By Priya Singh

Following layoffs of over 200 employees in May, Google is now offering voluntary buyouts to staff across several divisions as part of its ongoing restructuring efforts. Rather than issuing direct pink slips, the company is encouraging U.S.-based employees in teams like Search, Ads, Commerce, Engineering, Marketing, and Research to opt for a quiet exit with severance.

According to CNBC, this strategic move—targeting groups under the Knowledge & Information (K&I) umbrella—reflects Google’s attempt to streamline operations without triggering large-scale layoffs, though the total number of departures remains uncertain.

In an internal memo, Google’s K&I chief Nick Fox made it clear that the voluntary exit program is aimed at employees who may be disengaged or underperforming, offering them a respectful way out. For those thriving, the message was to stay focused, with Fox emphasizing the company’s ambitious goals and workload ahead. This approach is part of a broader shift in Google’s internal culture following the major layoffs in early 2023, with buyouts now being used more frequently as a quieter, less disruptive means of trimming the workforce.

However, these buyout offers come with strings attached—many are linked to Google’s renewed push for in-office work. Employees living within 50 miles of a Google campus are being encouraged, or subtly pressured, to return to a hybrid schedule. The shift reflects not just a workforce adjustment strategy but also Google’s evolving stance on remote work, suggesting that those unwilling to adapt may find the buyout route increasingly appealing.

Google is quietly reshaping its workforce by cutting internal training budgets and prioritizing AI-focused skill development, signalling a clear shift toward its AI-first strategy. Programs deemed non-essential are being sidelined, reinforcing the message that employees not aligned with this direction may not have long-term roles at the company. While the move from layoffs to voluntary buyouts has made restructuring less dramatic, the impact remains significant as Google sharpens its focus on future priorities.

By Priya Singh

Sourced from Mashable India

By Martin Rowinski, Edited by Chelsea Brown

Executive branding is no longer optional; it’s a leadership imperative. Here’s why.

Edited by Chelsea Brown

Sourced from Entrepreneur

Sourced from The Drum

Kicking off our Creative Technology for Drummies guide, our glossary helps navigate the tools, trends and terminology shaping the future of creativity.

From smart templates to scene detection, AI assistants to virtual production sets, creative tech is rewriting the rules of how brands make and scale ideas. But with new terms landing faster than you can say ‘generative fill,’ it’s easy to lose track of what’s worth your time (and what’s just buzz).

Feature Image Credit: Polina Kondrashova on Unsplash

Sourced from The Drum

By Jodie Cook

Scroll down the feed of any social media platform and you see the problem. Everyone’s content is starting to look the same. As people get scared of oversharing or alienating people, or using AI to generate terrible posts, they start writing the same vanilla messaging and hiding their true colours. Their strong beliefs don’t come out. They pretend to be like everyone else. They blend in. But there’s another way: your weirdness could be your superpower.

You weren’t put here to go through the motions with posting online. It’s time to get real. It’s time to stand out. ChatGPT can help. Copy, paste and edit the square brackets in ChatGPT, and keep the same chat window open so the context carries through.

Stand out from the crowd: ChatGPT prompts for memorable content

Understand fears, desires and motivations

Get inside your audience’s head so they wonder how you got there. They have specific dreams keeping them up at night and fears that stop them from taking action. Average creators guess what their audience wants. Winners know for sure. They speak directly to the pain points that matter. When you understand someone’s deepest motivations, your content resonates on a whole new level.

“Based on what you know about my target audience from our previous conversations, analyse their deepest fears and desires. Create 5 specific pain points they face daily, then match each with a hidden desire they might not even admit to themselves. For each pairing, write a single sentence that would make them think ‘how did you know that about me?’ Make the language direct and use their exact words where possible. Ask for more detail if required.”

Rework the hook

You only have a few seconds to hook someone on any platform. Your first line determines whether they keep reading or keep scrolling. Everyone writes their hook once and calls it done. But the first version is rarely the best version. Your hook needs to create an information gap, make a bold claim, or challenge a common belief. Get alternatives and see which one stands out the most. Test different angles until you find the one that grabs attention.

