Big efficiency wins don’t always require big changes. At Midland, we helped a client cut 65+ hours of manual labor per week by automating just one part of their packaging process.

Hearst Magazines, the world’s largest lifestyle publisher, announced the launch of AURA, a revolutionary, first-party ad targeting tool that utilizes proprietary AI-enabled technology and multi-dimensional contextual, behavioral and commerce signals to connect advertisers to their most valuable and engaged customers at scale. The announcement was made by Hearst Magazines President Debi Chirichella and Global Chief Revenue Officer Lisa Ryan Howard. AURA analyzes and activates Hearst’s broad and deep portfolio of first-party data and hundreds of millions of purchase actions from Hearst’s 145 million monthly visitors across its portfolio of more than 25 U.S. brands. The next-gen tool — which leverages a new, proprietary content taxonomy and sophisticated AI — provides a more comprehensive picture of a user than ever before and makes predictive and informed decisions about which ads to serve. The tool will expand globally across Hearst’s 50 brands and 300 million users in late 2024.

The U.S. ad market expanded for its 11th consecutive month in March -- rising 4.3% over March 2023 -- according to the latest monthly installment of Guideline's U.S. Ad Market Tracker. Smaller ad categories outpaced the growth of the top categories by a margin of nearly four-to-one. While the top 10 increased spending only 1.9% over March 2023, all other categories expanded 7.9%. March's growth was also due to a massive increase in digital vs. traditional media ad spending.

Adobe brought together the global creative community for the kickoff of Adobe MAX 2024 – the world’s largest creativity conference – where it introduced over one hundred new Creative Cloud features, including groundbreaking capabilities powered by Adobe Firefly that offer creators unprecedented power to create, collaborate and conceptualize ideas while empowering them to work more productively. Major updates to Adobe Express and an all-new Frame.io deliver new workflows to streamline collaboration for creative teams and their stakeholders. Adobe announced a new Firefly Video Model (beta) and breakthroughs in its Firefly Image, Vector and Design models, delivering significant enhancements to its family of generative AI models that are designed to be commercially safe. For enterprises, Adobe announced the general availability of GenStudio for Performance Marketing, the latest application within Adobe GenStudio, an end-to-end content supply chain solution that optimizes the process of planning, creating, managing, activating and measuring content for marketing campaigns and personalized customer experiences.