Customer acquisition costs can ruin a business. Some merchants limit acquisition spend to the gross margin of the first sale. Others look to customers’ lifetime value.
Yet Taylor Holiday, CEO of the agency Common Thread Collective, profits from acquisition marketing. He calls it “negative CAC.”
Taylor first appeared on the podcast in 2020. In our recent conversation, he explained his acquisition strategy, experiences with employee ownership, and more.
The audio from our entire discussion is embedded below. The transcript is condensed and edited for clarity.
Eric Bandholz: Give us the rundown.
Taylor Holiday: I’m the CEO of Common Thread Collective, an ecommerce marketing agency that helps brands grow predictably and profitably. We’ve been at it for over a decade. Recently, we partnered with Acacia, a private equity firm, to expand our platform and pursue the next phase of growth.
We operate with an employee stock ownership plan, an ESOP. Our company took a bank loan to buy 20% of equity from existing shareholders and placed it in a trust for employees. Shares are allocated annually based on each employee’s salary as a percentage of total payroll. For example, if payroll is $1 million and you earn $100,000, you’d get 10% of each share allocation.
Employees receive shares tax-free, with no purchase cost. If they leave, the company must buy back their shares, making them relatively liquid. ESOPs can buy out partners or provide owner liquidity, but they require education, vesting schedules, and carry liabilities on the balance sheet. Well-known companies like King’s Hawaiian are fully employee-owned.
Bandholz: Would you do it again?
Holiday: Probably not. Employees didn’t fully understand the ESOP, and it didn’t change behavior as I’d hoped. Plus, it complicates an eventual sale of a business, and the operational challenges are significant.
There’s a book on “community capitalism” that explores alternatives to pure capitalism and socialism. Capitalism can overly concentrate wealth, while socialism has its flaws. Many people sense the shortcomings of both systems but haven’t found a perfect alternative. For me, the ESOP wasn’t that solution. It was a noble attempt, but I don’t believe it resolves the core issues — and maybe nothing fully can, given human nature.
Bandholz: Before this interview, you referenced negative customer acquisition costs. Can you talk about that?
Holiday: Negative CAC means our marketing generates profit instead of being a cost. Initially, our podcast, videos, and email newsletter were purely for lead generation — effective but costly to scale. We realized these were valuable media assets for which companies, especially software vendors in our space, would pay to access our audience.
By selling sponsorships to our podcast, email list, YouTube channel, and social content, we offset production costs and, in some cases, made them profitable. This shift turned marketing into a profit center, improving margins and fueling growth.
There’s currently high advertiser demand, but a limited supply of quality, ecommerce-focused media. A small group of creators dominates sponsorships because they have niche authority. However, most operate independently with fragmented sales processes and no funding for new content creation.
I see an opportunity to unite strong content creators, build a shared sales engine, and package sponsorship offerings, similar to how The Ringer network scaled before being acquired by Spotify. Whether it’s launching new shows or helping others monetize existing ones, it’s about building the pipeline, finding sponsors, and providing the resources many creators lack.
Many brands turn costly activities into content that drives sales. For example, Vktry (pronounced “victory”), a performance insole company, outfits entire sports teams, such as UCLA volleyball. Vktry films the training sessions and uses that authentic, authority-rich footage as ad content. What would typically be a sales or training expense becomes a marketing asset, fueling ads and reducing acquisition costs.
Another example is Alex Hormozi, co-founder of Acquisition.com, a business education firm, who hosts high-ticket weekend seminars. Attendees pay to learn, and he films the sessions for ongoing distribution. He’s essentially getting paid to produce content that generates more revenue, creating a self-sustaining cycle.
In contrast, most ecommerce brands spend heavily on production, then on distribution, and hope the ads meet their CAC goals. Finding ways to subsidize or monetize production upfront can turn marketing into a profit driver rather than a cost center.
Bandholz: Where can people follow you, learn from you, and use your services?
With over 2 billion monthly active users, standing out on the platform requires strategy and content planning.
A content plan is an essential blueprint to help you keep your posts aligned with your strategy and your overall marketing goals.
Posting without a plan can just be a wasted effort without clear direction.
To support your brand’s conversion and success, this guide has a free Instagram content plan template and helpful tips that you can customise for your brand.
So, let’s try to capture some of those users.
1. Create Your Content Calendar
A well-structured plan is your roadmap to guide your path, help you meet your goals, and schedule campaigns effectively.
For this purpose, our template comes with an Overview tab and monthly planning tabs with flexible weekly layouts to give you a bird’s-eye view of your content.
It will help you know when you’ve met your goal and can readjust and analyze ways to improve your content strategy for your next one.
Plus, an Instagram content plan can keep ideas, budgets, themes, and marketing initiatives categorized. It also helps you identify any content gaps and build consistency – a key to Instagram success.
Begin with the Overview tab by outlining campaign cycles, including key conversion goals, strategic themes, and content pillars with associated budgets.
Move to the main weekly sheet to refine execution. Decide topics and post type, craft appropriate captions, align with campaign types, and define CTAs that support your marketing funnel objectives.
Finally, after you have the above laid out and initial captions, you can move to the next step: Create or assign the necessary key visuals or assets.