“Take this opening line from my content: [paste your opening line]. Based on what you know about my writing style and target audience, create 7 alternative hooks. Make each one completely different – vary the structure, angle, and emotional trigger. Include options that are bold statements, create information gaps, challenge common beliefs, or use unexpected contrasts. Great hooks are not questions. They are hard-hitting statements. Rank them from safest to most attention-grabbing. Make each hook 10 words or fewer.”

Be more weird

Your first draft is safe. It’s normal, it’s conservative. It doesn’t turn heads. It doesn’t shock anyone into action. The majority water down their message to avoid offending anyone. They end up offending no one and inspiring no one either. Crank up the shock factor. Say what others are thinking but won’t say. Take a stance that makes people choose sides. Your weird is someone else’s refreshing honesty.

“Review this piece of content I’ve written: [paste your content]. Based on what you know about my brand and communication style, make it dramatically weirder and more memorable. Push every vanilla statement to its extreme. Replace generic observations with specific, standout angles. Add unconventional examples or analogies. Include at least one line that would make someone gasp or laugh out loud. Keep my authentic voice but remove all the boring parts.”

Get a critique from a cynical naysayer

Nobody learns from yes-men. You need someone to poke holes in your content before your audience does. Safe players surround themselves with supporters who tell them everything is great. Real growth comes from harsh feedback. Let ChatGPT channel your biggest sceptic. Face the criticism head-on and make your content bulletproof. Every objection you address makes your message stronger.

“Based on what you know about my content and target audience, become my harshest critic. Review this content: [paste your content]. Channel a cynical industry veteran who’s seen it all. Point out every weakness, cliché, and place where I’m playing it too safe. Question my assumptions and credentials. Be brutal but specific – for each criticism, explain exactly why it weakens my message. End with 3 specific changes that would make even a sceptic pay attention.”

Experiment with formats

Same message, alternative delivery, can mean the difference between minimal engagement and going viral. It’s tempting to stick to one format because it’s comfortable. But comfort doesn’t create breakthroughs. Your best-performing content might be in a format you haven’t tried yet. Keep going until you find the one that works. Test everything. Measure results. Then do more of what connects.

“Based on what you know about my content goals and target audience, transform this piece of content into 5 completely different formats for [social platform]: [paste your content]. Create versions for: a personal story format, a contrarian hot take, a step-by-step guide, a behind-the-scenes confession, and a predictive/future-focused piece. For each format, write the first 3 lines to show how the tone and structure would change. Identify which format best serves my message.”

Create content worth remembering: make your mark with bold choices

Playing safe guarantees mediocrity. But these prompts transform your content from forgettable to unforgettable. Get inside your audience’s head until you know them better than they know themselves. Rework your hooks until they’re impossible to ignore. Own your weirdness and let sceptics make you stronger. Experiment with formats until you find your winner.

Your content should make people feel something. Make them think differently. Make them take action. Make them cry, if you like. The world has enough generic content. Stop hiding your true colours and create something only you could write.

Access all my best ChatGPT content prompts.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Jodie Cook

Find Jodie Cook on LinkedIn. Visit Jodie’s website.

Sourced from Forbes

By Jess Kinghorn

I utterly despise Google’s AI summaries. I dislike how they’re placed right at the top of the page, I dislike how prone to hallucinating the answers I’m searching for are, and I dislike that when it does offer something vaguely helpful, it’s almost definitely scraped from another human that actually did the legwork. Thankfully, the Bye Bye, Google AI browser extension means I no longer have to glower at them—if only I could do the same for similar eyesores, like bus stop ads and marketing billboards, in real life.

Software engineer Stijn Spanhove is currently tinkering with an AR project that does just that. Using Snapchat’s Spectacles and Google’s Gemini, he’s built an XR app that deploys the power of ad block via the lightweight frame of a wearable (via Tom’s Hardware). Unfortunately, as an experimental project that Spanhove is still tinkering with, ads are currently being replaced by glaring red boxes.

