Digital Marketing, SEO, Analytics, and Software Reviews
With 25+ years in digital marketing, Marketing With Dave focuses on discovering, measuring, and optimizing every aspect of it.
Marketing Tools Spotlight
My current top picks from everything I’ve been reviewing and testing.🔥 On My Radar → and view all reviews and comparisons →
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Your LinkedIn Profile Mastered
Get found. Build trust. Create opportunities.
Available in Kindle (ebook), paperback, and audiobook formats.
Learn how to improve your LinkedIn profile in about an hour with 17 practical improvements based on a real job search after 25+ years in digital marketing.
Step-by-step guidance to help you make the right changes the first time and build a profile that attracts recruiters, strengthens your personal brand, and creates new opportunities.
September Focus: Martech
September focuses on martech, the discipline of choosing tools that earn their place in your stack. AI has lowered the barrier to building software, and thousands of tools are chasing your budget.
More options should make marketing easier. Instead, they often create sprawl: disconnected platforms, duplicate data, and manual workflows. A tool that cannot talk to the rest of your stack is a liability wearing a feature list.
Integration is the filter. Before adopting anything new, ask whether it strengthens your system or adds another silo. The best stack isn’t the one with the most tools. It’s the one that works together.
If you missed past content or want to revisit a topic, check out the Content Calendar. Explore the insights below, and please share your thoughts.
This Month
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Week in Review
This week's stories center on AI settling into infrastructure marketers already run on: Google pushed Gemini 3.8 Live into Search Live's voice conversations, OpenAI tested in-chat Sponsored Agents for ChatGPT Ads, and AWS deepened its Salesforce integration, each treating AI agents as a default layer rather than an add-on. Trust is becoming the harder problem underneath that shift, with Bazaarvoice and Bluefish research showing consumers now lean on authentic reviews to trust AI product recommendations, even as Meta starts charging for an AI agent of its own inside its new Meta One tiers. Measurement discipline still matters most, with CTR and ROAS both losing credibility among senior marketers, and clean CRM data remaining the prerequisite for making any of this AI tooling reliable.
AWS and Salesforce Expand Partnership With New AI Agent Integrations
Technology and AI • September 18, 2026
AWS and Salesforce announced expanded integrations that bring CRM data, AI agents, and model choice into the tools enterprise teams already use daily. Salesforce data and actions will become available in Amazon Quick, the AWS DevOps Agent will be available in Slack, and Agentforce users will gain access to Amazon Bedrock models. The companies are also expanding zero-copy access across AWS data services and Salesforce Data 360, cutting the need to migrate data just to ground an agent. For enterprise marketing and sales operations teams running Agentforce, this lowers the technical lift for connecting CRM context to AI agents and adds model flexibility that was previously locked to a single provider. Expect faster rollout of agent-based workflows across teams that already run both ecosystems.
AI Update, September 18, 2026: AI News and Views From the Past Week
Technology and AI • September 18, 2026
MarketingProfs' weekly AI roundup covered OpenAI's Sponsored Agents test for ChatGPT ads, Shopify's claim that AI-driven discovery lifts conversion by roughly 80%, and Google's addition of agentic AI and upper-funnel measurement to its open-source Meridian marketing mix model. It also tracked a growing split among AI labs and policymakers over whether frontier AI development should slow down, with Anthropic and OpenAI leadership backing a more cautious pace while Meta, Nvidia, and the Trump administration pushed back. One cited estimate puts AI-directed ad spend at 12% of US ad spending this year, up from 2% in 2023, and projected to reach 27% by 2030. For marketers, the roundup is a reminder that measurement, media buying, and AI governance are all shifting at once, so product roadmaps and vendor safety postures should be treated as moving targets when planning next year's stack.
Bazaarvoice and Bluefish Partner as Research Shows Shoppers Want Reviews Behind AI Recommendations
Marketing and SEO • September 17, 2026
Bazaarvoice announced a partnership with Bluefish, an agentic marketing platform, alongside new joint research on how consumers trust AI-driven product recommendations. The research found that 57% of consumers cite authentic reviews and star ratings as what makes them trust an AI recommendation, ahead of brand reputation and price, and that 62% report higher trust in AI recommendations than six months ago. A companion analysis of more than 23,000 brand and eCommerce URLs found that 59% of AI-cited product pages carry 100 or more reviews, 92% hold ratings of four stars or higher, and 65% display a review summary near the top of the page. For marketers, the findings point to concrete, low-cost changes, such as surfacing a review summary above the fold, that can improve a product page's odds of being cited by AI shopping tools, while the partnership itself reflects review platforms folding AI-visibility monitoring directly into their existing tools.