Stephanie Faris

Taboola.com • June 6th, 2026

From Cost Center to Investment Portfolio: Rethinking the Marketing Budget

Every senior marketer knows the moment. The CFO sets down the deck, looks across the table, and asks the question that decides the next 12 months.
“What, exactly, is marketing contributing here?”
It’s rarely hostile. It’s almost always sincere, in fact. Most importantly, it exposes a problem no dashboard can fix. Classify marketing as a cost, and the budget conversation is lost before it begins. Cost lines are benchmarked against other cost lines, squeezed when revenue tightens, and never expand...

Taboola.com • June 4th, 2026

The Opportunity Arbitrage: How Marketers Provide the Alpha AI Can’t Find

Every performance marketer is asking the same question right now, even if most won’t say it out loud: Is AI going to take my job?
The fear isn’t unreasonable. Every quarter brings another agentic capability, another piece of the workflow that once required a human and now doesn’t. Briefs, bids, creative variations, performance measurement — all of it is being handled by tools that didn’t exist three years ago.
That said, it’s still not the right question. AI is already doing parts of the job. Th...

Taboola.com • May 31st, 2026

PMax: Google’s Performance Max Campaigns Explained

For most of digital advertising’s history, running campaigns meant making dozens of decisions every day. Decisions like which keywords to target, which placements to buy, how much to bid, and which creative to show to which audience.
Effective? Sometimes. Scalable? Not really.
Google Performance Max (PMax) is a complete departure from that model. Rather than requiring advertisers to manage individual levers across separate channels, PMax consolidates everything — inventory, bidding, creative, an...

Atera • May 20th, 2026

The business case for letting AI resolve tier 0 tickets autonomously

Self-service portals and chatbots defer tickets instead of resolving them. Closed-loop autonomy closes that gap and changes the cost math without adding risk to the environment.Your most expensive technicians are spending their days on password resets. At $22 to $100 per fully loaded IT support tiers ticket, this is a budget line that can keep someone up at night. That’s why autonomous Tier 0 isn’t a question of “if” anymore. It’s a question of which version is defensible enough to put in front...

The Penny Hoarder • May 19th, 2026

Unwanted Gift Cards? Here’s How to Cash Out Online

Selling gift cards is generally safest and most convenient through online marketplaces, while local buyers sometimes offer more money but require extra legwork. Gift cards often resell for about 60% to 90% of their face value, depending on the brand and where you list them. 
We bet that somewhere in your junk drawer or buried in your email you have gift cards you’re never going to use. No matter the reason it goes unused, gift cards have real cash value, and you can usually recover a good portio...

Taboola.com • May 19th, 2026

What's Holding Back Agentic AI Adoption? Risks of Delay Explained

An overwhelming 82% percent of marketers say agentic AI on the open web represents a real growth opportunity, but most still aren’t using it. That gap isn’t a fluke, it’s where the industry stands right now: strong belief, slow action, and a growing divide between the companies experimenting early and the ones waiting on the sidelines.
The hesitation is understandable. Agentic AI is moving fast, and many teams are still trying to figure out where the technology fits into existing workflows, budg...

Atera • May 12th, 2026

Why IT Consolidation Fails — and How AI-Native Platforms Fix It

Most consolidation projects collapse under the weight of integration debt and stalled adoption. AI-native platforms sidestep both by making intelligence the foundation, not a feature added later.Every executive has watched at least one consolidation initiative deliver a small fraction of what the business case promised. The pattern is so consistent, it’s almost predictable: the vendor count drops, the workload doesn’t, and the projected ROI never materializes.This piece unpacks why the pattern k...

Taboola.com • April 22nd, 2026

Beat Meta Diminishing Returns with Yahoo Mail Premium Inventory

Every growth-focused home improvement brand eventually runs into the same problems: performance plateaus, budgets increase, and lead costs follow. Audience expansion may generate more clicks, but fewer qualified inquiries.
The issue isn’t visibility: it’s context.
Home services are rarely impulse purchases. They’re planned, researched, and evaluated. That means brands need environments where homeowners are thinking about real-life decisions, not just scrolling for inspiration. Premium inbox inve...

Taboola.com • April 21st, 2026

Effective A/B Testing Techniques to Optimize ROI in Insurance Campaigns

If you want to understand why many insurance campaigns stall, look at the landing page. It may not be glamorous, but it’s where campaigns are won or lost.
Every additional form field introduces hesitation. Every removed requirement introduces risk. Insurance advertisers are constantly negotiating between volume and value, trying to satisfy both marketing key performance indicators (KPIs) and sales expectations.
In the insurance quote space, that negotiation can create a bottleneck. Recently, one...

Taboola.com • March 24th, 2026

Target CPA: Do's & Don'ts for Your Performance Campaigns

Target cost per acquisition (tCPA) can be one of the most powerful levers in performance marketing. But, it can also become a campaign killer if it’s turned on too soon, or configured without enough data. Across thousands of advertiser conversations, tCPA demonstrates that it works best when it’s treated as a refinement tool, not a launch strategy.
Whether you’re running lead generation or direct-to-consumer (DTC) campaigns, the right approach can help you avoid the most common mistakes, protect...