Breaking content planning into smaller, actionable steps makes it easier to create a content calendar.
Bonus Tip: Sync With Existing Marketing Initiatives
With a helpful overview or dashboard (included in our Instagram Content Plan), you can map out your seasonal themes, align your topics with days you’re posting, and have your captions and hashtags ready to easily copy and paste when you’re ready to schedule your content.
Screenshot by author, July 2025
If you already have some marketing initiatives, it’s the perfect time to incorporate them into your marketing campaign. For example, maybe you have a new product release.
You can then build a content series around it. Tease the product release with a few posts, run a giveaway, feature an influencer using the product in a video, and highlight key benefits throughout.
Events and holidays offer opportunities to boost engagement and attract new customers. They are another fun and positive way to get customers talking about your brand. Holiday giveaways or deals are another way to grow brand awareness and gain followers.
If you have an event coming up, you can create a campaign hyping the event and discussing the speakers involved, products that will be there, or awesome grab bags you’re giving away at the event.
We recommend pairing our Marketing Calendar for 2025 when creating your Instagram content plan to tie in your creative campaigns with holidays and seasonal themes for the week, month, or even quarter.
2. Define Your Goals
Once you have your content template and before you plan your posts, what you want to do is create your Instagram goals.
What do you want to accomplish? Is it to grow your audience, drive more engagement, or increase product sign-ups?
Once you know this, you can set the key performance indicators (KPIs) to mark different points of analysis you want to observe along with your Instagram campaign.
For example, you want to grow your audience by 20% by the end of the campaign cycle, or you wish to increase your engagement rate to at least 0.43%.
After you select your conversion goals, it’s beneficial to break down your goal into milestones you would like to reach.
This way, you can map out the type of content needed for each and track your progress using the KPIs you’ve set above.
Screenshot from author, July 2025
Ask yourself: What milestones can you mark to achieve that goal along the way? What types of content, topics, or content series can you create to increase engagement?
Write down all the goals you think your brand can reasonably achieve (Pro tip: the trick is to make it SMART).
3. Keep Your Theme And Tone Consistent
If you want to keep your posts engaging, ensure visual and tonal consistency by developing a brand guide. You’ll also want to maintain a cohesive theme across all posts, including style, typography, and color palette.
For inspiration, you can look at your website, content, and logos to help create the proper tone and theme for your posts.
Think about the look of your content for both pictures and videos, and consider a consistent angle or filter to set the right tone and look for your content.
It’s also vital to create standard operating procedures (SOPs) about your messaging, whether for captions, comments, or responses to direct messages, because chances are, multiple people are managing the account.
How you respond to consumers on Instagram matters, especially if you have multiple people responding to comments and messages, to ensure it’s within the brand’s tone.
4. Showcase Your Creativity: Instagram Post Types (With Examples)
Instagram is more than just an aesthetic photo-sharing app. It’s a significant platform that can showcase your product in different formats to entertain, engage, and educate audiences.
There are various ways to create content for Instagram that can highlight your brand and increase engagement.
Let’s talk through them for best practices for each use case:
Photos
Pictures are a great way to showcase products’ USPs, share thought leadership quotes, relatable memes, or announce new feature updates.
It’s also great for posing questions that you can answer in your image caption, or promoting deals or giveaways through the use of compelling captions.
Example: HubSpot’s AI-generated meme of its customer service rep as a toy figure catches attention and serves as a conversation starter.
Carousels
What can your company do when you have multiple photos from your high-end photoshoot but don’t want to post them into a grid or oversaturate your feed? Try beautifully crafted carousels to ensure return on investment (ROI).
Carousels have been a mainstay on Instagram since 2015. It is a collection of 10 photos you can post all at once, now expandable up to 20.
To entice your audience, make it interesting to swipe right with chronological storytelling, collage/magazine cutout elements, text overlays, or a narrative.
Example: Clickup’s photo of its new AI calendar features text overlay, seamlessly transitioning between both static and dynamic photos and tutorial short videos.
Reels
Next, videos are an excellent way to show sneak peeks of something coming up or create product teasers. You can also use videos for behind-the-scenes content to build product hype.
Consider using Instagram Reels, or short videos, to showcase products, share stories, and grow your audience.
By the way, Instagram discontinued IGTV, or Instagram TV, back in 2021, but you can post longer videos in-feed. Brands use these to go more in-depth into describing a particular topic.
Stories
Meanwhile, Stories are photos or videos that last 24 hours (unless you add them to your highlights on your profile), where you can share posts from your profile or post new content.
It’s a popular way to gain more followers and engage with consumers.
Example: Even if Stories expire after 24 hours, they still remain valuable. Sprout Social curated its Stories into its “Trending” highlights, showcasing key events and social media insights, such as the Oscars, Coachella, and Art Basel.
User Generated Content (UGC)
User-generated content, or content created by influencers, customers, or other users, is a great way to extend your reach to different audiences and further promote your products.
People are more intrigued to learn about a new product if it’s promoted by someone they already follow. Likewise, it can help build trust with consumers new to your brand if they see a post by a customer who already loves it.
Example: Slack featured its No. 1 “Slacker,” Rox (a senior social media manager at Gozney), as a fun UGC post, where she apparently sent the most Slack messages in a year.
