Sword and the Script ✒️🗡

Good PR people learn how to snoop useful information out of clients that aids in developing good pitches. It’s about eliciting ideas, kicking them around, and figuring out where and how they apply to current news trends. swordandthescript.com/2026/03/good-p…

If your annual marketing budget is US$100,000, a 10% to 15% influencer allocation (US$10,000 to US$15,000) is a sensible starting point for a test-and-learn year. contentgrip.com/influencer-mar…

What Happens When AI Makes CX Faster but Wrong? cxtoday.com/ai-automation-…

"Many [marketing] teams repeat last year’s playbooks while markets, buyers, and channels move faster than they do. The risk is not doing too little. It is learning too slowly." forrester.com/blogs/most-b2b…

This is a marketing problem: 74% of enterprises that deployed AI customer agents have rolled them back after governance failures damaged CX and trust. And if you've laid off customer service staff for AI, then what? martech.org/bad-ai-custome…

"70% of B2B buyers prefer a digital, self-service buying experience, and nearly half use generative AI tools to research vendors and products. The challenge for marketers is that buyers are running into misinformation along the way." martech.org/b2b-buyers-tru…

.@frank_strong: Should PR accept an interview with a publication that has a small audience? | ow.ly/QogG50Z1IBx @SwordandScript "There are fewer reporters inundated with pitches ... A placement in a small audience publication suggests your ideas are worth covering."

The Real Problem Isn’t The Decline In Traffic — It’s The Decline In Visibility When buyers use answer engines in their buying process, you not only lose the traffic; you also lose visibility. forrester.com/blogs/stop-rep…

Study of 25k LLM citations finds ~50% are listicles searchengineland.com/ai-search-love…

Should PR accept an interview with a publication that has a small audience? swordandthescript.com/2026/05/interv…

Hidden Costs: When Survey Companies Don't Understand Marketing and Sales - Elaine Ball Ltd elaineball.co.uk/blog/hidden-co…

The newsletter formatting pressure test: 4 questions to ask - Ragan Communications ragan.com/internal-comms…

"McKinsey’s latest State of AI report found that just one-third of organizations have managed to scale" beyond pilot. "PwC’s approach... has been to lean into gamification" ..."shifted toward personalised progress tracking, skill-building milestones" cxtoday.com/workforce-enga…

Old habits die hard: 57% of US B2B decision-makers use search engines during early research, more than any other channel emarketer.com/content/b2b-bu…

Marketers may be worried about AI, but B2B’s true existential threats are far more human in nature. thedrum.com/industry-insig…

Education-led marketing offers a way out and a way to break through the noise. marketingprofs.com/articles/2025/… via @marketingprofs

@MindTheGapMTG Definitely trendy to see pilots perform well - and then degrade when put into production.

@SwordandScript The 26% who kept agents live probably built the boring stuff first - deterministic guardrails, fallback paths, human handoff triggers. Everyone else shipped the demo to production and learned why that's a bad idea. The model isn't the failure point. The missing scaffolding is.

Sinch research (n=2,527) reveals 74% of enterprises have rolled back live AI customer communications agents >>62% already have AI agents live in production but are encountering systemic failures customerthink.com/sinch-research…

Google to no longer support FAQ rich results searchengineland.com/google-to-no-l…

How long does it take for B2B tech to close a deal – from first touch to deal-closed? swordandthescript.com/2026/05/b2b-te… h/t @DreamdataIO

AI use and fatigue growing among consumers martech.org/ai-use-and-fat…