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Warmly Ran GTM With No Sales Team. Here's How.
That's what Warmly proved. They defined ICP, scored buying intent, and surfaced the right accounts before a human ever touched a lead. HubSpot noticed.
On August 12, Max and Keegan are rebuilding it live in HubSpot — and showing you how to replicate it this week. HubSpot Credits included when you join HubSpot for Startups.
Two things happened in the last 48 hours that both amount to the same demand: prove it. The IAB published the first real measurement standard for whether your brand shows up in AI answers, and the EU started forcing AI-generated content to admit what it is. Meanwhile Adweek handed out awards to the martech that can actually tie itself to revenue — and Adidas showed everyone what happens when you spend $1 billion in a quarter and the margin line notices.
The IAB just gave "AI visibility" a scorecard
On August 3 the IAB released Measuring Visibility in the AI Era, a 36-page framework defining a shared vocabulary for brand and publisher visibility inside AI-generated answers. It hangs on four Ps — presence, prominence, portrayal and persuasion — plus a two-tier classification of data quality, where anything under 50 queries is labeled "exploratory" and, per the guidelines, "cannot meaningfully characterize a category."
Why it matters: Only 16% of brands currently track AI visibility at all, which means most of this category has been sold on vibes and vendor screenshots. You now have a defensible way to ask an AEO vendor how many prompts sit behind a report — and to tell your CMO that a 20-prompt "AI share of voice" deck is a directional hint, not a benchmark.
Adweek's Tech Stack Awards are a map of where AI is actually paying
Adweek published its 2026 Tech Stack Awards this morning. On the B2B side, Zeta Global's Athena took B2B Marketing Product for a conversational agent that replaced dashboards with natural language and drove 7x more AI interactions than prior platform tools in its first week of GA. Stagwell Search+ won Search, with Lenovo EMEA reporting a 34% revenue lift after moving to a system-level AI search strategy. Klaviyo took CRM on the back of $1.2 billion in 2025 revenue, up 32%.
Why it matters: Read the winner list as a heat map. Two themes dominate: incrementality measurement — Incremental, Pacvue, Measured and Ibotta all won for separating real lift from recycled demand — and agentic orchestration. Nobody won for generating more content faster.
HubSpot's Contact Discovery goes live today — check your lead scoring first
Contact Discovery launches August 4, and HubSpot spent Monday circulating clarifications on how the feature uses professional enrichment data and where admins can opt out. The practical warning buried in the guidance: new enrichment signals will touch scoring rules, segmentation and deliverability logic.
Why it matters: The failure mode is inflated lead scores, because models that treat firmographic completeness as intent will suddenly light up on records that did nothing. Review your thresholds this week, confirm the opt-out is applied consistently across portals, and if you operate in regulated industries or run mixed B2B/B2C data, document your basis for processing before the signals start flowing.
In the EU, your AI now has to introduce itself
Article 50 of the EU AI Act took effect August 2. Chatbots and interactive AI systems must tell users they're not human, deepfakes must be labeled, and AI-generated or altered content has to carry machine-readable marks — with a grace period to December 2026 for tools already on the market. The AI Office also published a voluntary Code of Practice; signatories get a presumption of conformity and a friendlier enforcement posture, non-signatories get closer scrutiny.
Why it matters: If you run an EU-facing chat widget, AI-generated ad creative, or a synthetic voiceover, this is a disclosure audit, not a legal abstraction. And it lands the same week the IAB asked you to measure AI visibility — the industry is being told to label and quantify its AI at the same time.
AI Max lands in Shopping, and PMax finally gets a retention goal
Google Ads Editor 2.13 shipped with full AI Max support for Shopping campaigns — automated text, URL expansion controls, text guidelines, URL exclusions and brand lists — bringing Shopping to parity with Search and Performance Max. The release also adds a Customer retention goal for PMax, which works like the existing new-customer acquisition workflow but points spend at re-engaging past buyers. Demand Gen picks up Maps placements.
Why it matters: The retention goal is the quiet upgrade. PMax has been optimized almost entirely toward acquisition, which is expensive and often wrong for high-repeat categories. You can now bulk-configure the alternative offline.
Adidas spent $1 billion in a quarter. It worked. The stock fell 17% anyway.
Adidas' Q2 marketing bill hit $1.05 billion, up 30% year over year on World Cup campaigns and activations. The campaign delivered: record net sales of $7.7 billion, up 14%, roughly $1.7 billion in event-related sales, four times the jerseys and twice the balls it moved during Qatar 2022. But operating profit came in at $658 million, below estimates, and shares fell about 17% — the biggest single-day drop on record.
Why it matters: This is the brand-spend accountability gap in one earnings call. Demand generation worked by every metric a CMO owns, and the market punished it on the one metric a CFO owns. If you're defending a big-swing campaign budget this planning cycle, expect to be asked about margin, not reach.
The through-line today: everything AI touched in marketing just got a measurement standard, a disclosure requirement, or an awards jury attached to it. Pick the one that lands on your desk first.
See you tomorrow.
— Marketing Qualified, making B2B marketing less boring.