But what content goes viral? It can be beneficial to look at what your competitors are posting on Instagram and put your brand’s unique twist on it.
5. Craft Compelling Captions And CTAs
While it’s great to have high-quality pictures and engaging videos, the captions and call to action still matter.
If you hooked the consumer with your picture or video, you still want to reel them in with your caption and CTA.
Screenshot by author, July 2025
It’s essential to craft the right CTA to ensure consumers follow your page, engage with your post, or purchase your product.
Consider A/B testing to identify the right approach for your campaigns. A compelling call-to-action is clear, concise, and written in an active voice.
6. Choose The Correct Hashtags
Researching and choosing the right hashtags is crucial to ensure your posts reach the intended audience and some new ones that might be interested in your niche and brand.
Hashtags allow your content to reach users beyond your profile’s following as you create content for specific hashtags. Note which posts perform particularly well.
That way, you can create future posts for specific hashtags that will increase your content’s visibility to a broader audience, helping you achieve more brand awareness.
7. Know The Best Time To Post
Planning posts ahead of time can help alleviate some stress from social media strategy.
You can use Meta Business Suites to schedule posts for Facebook and Instagram and set posts for a week or a couple of weeks.
If you’re unsure when to post, here are suggested days and times where analysis points to where you’ll get the most engagement and views.
It would be beneficial to do some research specific to your industry to see the best time and day for you to make your posts.
One important thing to keep in mind when you’re planning your content is the upcoming holidays.
Are you going to post celebrating the holiday, use the holiday to do a promotion or give away, or choose not to post on that day altogether?
No matter what you pick, keeping holidays in mind is crucial.
8. Measure Results And Adjust
Instagram Insights, both on the app and through Meta Business Suites, can show how many views a post gets and statistics on the engagement with the posts to help you see which types of content are working best. You can see your content’s likes, shares, comments, and saves.
Brands can also use Insights to get metrics on the paid activity. Insights are a great way to see trends so that you can adjust your content strategy.
You’ll also be able to see metrics about your followers to see how many you’re receiving, the age of your followers, and information on when they are most active online. This way, you can adjust your post times to ensure you are better at reaching your audience.
If your Instagram isn’t getting results, it may be due to a lack of planning.
Don’t miss the opportunity to tie your conversion goals, marketing campaigns, trends, holidays, and creative campaigns together and give it the well-planned, in-advance budget it deserves.
It can only help, not hurt, to create a proactive content plan for your social media team to stay aligned, maintain consistency, and deliver measurable results.
Achieving your goals by developing an Instagram-specific content calendar guided by current marketing objectives and data-driven themes will help your brand engage on the platform.
Download our Instagram content plan and start being more effective with your Instagram strategy.
More Resources:
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
Content marketers’ patience and performance are being tested as AI infiltrates every tech stack, which has been both a blessing and a curse.
Creating content has never been simpler, given the rise of AI, upending content creation, distribution, and discovery.
At the same time, writing original content has never been more paramount, given the vast amount of AI-generated content being written and misinformation spreading like wildfire.
In turn, audiences tune out the noise, demand well-written content, and are less forgiving when brands misstep.
For chief marketing officers (CMOs), this window in time is ripe for the taking.
Those who evolve fast, rethink foundational content marketing strategies, and invest in authentic, relevant, and human-first content will win attention.
For those who don’t, they risk taking themselves out of the game and being left in the dust.
In this post, we’ll explore the top eight trends defining the next era of content marketing and how forward-thinking CMOs are stepping up to keep up with the swift pace.
1. Use AI To Assist
Generative AI is no longer a tool to test out; it’s an integral part of every marketing strategy, irrespective of organization size or industry.
A study spanning 17 diverse industries found nearly three-quarters (73%) of respondents say their companies use Generative AI to help create text, images, videos, or other content types.
The same study found that only 17% of marketers aren’t using AI at all, a number that will likely shrink in the months to come.
While AI has been and will continue to be used to generate content, the quality of that content may not match that of human writers.
A study published in Nature found that when generative AI software only uses content created by other AI, its responses start to decline in quality.
For example, after the first two prompts, the answers weren’t quality and missed the mark, only getting worse by the fifth attempt.
By the ninth consecutive query, the responses became completely nonsensical and unrelated to the original query’s intent.
CMOs must ensure content writers aren’t leveraging AI-generated content to draft content but rather use it as a tool that helps writers co-create content with purpose and editorial rigor.
CMO Action Plan For AI-Assisted Content Creation:
Develop AI-human content workflows: Use AI for research, drafts, and metadata. Humans should be used for drafting, ensuring the brand’s tone of voice shines throughout, and fact-checking.
Audit existing content to ensure it meets brand quality standards. Prioritize updating or replacing low-value content.
Clearly disclose when and how AI tools are used to foster trust with your target audience.
Monitor and audit content consistently to ensure no AI-generated content falls through the cracks.
Search looks entirely different from what it did a few years ago.
What was once ruled by ten blue links has now adapted to shifts in user behavior, favoring semantically rich results that answer queries without users having to even click through to learn more.
AI-powered engines (like Google AI Mode) now parse through conversational queries and extract the most relevant information, displaying it as a summary at the top of the SERPs.