That quirk aside, the demo video Spanhove shared on X is no less neat. The app’s positional consistency is impressive, and is seen ‘blocking’ out billboards, newspaper ads, and even branded food packaging once activated. This is thanks to the use of Snap’s Depth Cache library shared via GitHub, but this also makes the project a Spectacles exclusive for the time being.

Besides the Snap exclusivity, the biggest hurdles to my mind are those garish red boxes that are arguably more distracting than the ads themselves. Perhaps developer Stijn Spanhove will in future add the option for users to replace ads with something of their choice—like an AR mural to Miku Hatsune…hypothetically, I mean.

More broadly speaking, big tech keeps trying to make smart specs happen, despite even Meta admitting earlier this year they’d yet to crack a killer use case for their in-development Orion AR glasses. Speaking of Meta, the fact that what you snap or record with the company’s Ray-Ban smart glasses may be used to train AI models also turns me off from the whole tech wearables fad.

That’s all before even mentioning this student project out of Harvard that uses Meta’s smart glasses to instantly dox anyone the wearer claps eyes upon. Okay, I admit that’s a lot of doom and gloom about wearables—but you’re no longer thinking about my AR Miku Hatsune mural, are you?

Feature Image credit: Stijn Spanhove

By Jess Kinghorn

Jess has been writing about games for over ten years, spending the last seven working on print publications PLAY and Official PlayStation Magazine. When she’s not writing about all things hardware here, she’s getting cosy with a horror classic, ranting about a cult hit to a captive audience, or tinkering with some tabletop nonsense.

Sourced from PC Gamer

Sourced from OM

The decades-old doctrine of “Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl” is over, writes Fred Vogelstein in his latest feature for our newsletter, Crazy StupidTech, and as a result, the Internet in the age of AI will be filled with much-needed “tolls.” This change has come quickly.

“Google essentially invented the business of crawling in exchange for monetizable traffic a generation ago with Adwords,” writes Fred. “It remains the source of its dominance today. And it has been an essential fuel for the growth of the $16 trillion global internet economy.“

The writing’s been on the wall since ChatGPT launched, but nobody wanted to read it. We’re watching the great traffic heist in real-time. “Not only are more and more searches going through AI chatbots that generate zero traffic for publishers,” Fred writes, “Google itself is now sending publishers less traffic. Instead, Google is increasingly choosing to use its own AI product Gemini to respond to queries as a way of competing with the chatbots.”

In other words, AI chatbots are swallowing searches whole, while Google is playing both sides with Gemini. Don’t ignore the fact that this is a big challenge to how Google makes money. But it has deep pockets. Established media is living on fumes. One man’s crisis is another man’s opportunity.

Tollbit is the first to capitalize on this. But as Fred points out, Cloudflare and Matthew Prince are cooking up something new and will give @TollbitOfficial some competition and a boost.

I have been talking about this for a very long time, but the establishment media is always the last to realize their own existential threats. Just as they were slow to recognize the emergence of blogs, social media, and how Facebook was a chimera, they have been slow to realize that the old “destination internet” as a behavioural construct is over.

The addiction to traffic and impressions-based advertising has been an Achilles’ heel of the media establishment. It is hard for them to look at the world through the lens of engagement. The rise of “chat-based” informational interfaces is yet another victory for engagement-trumps-all doctrine.

To get a better understanding of this, feel free to dig into the archives of our CrazyStupidTech newsletter. If you like what you read, please subscribe. It is free. But before you do all that, read Fred’s piece. It is very good.

Sourced from OM

By Lovely Marshall

As of 2025, there are more than 207 million global content creators who build digital influence through platforms like YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn and Instagram. Creators are more than content makers; they’re economic engines. But while the creator economy is booming, the bridge between influence and infrastructure remains fragile.

According to Goldman Sachs via MBO Partners, the U.S. creator economy alone contributes over $250 billion to GDP. Adam Mosseri, CEO of Instagram, shared in Business Insider: “We believe creators are becoming more and more relevant over time. We are just seeing more and more power shift from institutions to individuals across the industry.”

