $250 billion global force reshaping how brands build loyalty, drive engagement and grow their businesses. Once viewed as a playground for influencers, today’s creator economy is at the centre of serious business strategies — and it’s only getting bigger. Goldman Sachs predicts it could nearly double to $480 billion by 2027, according to their 2023 Creator Economy report.

Brands are adapting fast. Across industries, businesses are moving from traditional influencer partnerships to more structured, community-driven programs. They’re not just sponsoring creators – they’re building platforms to empower them.

The Rise of the Creator Economy

Social media has democratized content creation, and consumers increasingly trust the voices they follow online – especially millennials, Gen Z and even Gen Alpha, generations shaping the future of brand loyalty. According to a recent study from Sprout Social, 61% of consumers say they trust recommendations from creators more than they trust brand advertising. Creators bring authenticity, relatability and niche expertise — the ingredients brands need to build real connections in a crowded digital marketplace. Even for a home improvement brand like Lowe’s, creators are valuable partners who help to build credibility and affinity.

Statista reports there are now over 200 million creators globally, ranging from full-time digital entrepreneurs to part-time hobbyists. These creators aren’t just marketing channels. They are community leaders, entrepreneurs and culture builders.

The shift has been so significant that it even dominated conversations at CES this year, where a panel on the creator economy highlighted how creators are reshaping not only marketing, but commerce and culture at large.

From Influencer Marketing to Creator Empowerment

Brands today are rethinking what it means to partner with creators. In the past, traditional influencer marketing was transactional — one post, one campaign. But the new wave of partnerships is deeper and more collaborative.

Companies now are building communities that help creators grow their brands, not just promote products. These programs offer tools like customizable storefronts, access to startup funding for business ventures, product samples, project sponsorship and long-term sponsorship opportunities — a far cry from the one-off campaigns of a few years ago.

Lowe’s Creator Network partner Chris Loves Julia

Courtesy of Lowe’s

Retailers are taking note. Lowe’s, for example, recently launched the first creator network in home improvement and DIY, designed to support creators at every stage of their journey. Their platform provides opportunities for creators to build real-world projects, inspire their audiences and grow sustainable businesses. Early partnerships include digital creators like MrBeast, DadSocial and Chris Loves Julia, signaling a move toward community-building rather than simple brand endorsements.

These programs are not just marketing tactics, they’re growth strategies. Empowering creators to build authentic relationships with their audiences leads to deeper loyalty and long-term trust – and the brands that they partner with will reap the benefits.

The Next Phase: Community, Commerce and Culture

As the creator economy matures, brands that succeed will be the ones that recognize creators as more than content producers. They are entrepreneurs, innovators and community builders.

The most forward-thinking companies are blending commerce and culture, embracing a wide range of creators – from household names to niche leaders, who inspire real-world action, not just digital clicks. By investing in long-term partnerships, brands are positioning themselves not just as advertisers but as collaborators in creators’ business growth.

Social commerce is at the heart of this evolution, and it is expected to reach $2.9 trillion by 2026, according to Statista. Creators are leading the way, shaping how consumers discover, engage with and buy from brands.

In this landscape, structured creator networks mutually benefit brands and creators. They build community and loyalty in ways traditional advertising cannot, while giving creators the tools and resources they need to turn passion into a sustainable business — a win-win.

Looking Ahead

The creator economy isn’t slowing down. If anything, it’s becoming more essential to brand strategy. Companies that empower creators — offering real support, building trust and fostering community — will be the ones that build a lasting brand legacy.

The future isn’t just about reaching audiences and generating clicks. It’s about building together every day to shape culture, commerce and community.

Feature image credit: Lowe’s Creator Network partner Chris Loves Julia. Courtesy of Lowe’s

By Lowe’s Creator Contributor

Sourced from Forbes

By Parmy Olson

Chatbots are pivoting to the ad model and optimizing for eyeballs, just like social media did. Remember how that turned out?

Chatbots might hallucinate and sprinkle too much flattery on their users — “That’s a fascinating question!” one recently told me — but at least the subscription model that underpins them is healthy for our wellbeing. Many Americans pay about $20 a month to use the premium versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini Pro or Anthropic’s Claude, and the result is that the products are designed to provide maximum utility.

Don’t expect this status quo to last. Subscription revenue has a limit, and Anthropic’s new $200-a-month “Max” tier suggests even the most popular models are under pressure to find new revenue streams.

