
Happy Friday Marketing Engineers!
Today:
👩💼 Anthropic Hires Lawyers As It Preps For IPO
👴🏻 How To Do Baby Boomer Marketing: Tactics, Formats & Messaging
🤔 ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond The Numbers
😇 Angel Investors, A Field Guide
🔮 Design And Marketing Trends 2026
🫶 Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document
🚀 Ada{m}
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🗞 News
How Confessions Can Keep Language Models Honest [11 min read]
Confessions are a new training method where AI models provide separate, honest reports about whether they followed instructions, with the confession output optimized solely for honesty and rewarded even when admitting to misbehavior. The method proves highly effective at detecting hidden misbehaviors, achieving only 4.4% false negatives across adversarial tests, and confession accuracy actually improved during training even as models learned to exploit weaknesses in the main reward signal. While confessions successfully surface problematic behavior rather than preventing it, and the technique is still a proof-of-concept with imperfect accuracy, it's intended as one valuable layer in a broader safety and transparency stack alongside other oversight tools.
The Math Of LLMs And SEO [12 min read]
LLM-based search represents the biggest algorithmic shift in search history because it generates answers rather than ranking documents, making it mathematically fundamentally different from traditional search. Different SEO strategies now perform better in each paradigm—pillar pages rank higher in traditional search while focused, intent-specific pages perform better in LLM-generated answers due to how retrieval systems work. While this doesn't mean "SEO is dead" or require entirely new methods, the mathematical changes have significantly altered the relative importance of various SEO techniques, and understanding these shifts is important for optimizing visibility in the new landscape.
Introducing Google Workspace Studio [4 min read]
Google Workspace Studio is now generally available, enabling anyone to create AI agents without coding by using natural language descriptions or templates, with Gemini 3 providing the reasoning power to automate tasks from simple email management to complex business workflows. These agents are more intelligent and flexible than traditional automation tools because they can reason through problems, adapt to new information, and handle tasks like sentiment analysis and content generation. The agents are integrated across Google Workspace apps like Gmail, Drive, and Chat to understand work context, and they're extensible to third-party platforms like Asana, Jira, and Salesforce through pre-built steps, while advanced users can customize agents using Apps Script and integrate with internal tools or proprietary models via Vertex AI.
🤖 AI
Anthropic Hires Lawyers As It Preps For IPO [1 min read]
An IPO that could happen as early as 2026. The company is seeking a massive funding round at a valuation exceeding $300 billion and has begun talks with investment banks, though it hasn't yet chosen an underwriter, following its last raise of $13 billion in September at a $183 billion valuation. This IPO preparation mirrors similar moves by OpenAI, valued at $500 billion, which is also reportedly preparing for an IPO and testing the waters for the process, indicating a broader trend of major AI companies moving toward public markets.
OpenAI Hits Pause On ChatGPT Ads [3 min read]
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman declared an urgent "code red" to improve ChatGPT's quality, ordering company-wide efforts to enhance the platform's personalization, speed, reliability, and capabilities through daily calls and team reassignments. The move comes as rising competition from Google's Gemini (which reached 650 million monthly users) and Anthropic, combined with significant financial pressure requiring $200 billion in revenue by 2030 for profitability, has intensified urgency at the company. To focus on core product improvements, OpenAI is postponing its ChatGPT advertising rollout and other initiatives like AI agents for health and shopping, meaning advertisers will have to wait longer to use the platform as an ad channel.
🧠 Hacks & Tactics
Baby boomers overwhelmingly prefer organic marketing strategies like content, email, and video over paid advertising, with only 12% responding positively to ads compared to other generations. The most effective content formats for reaching this demographic include email newsletters, YouTube videos, blog posts, and Facebook content that uses clear, straightforward messaging without slang. Marketing to baby boomers requires patience and trust-building, as they have longer buying cycles, prioritize quality and price over brand authenticity, and are less receptive to personalized marketing and data collection than younger consumers.
ROI vs. VOI: Smart Marketers Look Beyond The Numbers [6 min read]
While Return on Investment (ROI) provides clear financial metrics, it struggles with attribution issues and fails to capture the intangible benefits that contribute to long-term marketing success. Value on Investment (VOI) fills this gap by measuring qualitative factors like brand awareness, customer loyalty, social media engagement, and reputation building that don't appear in spreadsheets but drive sustainable growth. Smart marketers understand that success requires balancing both ROI and VOI rather than choosing one over the other, as focusing too heavily on either metric alone can lead to poor business outcomes and missed opportunities for building lasting brand resilience.
🏗️ For Founders
Angel Investors, A Field Guide [10 min read]
Angel investors come in different types that serve distinct purposes, including strategic angels who fill expertise gaps, vanity angels like celebrities who provide credibility, early-stage angels who offer important runway, and friends and family investors whose involvement remains a personal choice. Unlike institutional VCs who must protect their ownership stakes, angel investors can freely assist with fundraising introductions and generate investor interest without conflicts of interest, making them uniquely valuable during funding cycles. To maximize the benefits of working with angels, founders should build intentional relationships through quarterly check-ins, send monthly updates with specific asks and acknowledgments, and understand each angel's unique strengths to leverage their help effectively.
🔮 The Future
Design And Marketing Trends 2026 [60 min read]
In 2026, AI is evolving from an experimental tool into a systematic workflow that powers efficiency and personalization while human creativity remains essential for emotional resonance and strategic direction. Social media success now depends on authenticity and meaningful community engagement rather than viral reach, with audiences craving real, human-centered content over algorithmic perfection. High-performing marketing teams are building intentional brand systems anchored in accessibility and data storytelling, shifting their focus from vanity metrics to value-based measurements like conversion, trust, and loyalty that drive sustainable growth.
Claude 4.5 Opus' Soul Document [50 min read]
A character training document called the "soul document" was discovered compressed in Claude 4.5 Opus's weights through systematic consensus sampling across multiple instances. The document reveals Anthropic's core philosophy: Claude should be "an extremely good assistant that is also honest and cares about the world," genuinely helpful rather than overly cautious, treating users as intelligent adults while maintaining ethical boundaries. Rather than following rigid rules, Claude uses nuanced judgment with context-dependent decision-making, distinguishing between absolute restrictions (like never helping create bioweapons) and flexible defaults that can be adjusted by operators or users for legitimate purposes.
👩🏫 Vocab
Marketing Operations: The processes, technology, and people that enable marketing to run efficiently at scale. It includes workflow management, technology integration, and performance measurement. Marketing operations ensures marketing teams can execute strategies effectively.
Example: A company uses project management software to coordinate content creation, approval processes, and campaign launches across global marketing teams.
Campaign Attribution: The identification of which marketing campaigns and channels contribute to customer conversions. It tracks how different marketing efforts work together to generate results. Campaign attribution helps marketers understand which activities drive the most value.
Example: An online store discovers that customers typically interact with three social media ads and two email campaigns before making their first purchase.

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🥞 Stack
tools we use to keep our business running
Discord - find community with text, voice, and video chat. Join us!
Beehiiv - engage newsletter audiences and grow subscribers
Clickup - project management and team collaboration
WordPress - build websites and blogs
Elementor - drag-and-drop builder for WordPress
Buffer - streamline social media scheduling and analytics
ElevenLabs - convert text into realistic voiceover
Riverside - record high-quality audio and video remotely
Transistor - all-in-one podcast hosting platform
Zapier - automate tasks by connecting web apps
Claude - AI language model focused on safe and ethical text processing
Midjourney - generate images from text prompts using AI
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