☕️ Most businesses still send emails without tracking ROI

Hi there, this is your daily ☕️ MarketingShot.

In today's MarketingShot:

📜 Why a 1967 privacy law is powering ad tech lawsuits

🔗 Google adds Read more links best practices

👻 The ghost citation problem

🤖 Adobe makes its biggest play yet for marketing's AI future

📧 Why most businesses still send emails without tracking ROI

💡 + 6 strategies & tactics

🎁 + 9 other news & articles you might like

🧰 + 1 trending marketing tools

FROM OUR PARTNER

• A 1967 California wiretapping law called CIPA has become a major source of ad tech lawsuits because plaintiffs argue that cookies, pixels, and SDKs amount to illegal surveillance under the statute.
• CIPA allows plaintiffs to recover $5,000 per violation or three times actual damages plus attorney's fees, which has motivated class-action lawyers to file a growing wave of complaints targeting RTB, SSPs, and DSPs.
• In a recent Google RTB class-action settlement in Northern California, Google agreed to build a tool that stops personal data from leaking into ad auctions, showing that product changes are now part of resolving cases.

• Google published new documentation with best practices for the "Read more" links that started appearing in some search result snippets back in December 2025.
• The three best practices include making sure content is immediately visible on the page, not using JavaScript to control scroll position on page load, and avoiding removal of hash fragments from URLs.
• The "Read more" links add an extra clickable element to search result snippets, which could lead to more clicks from Google Search to websites if publishers follow the listed guidelines.

• A new analysis of nearly 4,000 domains across four AI search engines found that 62% of the time an AI cites a brand's content with a source link, it never actually names the brand in its answer.
• The four engines behave very differently: Gemini names brands in 83.7% of appearances but only links 21.4% of the time, while ChatGPT links 87.0% of the time but names brands in just 20.7% of answers.
• Consumer brands with strong public identity get mentioned by name at close to 100% rates, while content aggregators like Medium.com and Wikipedia.org are cited repeatedly as source links but almost never named in AI responses.

• Adobe launched an AI agent platform called CX Enterprise at its Las Vegas conference, marking the company's largest effort yet to compete with AI-native rivals in the marketing and sales automation space.
• The platform combines an AI-powered content supply chain, customer engagement orchestration, and brand visibility tools, with an agent called "CX Enterprise Coworker" that can build and execute marketing plans on its own.
• Adobe's stock is down roughly 30 percent this year, and CEO Shantanu Narayen announced in March he would step down after 18 years, adding leadership uncertainty as the company fights pressure from competitors like Canva and Anthropic.

• A 2026 report from Sinch Mailgun found that fewer than half of organizations can reliably track return on investment from their email programs, despite email remaining a top-performing marketing channel.
• Among companies that do measure email ROI, 60% report returns above $10 for every $1 spent, and more than one in ten achieve returns as high as 40 to 1.
• Nearly 18% of all marketing emails fail to reach the inbox, and while 41% of teams use AI to generate email content, only 23% say AI has greatly improved their programs.

Strategies & Tactics

Other news & articles you might like

• Buyer Spends Six Figures on WordPress Plugins, Plants Backdoors in All 31 for Mass Compromise LINK

• Why Mondelez is hiring a global lead to solve for AI-driven shopping bots LINK

• Digiday+ Research: Agencies punt budget growth expectations to 2027 — while AI worries intensify LINK

• Meet the AI influencers taking over Coachella – worth millions and replacing the real thing LINK

• The World Cup is set to lift demand for digital out-of-home spending LINK

• Moloco launches app-focused connected TV ad product LINK

• Google finds new ways to keep you from ever visiting a website directly again LINK

• Can Google Handle Domains With One Letter Difference? Usually LINK

• Marketing investment is a capital allocation decision LINK

Trending Marketing Tools

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