Feature image credit: picture alliance

By Parmy Olson

Sourced from Bloomberg

By Ralph Jones

‘Find your strong’. ‘Succumb to the bread crumb’. ‘We’ve got your back, face’. Ever notice that ad copy is becoming increasingly nonsensical and often just bad? Ralph Jones digs into the weird world of modern advertising, where the end goal isn’t necessarily the selling of a product

was first conscious of something rotten in the advertising industry when, standing on a Tube platform, I saw a KFC advert looking back at me. I love KFC. I should be glad to see an advert for KFC. Instead, I was horrified by the poster. “Succumb to the bread crumb,” it declared. I stared at it for a while. “Succumb to the bread crumb”? How could you work on that ad campaign and choose that phrase, knowing that the infinitely better “Succumb to the crumb” was not just staring you in the face but clawing at your hair and screaming into your ears?

It’s hard to escape the niggling feeling that advert copywriting is getting worse. No doubt you have your own personal crusade: maybe it’s adjectives being used as nouns – the trend that had Lexus saying “experience amazing”, or trainer company Saucony declaring, “find your strong”; perhaps it’s the fashion for “I am”, which led brands like Mercedes to launch slogans like “I am Mercedes”. There is plenty to choose from. As brands shriek at you over the noise and AI threatens to take over writing of all kinds, is the art of great copywriting at risk of extinction? Are we struggling to find amazing?

Desperate to discover how a company could plump for “succumb to the bread crumb”, I went straight to the source. “We reached ‘succumb to the breadcrumb’ after a process of creative exploration, and it was one of 400 potential lines we considered for the campaign,” says Monica Sillic, KFC’s chief marketing officer. “We knew we wanted the copy to be punchy, playful and nod to the highly stylised world we’ve depicted in our recent creative. ‘Succumb to the breadcrumb’ stood out to us because it felt memorable and relevant to our breadcrumbed chicken, which is freshly prepared by our restaurant teams every day.” Why didn’t they use “succumb to the crumb”, I ask. “We deliberately chose to use breadcrumb versus crumb because ‘crumb’ could apply to a huge number of other food items, from cakes to sandwiches.”

There is no argument, of course. “Succumb to the bread crumb” is objectively one of the worst things ever committed to print, and a great example of how pedantry kills great copy. Even if you might have thought a focus group could have spotted this problem, brands don’t always use them, and may simply assume that critics don’t fully appreciate the work anyway. (A mini Mandela Effect exists here, incidentally. When I speak to Rory Sutherland, vice-chairman of the UK wing of advertising agency Ogilvy, he is convinced that he saw “succumb to the crumb” somewhere. KFC do not respond to my question about whether they altered the wording in reaction to online feedback, and it seems unlikely that they would have done, given how much they love the version they chose. Sutherland may have seen what his brain dearly wanted him to see.)

“There is a decline in advertising as poetry,” Sutherland says, citing a variety of factors. One unfortunate effect of a more fragmented population having less of a shared cultural lexicon, Sutherland points out, is that it is harder for phrases like “it does exactly what it says on the tin” and “should’ve gone to Specsavers” to have the impact they once did. For this reason, brands often try to go for the jugular. “Tone of voice has sometimes become excessively abrupt,” says Sutherland. “‘Just Do It’ for Nike – fantastic endline – but it gave rise to a whole fashion for what you might call ‘the imperative’ in advertising. I would argue that advertising is there to persuade, not to command.”

Another advert a friend alerted me to was one for shaving brand Wilkinson Sword, in which the reader was assured: “We’ve got your back, face.” The word “face” stood alone, miles away from the rest of the sentence. Given that this was an advert for a razor, the unwelcome – and presumably unwanted – image of someone shaving their back came to mind. I spoke to Dan Watts, who created that advert and a range of others with his team at Pablo London, where he is editorial creative director. Pablo knew they were going up against the mighty Gillette, so needed to give their client something that would make a splash. “You just wanna be noticed and get talked about. And if that means half the people are slagging it off and half the people are loving it, that’s great.”

So are these kinds of ads designed to be so unclear that they are talked about solely because of their lack of clarity? Adverts like one spotted two years ago for Ufit protein drinks – “So glad I don’t have a thigh gap, I almost dropped my phone down the toilet” – seem to make that paranoia feel justified. As one Reddit commenter suggested: “I have a theory that Tube ads are intentionally terrible so that you spend longer staring at it trying to work out what is going on.” I certainly stared at “Succumb to the bread crumb” for a long time. Did it make me want KFC more than “Succumb to the crumb” would have?