To adapt to this shift in how Google and other search engines prioritize and rank content, CMOs should reshape their content strategies to structure content around topic clusters and frequently asked questions.
And, if you’re not already using schema markup, now is the time to make it clear to search engine crawlers what your content is all about.
Schema markup can help search engines understand the context and boost your chances of appearing in featured snippets. The more visible your content is, the better your chance of winning clicks and attention.
CMO Action Plan For Writing For Semantic Search:
Redesign landing pages (if needed) around FAQ-driven, intent-focused headings.
Implement relevant structured data, such as FAQPage, HowTo, and Q&A markup, which might enhance your visibility.
Keep a pulse on SERP changes by consistently monitoring where your content stands; repurpose or refresh pages that are losing visibility.
For marketers, video marketing has proven to be a successful endeavor; 93% of marketers say video marketing has given them a good ROI, and 96% of video marketers say video has helped them increase brand awareness.
The same study reported that 84% of video marketers say video has directly increased sales, while 84% say video has helped keep visitors engaged on their website longer.
As social media platforms, like TikTok grow in popularity, so too does the need for diverse content types.
It comes as no surprise that short-form video comes in as the top content format delivering ROI in 2025, followed closely behind by live-streamed video.
Undoubtedly, videos are capturing attention, and CMOs should continue to invest in video to build brand awareness, diversify content, and meet evolving consumer expectations.
CMO Action Plan For Creating More Short-Form Videos:
Develop a repository of short-form clips (30–90 seconds). These clips can be anything from customer testimonials, product demos, teaser videos, video ads, and more.
Repurpose long-form content – webinars, whitepapers – into bite-sized assets to extend your content’s lifetime.
Distribute video via LinkedIn, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and embed in emails and site pages. Share your video wherever applicable (you’ve already put the hard work in; it’s time to get the most out of it!).
The rise of voice and visual search is growing. More customers than ever are seeking products by sharing screenshots or using voice assistants to search for businesses.
Given the influx of smart assistants, image-based queries, and platform recommendations, businesses can no longer ignore investing in rich metadata and optimized visuals.
For images specifically, businesses should ensure files are saved and uploaded with a name that’s relevant to the image.
Additionally, you’ll want to add descriptive alt-text to every photo on your website to ensure search bots are able to crawl your photos correctly or in the case where a user isn’t able to see the image on your landing page. It’s also critical to ensure images are fast-loading and don’t delay the page speed.
In the case of voice search, conversational content is now a must. Write your content in a way consumers speak. Incorporate long-tail keyword phrases within your content and answer frequently asked questions.
CMOs should play a key role in cross-functional efforts to ensure content is optimized, compliant, and providing the best user experience.
CMO Action Plan For Improving Voice And Image Search Visibility:
Add descriptive, keyword-rich alt-text for all images.
Don’t neglect mobile performance and ensure fast load speeds for visual content-heavy pages.
Include voice-format answers in your content. For example, a restaurant may want to address common questions it receives, such as “Do you serve brunch?” or “Are gluten-free options available?”.
Third-party cookies may be a thing of the past, but brands still need to capture first-party data.
First-party data powers personalization, however this type of data must be captured in a compliant way. That’s where interactive content comes into play: quizzes, calculators, polls, and more can encourage browsers to share their personal data with your business.
In fact, a study from HubSpot revealed interactive content sees the fourth-highest ROI compared to other marketing initiatives. In the first place (66%) were product-related videos, second (55%) were trendy videos, and third (53%) were funny videos.
CMOs should encourage their teams to integrate an ecosystem of experiences to collect data and personalize future interactions.
By doing so, businesses are better poised to achieve better segmentation, stronger nurture workflows, and foster greater trust with their target audience.
CMO Action Plan For Creating More Interactive Experiences:
Add interactive tools such as gated lead generation engines.
Ensure lead capture forms connect appropriately to customer relationship management (CRM) tech for tailored follow-up.
Collaborate across marketing, CX, and analytics to operationalize first-party insights, ensuring insights are shared across teams.
Consider the last time you conducted a search on Google. One of the top results for your query was likely a link to a Reddit post about the same topic.
Savvy brands turn to Reddit to engage in authentic and meaningful conversations, and even create their own micro-communities.
A vast majority (88%) of Gen X, Millennial, and Gen Z U.S. consumers engage with niche groups based on shared values or interests.
This number continues to grow with time, making micro-communities a prime area to focus marketing efforts.
Authentic dialogue and communication are essential to effectively connect with your target audience.
Consider that users frequent online communities as a place to explore and connect with like-minded individuals, not to be met with spammy sales strategies.
CMOs should map and engage niche communities that align with brand values and develop user-generated content initiatives to engage in softer sales techniques that elevate customer experiences.
CMO Action Plan For Tapping Into Micro-Communities:
Identify a few key niche communities (forums, Facebook groups, subreddits, niche LinkedIn pods).
Start by observing user behavior in these groups and then engaging in real, natural conversations.
Share user-generated content (UGC) – reviews, stories, testimonials – from real users to build trust and credibility.
The search experience has become fragmented. Google still holds significant dominance in the search engine marketplace, but generative AI services are gaining traction.
