MaryLeigh Bliss, Chief Content Officer at YPulse, discusses findings from two reports: the Social Media Monitor tracking platform usage trends and a deep dive into YouTube's role in Gen Z's lives. While marketers have focused intensely on TikTok, YouTube has maintained steady relevance as a multimodal platform serving simultaneously as entertainment hub, search engine, TV replacement, and trusted information source. The conversation examines how young people navigate six platforms at once, each serving distinct purposes, and why YouTube's embedded presence since childhood creates advantages TikTok hasn't replicated. Bliss explains shopping behavior shifts, the rise of reposting over creating, and why YouTube creators command more trust than traditional public figures.

In this episode, Jason Fairchild, CEO of tvScientific, discusses how performance marketing principles are being applied to connected TV advertising. The conversation covers deterministic attribution matching household ad exposure to outcomes, supply path optimization through direct publisher relationships, and radical transparency, including log-level data access. Fairchild explains how the platform brings search and social advertisers to television, the role of incrementality testing in measuring TV impact, and targeting capabilities from demographics to neighborhood-level geography. He also addresses how large language models will disrupt search advertising and create opportunities for television to reclaim its demand creation role in the marketing funnel.

Guilherme Ramos, assistant professor of marketing at Rochester Institute of Technology, and Larissa Elmor, PhD student at FGV Brazilian School of Public and Business Administration and visiting scholar at Imperial College Business School, discuss their research published in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Their study of nearly 8,000 consumers across three countries examines the gap between what shoppers say they value and what they actually consider when making purchases. The conversation explores why sustainability rarely comes to mind during shopping decisions and what businesses can do to bridge this attitude-behavior gap through cognitive accessibility and contextual salience.