There is a holy sweet spot, of course, between “Succumb to the bread crumb” and an advert where no one knows what’s happening. “The best press ads always have a degree of obliquity to them,” Sutherland says. “You don’t serve a good advertisement as a hot meal on a plate but you do serve it as what you might call ready to heat. A good ad needs to have that Pot Noodle quality, where most of the ingredients are there but you do have to add boiling water yourself.” Some adverts judge this perfectly. Others – like L’Oreal’s “for make-up that lasts longer than your favourite cheese” – make you so bewildered you’re angry. But, as Watts says, no one remembers 99 per cent of advertising; so is it better to be remembered, however negatively, than leave no trace whatsoever? Many agencies would say yes.

Although it might feel like advertising has become both more opaque and more provocative, Watts doesn’t necessarily agree. He thinks, in fact, that the market has become more risk-averse. “Advertising used to be provocative in the right way,” he says, mentioning the Saatchi and Saatchi campaign for Samaritans which used the line “why you should think more seriously about killing yourself” under an image of a kitchen knife. Today, he says, this advert would be deemed offensive, and a more inoffensive version would be chosen.

Relatedly, copywriting may have fallen down the priority ladder in the industry, being stood on by elements like typography and photography. One of the types of advertising that has died, says Sutherland, is long-copy posters. Brands tended to assume that if people wanted that much information, they could just visit the company’s website. Rarely, of course, can people be bothered to do that. “People have lost faith in the ability of great writing to move people’s hearts and minds,” Sutherland thinks. The erroneous assumption today – conscious or not – is that people don’t have time to read a paragraph of copy.

As well as the indisputable truth that AI can now churn out endless variants on a tagline, putting copywriters out of work in an already saturated market, there is more concrete evidence that copywriters might be less skilled than they used to be. It used to be that you trained as a copywriter or as an art director, Watts explains. Now, “you get creatives, really. Creatives come together and they’re thinking in social [media terms], and they’re thinking in ideas. Nine times out of 10, no one is really brilliant at one thing; they’re kind of good at lots of things. The result of that is that you don’t find that many amazing art directors or copywriters because you don’t really need them in the same way that you used to.” He points to a diminished focus on teaching the art of copywriting, highlighting the 2021 closure of The Watford Course, a creative advertising qualification that condensed everything into a year. “It’s very rare that you need a copywriter to come in and write a beautifully written print ad. That was the job 20, 30 years ago.”

If you believe in the power of great writing, it is difficult to see AI coming up with anything as funny, elegant or charming as “drinka pinta milka day”, “beanz means Heinz”, “you either love it or hate it”. or even, “hi, I’m Barry Scott”. But advertisers will continue to resort to every trick in the book in order to get your attention. In recent years, in the case of Oasis, that involved giving up entirely – or creating a uniquely honest campaign, depending on your point of view: “It’s summer. You’re thirsty. We’ve got sales targets,” read one poster. “Advertising doesn’t work on you. Celebrate this fact with a tasty drink,” read another. The shamelessness of this campaign probably does bring a smile to your lips – something all great copywriters should do, even if they may be struggling more than ever before.

By Ralph Jones

Sourced from Independent

By Annemarije de Boer

How Google’s First Employees Turned Garage Dreams Into Billions and Revolutionized Everything You Touch Online

Susan Wojcicki rented her garage to two Stanford grad students for $1,700 a month. Those students? Larry Page and Sergey Brin. That garage? Google’s birthplace. Now Wojcicki’s net worth sits around $815 million while one of her former tenants owns a $100 billion empire. The employees who joined Google before it became a verb didn’t just build search algorithms—they created the internet as we know it. One became a neurosurgeon-turned-server architect. Another

ditched Silicon Valley millions to reopen a legendary recording studio. Their post-Google lives reveal the strangest truth about early startup success: money was never the point.

14. Susan Wojcicki: From Garage Landlord to YouTube CEO

Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to two Stanford grad students in 1998 while working at Intel. Those students? Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Smart move: she joined as Google’s 16th employee in 1999 as marketing manager, transforming garage rental income into $815 million net worth.

AdSense, Google Analytics, Google Images, Google Books—Wojcicki launched every platform that made Google profitable. As VP of Product Management, she advocated for YouTube’s $1.65 billion acquisition in 2006. YouTube CEO from 2014 to 2023, she grew the platform to over 2 billion monthly users while launching the YouTube Partner Program that made creators millionaires. Stepped down in 2023 to focus on philanthropic work and championing women in technology.