U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) estimates there are 34.8 million small businesses nationwide, yet few policies formally recognize creators as part of that group. This is the untapped gap: Creators don’t always see themselves as entrepreneurs, and as a result, they often miss out on resources specifically designed to support business growth.

Influencers produce content daily, yet miss out on tools that could help them monetize, scale and build long-term wealth. To prevent what I call “Creator-to-CEO Failure to Launch,” here’s how creators can start using existing free partnerships right now to turn their visibility into viable ventures.

7 Essential Partnerships And Resources To Help You Build A Business In 2025

1. SCORE (Service Corps Of Retired Executives)

Why It Matters: With 10,000+ volunteer mentors, SCORE offers free one-on-one guidance to entrepreneurs across industries.

Action Step: Book a mentor at SCORE.org who understands digital marketing, pricing or scaling to review your business model, even if you’re just starting out.

2. Small Business Digital Alliance (SBDA)

Why It Matters: Backed by the SBA and Business Forward, this organization curates digital tools, templates and educational materials.

Action Step: Use their free business planning and legal resources to turn your content operation into a structured, scale-ready venture.

3. Local Chambers Of Commerce + Women’s Business Centres

Why It Matters: These groups provide hands-on workshops and funding guidance often overlooked by online-first creators.

Action Step: Attend a local business centre event. Even a one-time mixer can connect you to a lawyer, lender or advisor who can help formalize your brand.

4. University Innovation Centres (U Of H, Community Colleges, HBCUs)

Why It Matters: Community colleges and HBCUs now house innovation labs where non-enrolled creators can join pitch competitions, incubators or workshops.

Action Step: Search your city + “University Innovation Centre” and inquire about available small business or entrepreneurship resources.

5. Google Reviews + Business Tools

Why It Matters: A buyer’s decision is often driven by trust and validation, but many creators still lack visibility because they haven’t claimed or optimized a Google Business Profile.

Action Step: Create your Google Business Profile and start collecting reviews from collaborators, clients or brand deals.

6. Hello Alice

Why It Matters: With over $40 million in grants distributed, Hello Alice supports early-stage founders and women, veterans and creators of colour.

Action Step: Apply for funding, access business education and join their creator cohorts if you’re ready to scale beyond brand deals.

7. Verizon Small Business Digital Ready

Why It Matters: With over 1 million users, this platform offers courses, mentorship and $10,000 grant competitions.

Action Step: Enrol in courses and track your progress. Creators who complete modules qualify for mentorship and funding.

Real Voices, Real Impact

Gone are the days when we only viewed creators as entertainment. They’re digital founders. With the right partnerships, they won’t just gain influence. They’ll gain infrastructure.

Powerhouse Thought: Creators Don’t Just Need Platforms; They Need Partnerships

Entrepreneurs aren’t made when you hit six figures. They’re made when you set up your backend like it matters. If you’re already creating content, building an audience or selling a service, you’re not an influencer. You’re a business.

These tools are your blueprint to prove it.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Lovely Marshall

Sourced from Forbes

By Madeline Duley

With AI’s ability to generate art, content, codes and video, understand and respond to multiple languages, identify objects and even make decisions, the potential uses of this technology are practically limitless. Though no system is flawless, there are ways you can use this powerful tool at your fingertips to help you make money.

To learn how, GOBankingRates spoke with a self-made millionaire who has mastered the art of using ChatGPT to drive cash flow. You’ll be surprised at just how simple — and fun — it can be to let AI work for you. Here are six money-making tips you should follow.

Streamlining Processes

For Mason Jones, a self-made millionaire and managing director with over 20 high-earning affiliate websites at NDR, integrating ChatGPT into his business was a no-brainer.

“As my affiliate sites grew, I was spending too much time on repetitive tasks — like keyword research, content generation and social posting,” Jones said. “I needed a way to streamline my processes without sacrificing quality. That’s when I dove into AI, and, once I saw how much more efficient it made me, I was hooked.”

Generating Content Ideas

For website owners like Jones, staying relevant and engaging can be both time-consuming and creatively draining.