With search results becoming more volatile, many SEO professionals wonder what works these days.
Content must be amplified for maximum reach, with distribution across a vast array of channels like social, community, earned, and email.
This isn’t limited to just written content. Short-form videos can be shared across Reels and Shorts, on LinkedIn, paid placement in niche newsletters, and more to help diversify reach.
A multi-channel strategy reduces dependency on any single platform.
CMOs should invest in and focus on a multi-channel strategy. By doing so, businesses are better set up for the success of appearing in organic search results and for AI-generated results.
New channel experiments can help your business test what’s working and what’s not, and tracking performance across each channel can inform ongoing strategy.
CMO Action Plan For Improving Content Reach:
Launch content distribution campaigns across video, social, email, community, and earned/paid channels.
Build relationships with niche newsletters and podcasts for earned coverage.
Use performance dashboards to monitor channel-specific key performance indicators (KPIs) and adjust efforts where needed.
Content marketing investment is a top priority for many businesses.
It continues to prove the effort is worth the spend, with nearly half (46%) of B2B marketers increasing their marketing budgets in 2025 and over two-thirds (61%) spending more on video.
AI has also been added as a line item in many budgets, given that AI in marketing is now a $57.99 billion market, and 56% of marketers say their company is taking an active role in implementing and using AI.
CMOs must have a firm understanding of what works well for their business and what doesn’t, strategically allocating resources to what moves the needle, whether that’s video, interactive content, community engagement, paid ads, or more.
Clear return on investment (ROI) models and transparent budget allocation will highlight content as a profit center, not a sunk cost. It will also paint a clearer picture to leadership to showcase how your team’s efforts are driving revenue.
CMO Action Plan To Create A Strategic Budget:
Create a framework for how you’ll reflect content’s ROI by including KPIs for lead quality, closed revenue, and engagement.
Consider budget allocations for emerging technologies like AI and interactive content.
Track and report ROI on at least a quarterly basis. Adjust content marketing tactics based on outcomes.
To thrive in a rapidly changing industry, CMOs must become strategic futurists, rooted in testing, tracking, and tackling new endeavors that align with shifts in consumer behavior.
As the face of the marketing teams, CMOs must lead the change they wish to see, equipping teams with the right tools and technology to make that change happen.
CMOs will act as the guiding light for handling marketing ethically, from responsible AI usage to properly disclosing AI and scaling human-first, value-driven content initiatives.
They’ll diversify distribution, ensuring content marketers’ hard work is getting the chance to shine across a variety of channels. They’ll also provide editorial oversight, especially over larger content pieces like “State of” reports.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, they’ll rigorously track ROI and invest with intention. They’ll see what’s working well and pivot quickly when something isn’t proving its value.
ROI will remain top of mind, ensuring each and every marketing effort drives the company forward.
CMOs who embrace the aforementioned changes now will elevate content from a marketing function to a strategic growth engine, one that builds lasting trust with customers, leads to corporate longevity, and improves the marketing team’s job satisfaction.
At long last, OpenAI has released GPT-5. The new system abandons the distinction between OpenAI’s flagship models and its o series of reasoning models, automatically routing user queries to a fast nonreasoning model or a slower reasoning version. It is now available to everyone through the ChatGPT web interface—though nonpaying users may need to wait a few days to gain full access to the new capabilities.
It’s tempting to compare GPT-5 with its explicit predecessor, GPT-4, but the more illuminating juxtaposition is with o1, OpenAI’s first reasoning model, which was released last year. In contrast to GPT-5’s broad release, o1 was initially available only to Plus and Team subscribers. Those users got access to a completely new kind of language model—one that would “reason” through its answers by generating additional text before providing a final response, enabling it to solve much more challenging problems than its nonreasoning counterparts.
Whereas o1 was a major technological advancement, GPT-5 is, above all else, a refined product. During a press briefing, Sam Altman compared GPT-5 to Apple’s Retina displays, and it’s an apt analogy, though perhaps not in the way that he intended. Much like an unprecedentedly crisp screen, GPT-5 will furnish a more pleasant and seamless user experience. That’s not nothing, but it falls far short of the transformative AI future that Altman has spent much of the past year hyping. In the briefing, Altman called GPT-5 “a significant step along the path to AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, and maybe he’s right—but if so, it’s a very small step.
Take the demo of the model’s abilities that OpenAI showed to MIT Technology Review in advance of its release. Yann Dubois, a post-training lead at OpenAI, asked GPT-5 to design a web application that would help his partner learn French so that she could communicate more easily with his family. The model did an admirable job of following his instructions and created an appealing, user-friendly app. But when I gave GPT-4o an almost identical prompt, it produced an app with exactly the same functionality. The only difference is that it wasn’t as aesthetically pleasing.
Some of the other user-experience improvements are more substantial. Having the model rather than the user choose whether to apply reasoning to each query removes a major pain point, especially for users who don’t follow LLM advancements closely.
And, according to Altman, GPT-5 reasons much faster than the o-series models. The fact that OpenAI is releasing it to nonpaying users suggests that it’s also less expensive for the company to run. That’s a big deal: Running powerful models cheaply and quickly is a tough problem, and solving it is key to reducing AI’s environmental impact.