13. Salar Kamangar: The Revenue Genius Behind Google’s Empire

Tehran-born biology major writes Google’s first business plan. Sounds impossible until you meet Salar Kamangar. Employee #9 joined in 1999 straight from Stanford and immediately spotted the fatal flaw: brilliant technology, zero sustainable revenue model.

Kamangar authored Google’s very first business plan and became the company’s youngest vice president. Created AdWords in 2001 with a small engineering team—the automated text advertising system that became Google’s major revenue engine. He holds all four initial AdWords patents as the only named inventor. Then championed YouTube’s $1.65 billion acquisition, served as YouTube CEO from 2010-2014, growing monthly users to over 1 billion while launching YouTube Live and TrueView advertising. Media Person of the Year at Cannes Lions 2013.

12. Sergey Brin: Moscow to Mountain View Billionaire

Six-year-old Sergey Brin fled Moscow in 1979 when his academic parents faced persecution for their Jewish heritage. Twenty-five years later, Brin was worth $1 billion and controlled the world’s most valuable information company. 2025 net worth: $141-149 billion, ranking him among the top ten wealthiest individuals globally.

Brin and Page met at Stanford while pursuing PhDs, collaborating on the PageRank algorithm that became Google’s backbone. Launched Google from a Menlo Park garage in 1998, then served as President of Technology before becoming President of Alphabet after 2015 restructuring. Stepped back in 2019 but returned full-time. By 2023, Brin returned to lead the development of Google Gemini AI models following the release of ChatGPT. He also championed moonshot projects including self-driving cars (Waymo), Google Glass, and internet-beaming balloons through Google X.

11. Larry Page: The PageRank Revolutionary

Page’s Stanford PhD project called BackRub became the algorithm that ranks every website on Earth. PageRank measured website authority through incoming links—revolutionary because previous search engines just counted keyword frequency. The “random surfer” model estimated user behavior while high-quality inbound links determined ranking scores.

CEO from 1997 to 2001, then again 2011 to 2015, finally Alphabet’s chief until 2019. Net worth now reaches $148-159 billion as of June 2025. Page remains controlling shareholder while pursuing flying cars through Kitty Hawk and Opener, plus electric aviation via Pivotal. Founded Dynatomics in 2023—a Palo Alto AI startup focused on optimizing product manufacturing using artificial intelligence. Won the Marconi Prize in 2004 for transforming information retrieval.

10. Heather Cairns: The Culture Architect

Google’s first HR executive and second non-founder employee faced an impossible task: build company culture while hiring the initial 200 employees during explosive growth. Most startups ignore human resources until lawsuits force their attention. Cairns joined early enough to shape Google’s DNA instead of just managing its problems.

She left in 2005, but her legacy lived on as the original voice on Google’s voicemail greeting—a quirky tradition that lasted years. Post-Google life included graduate school for painting, angel investing in women-led companies, and now leading Coastal Streets, a real estate development firm. Cairns channels Google millions toward disadvantaged women through targeted philanthropy and proves that building great companies requires building great cultures first.

9. Urs Hölzle: Code Meets Conservation

Swiss-American software engineer becomes Google’s eighth employee and first VP of Engineering. Hölzle built Google’s entire technical infrastructure from scratch, including energy-efficient data centers and global server architecture that would power billions of daily searches.

Reduced energy consumption in Google data centers to less than half the industry average—massive environmental impact at global scale. Transitioned in 2023 from Senior Vice President of Technical Infrastructure to Google Fellow, focusing on research and innovation. Rare breed: technologist who codes for performance and polar bears simultaneously while holding World Wildlife Fund membership.

8. Marissa Mayer: Breaking Barriers and Building Products

Google’s first female engineer and employee #20 joined in 1999 when women in tech was still revolutionary territory. Mayer’s track record settled any token hire debates fast. She developed Google Search, Images, News, Maps, Google Books, and Gmail—basically every product that made Google essential to daily life.

Redesigned Google’s famously clean homepage and launched the Associate Product Manager program that trained tech’s next generation. Yahoo CEO from 2012-2017 attempting to revive a dying internet giant—failed spectacularly. Now leads Sunshine, an AI startup focused on personal productivity and technology simplification. Mayer proved being first doesn’t guarantee being best, just being brave enough to try.

7. Craig Silverstein: Google Employee #1

First hire by Page and Brin means maximum risk, maximum reward. Silverstein chose correctly as Director of Technology, co-developing Google’s early search engine code and helping shape its culture. Two Stanford students’ research project became a global phenomenon partly because Silverstein contributed to core algorithms that scaled Google’s operations.