“One of the biggest challenges in affiliate marketing is constantly creating fresh, relevant content that resonates with your audience,” Jones said. “AI stepped in big time here. I use tools like ChatGPT to brainstorm blog post ideas and even map out article structures. If I’m working in a niche, I can quickly generate content ideas tailored to what people are actually searching for. What used to take hours of research, ChatGPT can now handle in minutes.”

While Jones doesn’t use ChatGPT to write content, he leverages it to generate topics, plan PR campaigns and suggest stock ideas, saving both time and energy without sacrificing quality.

“ChatGPT has been an absolute game changer for me,” Jones said. “I use the paid version almost daily, and it saves me around 20% of my time when creating affiliate campaigns, which is huge for revenue generation. The data and insights it provides are much more reliable than the free version, and it’s been essential in shaping my overall strategy. It’s really become an integral tool in my business.”

Identifying Keywords and Google Ranking Opportunities

Creating engaging content is just the start. Optimizing it for search engines is the key to driving traffic and boosting revenue.

“This was probably the most exciting part for me,” Jones said. “Using AI-driven tools, I’ve been able to identify profitable keywords and opportunities that I might’ve missed on my own.”

Instead of making educated guesses, AI offers data-driven insights.

“AI tools like SurferSEO analyse search trends and help me optimize my posts to rank higher on Google,” Jones said. “The cool thing is that these tools also suggest what’s missing in my content compared to the top-ranking articles, which gives me a real edge in the game. SEO is no longer guesswork; AI pretty much does the heavy lifting.”

Automating Social Content

To drive traffic to his sites, Jones relies heavily on social media. However, creating effective posts, hashtags and captions is time-consuming — and a task that AI can handle with ease.

“I don’t have time to manually craft social media posts every day, and that’s where AI has saved me countless hours,” Jones said. “I use ChatGPT to automate social media content — everything from post ideas to captions. Once I’ve written a blog post or created a piece of content, AI helps break it down into smaller, shareable chunks for Instagram, Twitter or Facebook.”

By keeping his social presence consistent without being tied to a computer all day, Jones has been able to use AI’s capabilities to free up time and energy.

Sorting and Analysing Data

For Jones, being able to identify top-performing content and make sense of all the data from his websites is crucial. Thanks to ChatGPT, it has never been easier.

“Tools like Google Analytics and SEMrush are great, but they can be overwhelming with the amount of data they provide,” Jones said. “AI tools help me sort through that noise and focus on what really matters, like which pages are converting best and where my traffic is coming from. This data-driven approach has been crucial in scaling up my ventures.”

Upfront Costs & Profit Timeline

Beyond saving time and reducing the mental strain of repetitive tasks, ChatGPT also offers low upfront costs and a quick path to profits. For Jones, the small investment was well worth it.

“AI tools are surprisingly affordable,” Jones said. “Most of the tools I use are subscription-based, and I probably spend around $100 to $200 a month on AI-driven tools like Jasper for writing, SEMrush for SEO, ChatGPT Plus and a few social media automation platforms. Within about three to four months of fully integrating AI into my workflow, I hit profit. My first $1,000 came much quicker than with traditional methods, and from there things have just snowballed.”

At just $20 per month, OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus is a bargain investment, offering higher-quality data and more strategic insights than the free version.

Final Take To GO: Your AI Income Stream

With such a low upfront cost, there’s little downside to leveraging AI to streamline your processes and make earning money easier than ever. Just ask Jones.

“Over the past year, AI has helped me significantly increase my affiliate marketing earnings,” Jones said. “Without getting too deep into specifics, let’s just say AI has contributed to a steady five-figure monthly income stream. The best part? I’m working fewer hours than ever before.”

Feature Image Credit: Robert Way / Getty Images

By Madeline Duley

Caitlyn Moorhead contributed to the reporting for this article.

Sourced from AOL

By Chris Suchánek

Let’s not sugar-coat it. Most companies? They’re winging it. They’re throwing digital spaghetti at the wall— running ads, posting content and hoping something sticks. But if we’re being honest, something always feels a little off. The message is muddy. The brand vibe is all over the place. They’re spending money, sure, but the results? Inconsistent at best.