OpenAI has also taken steps to mitigate hallucinations, which have been a persistent headache. OpenAI’s evaluations suggest that GPT-5 models are substantially less likely to make incorrect claims than their predecessor models, o3 and GPT-4o. If that advancement holds up to scrutiny, it could help pave the way for more reliable and trustworthy agents. “Hallucination can cause real safety and security issues,” says Dawn Song, a professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. For example, an agent that hallucinates software packages could download malicious code to a user’s device.
GPT-5 has achieved the state of the art on several benchmarks, including a test of agentic abilities and the coding evaluations SWE-Bench and Aider Polyglot. But according to Clémentine Fourrier, an AI researcher at the company HuggingFace, those evaluations are nearing saturation, which means that current models have achieved close to maximal performance.
“It’s basically like looking at the performance of a high schooler on middle-grade problems,” she says. “If the high schooler fails, it tells you something, but if it succeeds, it doesn’t tell you a lot.” Fourrier said she would be impressed if the system achieved a score of 80% or 85% on SWE-Bench—but it only managed a 74.9%.
Ultimately, the headline message from OpenAI is that GPT-5 feels better to use. “The vibes of this model are really good, and I think that people are really going to feel that, especially average people who haven’t been spending their time thinking about models,” said Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT.
Vibes alone, however, won’t bring about the automated future that Altman has promised. Reasoning felt like a major step forward on the way to AGI. We’re still waiting for the next one.
Every week we publish a handpicked list of new products and services from vendors to ecommerce merchants. This installment covers AI-powered commerce platforms, embedded financial services, cross-border payment solutions, logistics optimization, marketplace incentives, and simplified transaction processes.
Got an ecommerce product release? Email releases@practicalecommerce.com.
New Tools for Merchants
Wix launches financial services for merchants.Wix has launched Wix Checking and Wix Capital to help clients manage cash flow and fund growth. Wix Checking, powered by Unit, a platform for embedded finance, gives users an integrated business checking account. By syncing automatically with Wix Payments, Wix Checking removes the need for external banking tools and manual reconciliations. Wix has also introduced Wix Capital, allowing clients to request a cash advance in exchange for a fixed fee and a percentage of future sales.
Wix
Prepping for the holidays, Walmart Marketplace offers seller incentives.Walmart Marketplace will now waive referral fees to sellers on popular items. Plus, the company is waiving peak season storage fees from October 1 through December 31 for sellers using Walmart Fulfillment Services. Now through October 1, first-time users of Multichannel (shipping) Solutions get a 30% discount. Also, WFS has expanded international transport options with the addition of two ports in Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong.
BigCommerce and Feedonomics deepen partnership with Google Cloud.BigCommerce and Feedonomics, a data feed platform, have announced a deepened partnership with Google Cloud. Feedonomics Surface will deliver AI-enriched product data directly to Google Merchant Center, boosting visibility across sales channels. Using Feedonomics’ new Google Cloud with Gemini features, merchants can automatically enrich product catalogs. By combining BigCommerce’s Model Context Protocol with Google’s Agent Development Kit, developers can build commerce-aware merchant agents.
Blockchain fintech OwlTing introduces OwlPay Stablecoin Checkout.OwlTing Group, a global blockchain fintech company, has launched OwlPay Stablecoin Checkout, an API-embedded stablecoin function set to go live this month. Designed for global enterprises in mobility, hospitality, ecommerce, and gaming sectors, OwlPay Stablecoin Checkout enables seamless USD to USDC conversions, allowing businesses to accept stablecoin payments and settle in USD through their own platforms or leverage the built-in feature on the user interface of the OwlPay Payment B2B tool.
OwlTing
Rakuten launches Rakuten AI.Rakuten, a Japan-based ecommerce marketplace and online services company, has launched Rakuten AI, an AI agent to enhance user experiences and streamline interactions across the Rakuten ecosystem, including shopping, lifestyle, fintech, travel, education, work, wellness, and entertainment. The initial rollout integrates Rakuten AI into Rakuten Link, a communication app for Rakuten Mobile subscribers, and offers Rakuten AI as a web app in beta. Rakuten AI is free to use in all its forms.
Octup raises $12 million for 3PL operations.Octup, a real-time AI operations platform for third-party logistics providers, has closed a $12 million seed round co-led by Shine Capital and JAL Ventures. Octup’s platform provides real-time analytics for warehouse operations, including automated billing, labor tracking, and service-level-agreement management, while also offering client-facing portals with self-service reporting capabilities. With this funding, Octup plans to accelerate AI-powered forecasting and exception management development. The company also plans to expand its presence in North America.
FlavorCloud launches Localized Market Pricing.FlavorCloud, a provider of cross-border shipping solutions, has launched Localized Market Pricing, a recommendations and analytics tool that enables Shopify sellers to display fully landed costs, including duties, taxes, shipping, and fees, as a part of SKU-level pricing. The platform can adjust pricing based on actual landed costs, allowing retailers to choose whether to absorb or pass on cost changes. Price updates are automatic, triggered by schedules or specific events.
FlavorCloud
Amazon introduces star-only ratings.Amazon has launched a simplified experience to provide feedback on sellers. Customers can now provide star ratings without (or with) written feedback. Customers will be required to select a reason before they can submit any rating below four stars. According to Amazon, the new process will help sellers collect more ratings faster and may lead to an increase in the average seller ratings.