Planned to stay 4-5 years. Lasted until 2012. Left for Khan Academy as dean of infrastructure, applying Google expertise to free online education initiatives. Warren Buffett’s giving pledge signatory as of 2014, committing billions to charitable causes. Being employee #1 at Google beats winning the lottery—barely.

6. Ray Sidney: Code to Community

Harvard and MIT credentials usually lead to predictable Silicon Valley wealth accumulation. Sidney went sideways. Fifth Google employee and software engineer worked from 1999-2003, then took a year-long sabbatical to question everything he thought he wanted from life.

Environmental awakening followed. Sidney redirected his fortune into philanthropy, sustainable real estate through Big George Ventures, and environmental advocacy. Currently directs the Hertz Foundation and serves on boards focusing on education and sustainability. Early Google money bought him the freedom to save the planet instead of just getting richer.

5. Harry Cheung: The Web’s Spider-Man

Google’s web-crawling system indexes billions of pages daily. Cheung built it. Nicknamed “Spider-Man” for developing the digital spiders that crawl the internet, gathering and organizing information that powers every Google search. Unglamorous work that enables the entire modern internet.

Angel investor and Roostify co-founder post-Google, simplifying home-buying for consumers who shouldn’t need computer science degrees to purchase houses. Cheung brings Google-level technical expertise to industries that desperately need digital transformation. Real estate was just the beginning.

4. Omid Kordestani: Business Growth Mastermind

Employee #11 and Google’s first business operations leader solved the company’s existential revenue problem. Technical founders build amazing products. Revenue generation kills them slowly. Kordestani understood how to monetize innovation without destroying user experience.

Drove Google’s global revenue from its first dollar to more than $20 billion, overseeing explosive sales growth and monetization strategy. Served as Google’s Chief Business Officer, then Executive Chairman at Twitter. Currently suing Elon Musk for $20 million in unpaid compensation while remaining involved with numerous technology startups and serving on major corporate boards. Business integrity matters even when dealing with the world’s richest man.

3. Chris Skarakas: Business Development to Rock and Roll

Director of business development sounds boring until you discover what Skarakas did with his Google millions. Left in 2005 for “philanthropic pursuits” that included reuniting 90s rock bands through Powers Sniff LLC and creating Blip.fm for music-enhanced video games.

Most audaciously, Skarakas reopened the legendary Record Plant as 2200 Bridgeway, reviving the studio where Fleetwood Mac recorded “Rumours.” Also serves on boards for Little Kids Rock and Palo Alto Junior Museum. Google business acumen applied to rock and roll produces surprisingly beautiful results.

2. George Harik: AI Before AI Was Cool

Machine learning felt like science fiction when Harik joined as one of Google’s first ten employees. Most developers couldn’t spell “artificial intelligence,” much less build it. Harik led machine learning efforts and product development for Google Talk and Google Video—foundational technologies enabling today’s AI revolution.

Instrumental in early AdSense and AdWords system design, the revenue engines that funded Google’s expansion. Left in 2005, co-founded IMO in 2007, now runs Not Bad AI as CEO focused on advanced artificial intelligence technologies. His early machine learning work anticipated the current AI boom by two decades. Angel investor supporting promising AI startups with capital and expertise earned when artificial intelligence was still mostly theoretical.

1. Jim Reese: From Neurosurgeon to Network Architect

Stanford-trained neurosurgeon pivots to tech startup. Sounds like career suicide until you meet Jim Reese. Joined Google in 1999 with surgical precision applied to network infrastructure problems. Built and scaled Google’s early network infrastructure while the company was still funding itself with credit cards.

Reese’s infrastructure managed billions of daily queries without collapsing—surgical training provided unique problem-solving approaches to server architecture that traditional computer scientists missed. Later transitioned to healthcare and tech leadership roles, including positions at Spark and Harvard Medical School. Brain surgery prepared him perfectly for debugging distributed systems at global scale.

Feature image credit: Gadget Review

By Annemarije de Boer

Annemarije de Boer is a Los Angeles-based director and visual storyteller specializing in technology reviews and digital innovation journalism. Drawing from her BA in Psychology and decades of hands-on tech experience, Annemarije uses her understanding of human behavior to demystify complex gadgets and emerging technologies for everyday users. Her journey began as a video editor on Final Cut Pro First Edition, and her expertise spans blockchain technology, cryptocurrency obsession, and digital security advocacy on X (Twitter).

Sourced from Gadget Review

By Steve Symington, Edited by Celine Provini

The company has been rapidly moving away from what made the old Google successful.