Here’s the not-so-fun truth: Marketing without brand strategy is noise. And the world is full of it.

We live in a broken business culture where activity is often mistaken for progress. You hear things like, “Look at our likes!” and “We got 10,000 impressions!” But none of that matters if you can’t explain what your brand stands for. It feels like progress, but it’s not. It’s a treadmill. So let’s hit pause and call out what most people get completely wrong.

Brand strategy isn’t optional. It’s the starting point. It’s not something you slap on after your website goes live. It’s not something you retrofit after the Facebook ads flop. It should come first, always.

Why Do So Many Brands Get This Backward?

It’s the speed trap: Companies race to get seen fast. They want visibility, reach and buzz. “Let’s get the word out!” they say. But here’s the kicker: They skip the step where they figure out what that “word” even is.

So what do we end up with? A pile of brands that look shiny but feel hollow, campaigns that scream but say nothing, and messaging that changes every other week. It all looks impressive until you look beneath the surface.

When your brand isn’t rooted in anything real, every ad, post and pitch feels a little disconnected. The customer notices it too, even if they can’t quite put their finger on why. It’s like starting a conversation that sounds exciting at first but ends up going nowhere. There’s no spark. No soul.

Build A Brand, Not A Billboard

The strongest brands don’t start with marketing. They start with meaning. They ask the real, sometimes uncomfortable questions: Why do we even exist? What do we believe in? What can we offer that no one else can, at least not the way we do?

That’s what brand strategy is all about. And no, it’s not about logos or colour palettes. It’s about your brand’s core. It’s about your worldview—the stuff that drives every decision and shapes how you show up in the world.

If you want your marketing to stick, and to mean something, this is where it begins.

Brand Strategy: Know Who You Are

This is your foundation. Don’t skip it.

• Define your vision, mission and values in a way that influences real decisions.

• Understand what you believe and why it matters to your audience.

• Nail your positioning. This is the space you want to own in your customer’s mind.

A brand isn’t a product or a clever tagline. It’s a gut feeling people get when they think about you. Brand strategy helps shape that feeling so it’s consistent, honest and memorable.

Market Strategy: Know The Game You’re Playing

Once you know who you are, it’s time to figure out where you belong.

• What are you offering, and why should people care?

• How are you pricing, packaging and delivering it?

• Who’s your customer, and how will you reach them clearly and meaningfully?

This is the bridge between your identity and your actions. It keeps you from wandering in circles.

Execution: Show Up With Purpose

Now, finally, you can talk about branding and marketing. Branding is how you present yourself visually, verbally and experientially. Marketing is how you get your message out through campaigns, content, ads and stories. You need both. Marketing gets you noticed, but branding keeps people coming back. One creates interest, while the other builds trust.

Just remember, this is the last phase. If you start here, you’re building on sand.

Stop Chasing Vanity Metrics, And Start Building Real ROI

Metrics can be addictive. They’re flashy, easy to measure and look great in reports. But if they become your only focus, you’re losing the bigger picture.

Click-throughs and impressions don’t build businesses. Decisions do. Purpose does. Real growth starts when you slow down, ask better questions and build something with substance.

So here’s your challenge: Stop launching just to launch. Stop marketing without meaning. Stop throwing messages into the void and hoping they land.

Start with the brand. Build something solid. Say something real. Make your message impossible to ignore. Put brand strategy first, always.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Chris Suchánek

Sourced from Forbes

By Slava Bogdan, Edited by Micah Zimmerman

The classic sales funnel is outdated for Gen Z, as their shopping journey is now non-linear. It involves platforms like TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, focusing on viral videos, user-generated content and influencer recommendations rather than traditional ads.

By Slava Bogdan, Edited by Micah Zimmerman

СEO & co-founder of Flowwow, tech-entrepreneur with a 10-year leadership experience in e-commerce business. Building a glocal (global + local) marketplace that brings ultimate joy to your loved ones around the world.

Sourced from Entrepreneur