Splitit and Antom partner on cross-border card-linked installments for merchants.Splitit, an embedded white-label platform enabling card-linked installment payments, and Antom, a provider of merchant payment and digitization services under Ant International, have announced a strategic partnership. Splitit will integrate its installment technology into Antom’s checkout experience worldwide. Customers can split purchases into monthly payments directly at checkout, using existing credit cards, streamlining cross-border commerce and international payment processing.
eBay debuts Secure Purchase checkout for vehicle transactions.eBay has announced the availability of Secure Purchase, simplifying vehicle transactions by managing payment, financing, registration, ownership transfer, and transport. Both the buyer and seller verify their identity and provide basic information about the vehicle. The buyer selects financing, transportation, protection, and insurance preferences in a few clicks. The seller uploads photos of the title, vehicle identification number, and odometer readings. Buyer and seller digitally sign the required documents, then transfer funds to initiate registration and title transfer.
AstroPay launches platform to embed global financial services.AstroPay, a digital wallet provider, has rolled out a platform allowing companies to build and launch their own global financial products using the same infrastructure that powers AstroPay’s consumer wallet. Businesses can leverage AstroPay’s connections to multiple local and international payment schemes, along with its multicurrency wallet, card issuing capabilities, and regulatory compliance framework across jurisdictions. Current support includes accounts in Brazil, Argentina, and Europe.
Google’s John Mueller says small businesses may be hurting their search visibility by choosing generic keyword domains instead of building distinctive brand names.
Speaking on a recent episode of Search Off the Record, Mueller and fellow Search Advocate Martin Splitt discussed common challenges for photography websites.
During the conversation, Mueller noted that many small business owners fall into a “generic domain” trap that can make it harder to connect the business name with its work.
Why Keyword Domains Can Be a Problem
The topic came up when Splitt mentioned that his photography site uses a German term for “underwater photo” as its domain. Mueller responded:
“I see a lot of small businesses make the mistake of taking a generic term and calling it their brand.”
He explained that businesses choosing keyword-rich domains often end up competing with directories, aggregators, and other established sites targeting the same phrases.
Even if the domain name exactly matches a service, there’s little room to stand out in search.
The Advantage Of A Distinct Brand
Mueller contrasted this with using a unique business name:
“If your brand were Martin Splitt Photos then people would be able to find you immediately.”
When customers search for a brand they remember, competition drops. Mentions and links from other websites also become clearer signals to search engines, reducing the chance of confusion with similarly named businesses.
Lost Opportunities For Word-of-Mouth
Relying on a generic keyword domain can also make offline marketing less effective.
If a potential client hears about a business at an event but can’t remember its exact generic name, finding it later becomes more difficult.
Mueller noted:
“If you’ve built up a reputation as being kind of this underwater photography guy and they remember your name, it’s a lot easier to find you with a clear brand name.”
Why This Matters
For service providers like photographers, event planners, or contractors, including the service and location in a domain name can feel like a shortcut to local rankings.
Mueller’s advice suggests otherwise: location targeting can be achieved through content, structured data, and Google Business Profile optimization, without giving up a distinctive brand.
Looking Ahead
While Mueller didn’t recommend immediate rebrands for existing sites, he made it clear that unique, brandable domains give small businesses a defensible advantage in search and marketing.
For those still choosing a domain, the long-term benefits of memorability and differentiation can outweigh any short-term keyword gains.
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OpenAI has released GPT-5, now the default model in ChatGPT for all users, including those on the free tier.
The new model is positioned as OpenAI’s most capable and reliable system to date. OpenAI emphasizes a stronger focus on accuracy, instruction following, and long-form reasoning.
Available Now To All ChatGPT Users
For the first time, OpenAI is making its latest flagship model available to free users.
GPT-5 is rolling out now to Free, Plus, Pro, and Team accounts, with support for Enterprise and Education expected next week.
Free-tier access includes basic usage of GPT-5, with requests routed to a smaller “GPT-5 mini” variant once limits are reached.
Paid subscribers receive higher usage limits, and Pro users gain access to GPT-5 Pro, a version designed for more complex, resource-intensive tasks.
Accuracy, Reasoning, and Transparency Take Priority
According to OpenAI, GPT-5 significantly reduces hallucinated facts and is more likely to admit when it lacks the context to provide a reliable answer.
Evaluations show GPT-5 produces 45% fewer factual errors than GPT-4o, with up to 80% fewer errors when deeper reasoning is enabled.
The model also performs better on benchmarks tied to real-world problem-solving, such as coding, legal analysis, and health-related queries.
What’s Changed in the System
Rather than a single model, GPT-5 acts as a dynamic system that automatically decides whether to respond quickly or think more deeply, depending on prompt complexity.
Users can also request explicit reasoning with natural language prompts like “think hard about this.”
Other updates include:
A redesigned safety system that favors partially helpful answers over blanket refusals
Reduced sycophantic responses and more honest communication about limitations
Improvements in coding performance, including front-end UI generation and debugging
Support for multimodal input, including charts and images
Looking Ahead
GPT-5 is positioned less as a revolutionary jump and more as an effort to build trust through accuracy, reliability, and broader access.