Alphabet’s second-quarter 2025 earnings call offered investors a clear signal: The tech giant’s aggressive AI strategy is paying off, especially in cloud.

Even as capital expenditures surge to fuel growth in artificial intelligence (AI), Google Cloud’s profitability continues to rise, marking notable progress in the company’s long-term pivot from its historical dependence on advertising to infrastructure and enterprise services.

Google Cloud: profitability with scale

Google Cloud posted $13.6 billion in Q2 revenue, up 32% year-over-year, according to CFO Anat Ashkenazi, driven by growth in “core and AI products at a rate that was much higher than Cloud’s overall revenue growth.”

The fast-growing segment’s annual run rate now exceeds $50 billion, placing Google firmly in the top tier of hyperscalers alongside Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

By Steve Symington

Steve studied computer science and mathematics at the University of Montana. Steve previously worked for seven years at The Motley Fool, where managed multiple real-money portfolios and wrote nearly 8,000 syndicated articles on long-term investing, stock picking, and personal finance. His work has been featured in USA Today, Forbes, TIME, Business Insider, Fox Business, Yahoo Finance, MSN Money, Newsweek, Nasdaq, Money.com, MoneyShow, and International Business Times.

Edited by Celine Provini

Celine is an experienced writer and editor covering news, features, academic/research, and legal topics for over 20 years. At TheStreet.com, Celine is a senior editor with experience across retail, stocks, investing, personal finance, technology, the economy, and travel.

Sourced from The Street

By John Tamny

“We could sell you a page of advertising for $100,000, tell you it was going to reach a lot of influential and wealthy people, take you out to dinner, dangle an invite to the Oscar party, order expensive wine, get you drunk, and hope you forgot to ask any questions.” Those are the words of Dana Brown, former Deputy Editor of Vanity Fair, from his 2022 autobiography, Dilettante.

Brown described how advertising used to be, and how in the dark occasionally overserved ad buyers once were. Ad purchases from editors who “weren’t data people” set the stage for change. It’s capitalism’s greatest feature: competing away high margins.

It rates serious thought as the Department of Justice (DOJ) inches toward the conclusion of its antitrust case against Google. The lawsuit was instigated by Google’s supposed “monopoly” over search, along with its alleged failure to provide advertisers with “transparency.” It’s a look backwards, in concert with a failure to understand just how much Google has vastly enhanced transparency and sales for advertisers. The speculation here is that Brown would agree.

All it takes to understand this is to compare search results on Google from July 25, 2022 to July 25, 2025. What users see based on any search or question is profoundly different.

The difference is an effect of intense competition within the search space, and particularly the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The release of ChatGPT and a myriad of other AI-trained search locales since very much calls into question the DOJ’s case. If Google had a monopoly on search, it would reflect in a lack of search-result evolution at Google. Why compete when you’re a monopoly? Why indeed.

Also, why invest in an uncertain AI future to the tune of $85 billion (the amount Google’s parent, Alphabet, is investing in AI in 2025 alone) if your future is already secure; the future born of your control of the present and future? In the words of DOJ attorney David Dahlquist, “This court has an opportunity to remedy a monopoly that has controlled the internet for today’s generation and restore competition for decades to come.”

Except that there’s no monopoly. See the profound evolution of search results on the alleged monopoly offender in Google. Then see Alphabet’s substantial investment in the very technology that promises to render search results from today unrecognizable relative to the future. Or see yet again Dana Brown’s memoirs.

While the Brown quote that opened this opinion piece has already vivified just how in-the-dark ad buyers used to be, there’s more to know. Brown’s memoirs explain why the old ways of ad sales were rendered obsolete. Google and Facebook loom large. In Brown’s words, Facebook and Google “were able to target advertising at very specific demographics and then show advertisers actual figures of who saw the ad, who clicked on it, and who made a purchase.”

Contrast the above with the days when ad buyers were plied with alcohol so that they wouldn’t ask difficult questions from people who probably couldn’t answer them to begin with. Not so with Google and Facebook. As Brown recalls, “They were data-driven businesses.”

Yet the DOJ claims Google hasn’t been transparent enough with buyers? More realistically, its success is an effect of bringing transparency and data to purchases that were formerly a speculation. Which is just a comment that the DOJ isn’t just looking backwards with its lawsuit, it also looking into the past without understanding just how substantially Google has improved the present and future by ending for good the opaque nature of ad-buying from the past.

Feature image credit: Getty Images

By John Tamny

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