For SEOs and digital marketers who rely on AI tools for drafting, analysis, or ideation, GPT-5’s improvements may help reduce the time spent verifying or correcting outputs.
Google Ads just dropped another wave of updates to Performance Max today.
For those who’ve been asking for better audience targeting, clearer reporting on new customer acquisition, and more transparency around auto-generated assets, these updates will feel like long-overdue upgrades.
Let’s break down what’s new, why it matters, and how advertisers should respond.
What’s New in Performance Max
Google has announced three core areas of updates for Performance Max campaigns:
Expanded audience and campaign controls
Improved new customer acquisition reporting and diagnostics
More granular creative reporting and AI-powered asset recommendations
Most are either rolling out now or available broadly, with some elements in beta. Let’s walk through the details.
Expanded Controls Over Audience Targeting and Search Inventory
Performance Max has long leaned on automation, sometimes at the expense of control. Google is slowly changing that, and this release continues that shift.
Campaign-Level Negative Keyword Lists
Advertisers can now apply negative keyword lists across Performance Max campaigns. Previously, campaign-level negatives had to be managed individually, which created friction for accounts with dozens of asset groups.
With this update, advertisers can centralize keyword exclusions. For example, excluding terms like “cheap” or “free” across multiple luxury or premium product campaigns.
Image credit: Google, August 2025
You still have the option to apply unique negative keywords to individual campaigns, but this rollout makes managing brand suitability far more scalable.
More Search Themes per Asset Group
Google has doubled the search theme limit from 25 to 50 per asset group. This matters for brands that want to influence where their Performance Max ads show up in Search, without leaning on historical keyword builds.
By expanding your search theme input, you’re giving Google more information to better match your ads to queries. It also helps widen your eligible inventory while staying relevant.
Device and Demographic Targeting Updates
You can now fully control which device types your Performance Max campaigns appear on, something that was previously only partially available.
For example, a gaming company can restrict campaigns to mobile devices, or a B2B advertiser can exclude tablets entirely.
Age targeting is now also available, allowing advertisers to exclude or target specific age ranges.
Google is also testing gender-based demographic targeting in beta. These controls bring Performance Max closer in line with what’s long been possible in Search, Display, and YouTube campaigns.
New Customer Acquisition Reporting Gets Smarter
One of the most frustrating parts of new customer acquisition bidding has been the vague “Unknown” label in reporting. That’s changing with today’s updates in Performance Max reporting.
No More “Unknown” Conversions
In lifecycle reporting for new vs. returning customers, Google previously bucketed a portion of conversions as “Unknown”. This left advertisers with limited visibility into actual performance.
Google has now improved the backend logic that determines if a user is new or existing, meaning those “Unknown” labels should be gone moving forward.
This matters for two key reasons:
You can now get a more accurate read on how many new customers you’re acquiring.
Bidding strategies that rely on new customer signals will become more effective as the data improves.
For even more precision, Google encourages advertisers to update their conversion tracking tags to include the new customer acquisition parameter. This signals to Google whether a conversion is from a new or returning customer, based on first-party data.
New Goal Diagnostics and Recommendations
Alongside the reporting improvements, Google has added new diagnostics that surface goal-related issues in Performance Max.
These include broken or missing conversion tags, goal misconfigurations, or other tracking issues that could be holding back performance.
The diagnostics come with actionable recommendations to help advertisers resolve the problem. While this might not be the most glamorous update, it will save time and frustration during campaign setup and troubleshooting.
Creative Reporting and Asset Control Get a Boost
Asset transparency in Performance Max has been a long-standing pain point. While things have improved in the last year, these new changes go further.
Final URL Expansion Asset Reporting
Advertisers can now view reporting for assets generated through Final URL Expansion (FUE). This is Google’s feature that dynamically creates assets based on landing page content.
You’ll be able to see what text and visuals were created through FUE and how they performed.
Image credit: Google, August 2025
More importantly, if you don’t like what Google created, you now have the ability to remove those assets from your campaign.
This is a big win for brands concerned about creative consistency, especially when it comes to legal language or brand tone. While FUE can be useful for scale, it hasn’t always produced on-brand results. So, this added visibility is a welcome change.
AI-Powered Creative Recommendations
Performance Max will now generate image-specific recommendations to help you improve performance. These suggestions will include both what types of visuals to add and how to optimize existing ones for better performance on various channels (like YouTube vs. Discover).
Image credit: Google, August 2025
Best of all, these recommendations link directly into the built-in AI-powered image editor in Google Ads, so you can make changes right inside the platform without needing to re-upload or redesign assets elsewhere.
It’s clear Google wants advertisers to take a more active role in creative strategy, even inside an automated campaign structure.
Wrapping Up
Google is clearly listening to advertisers’ calls for more transparency and control. These updates to Performance Max mark another step toward striking a better balance between scale and strategy.
While not every advertiser will need to use every new feature, the option to do so means there’s more room to tailor Performance Max campaigns to your business goals, creative preferences, and customer insights.
Whether you’re looking to fine-tune audience reach, fix tracking issues, or clean up your creative assets, there’s something in this update that’s worth your attention.
