Direct mail remains a nutritious part of your complete marketing mix. But innovation is rare. So it’s exciting to see printer Quad/Graphics touting a new platform that can run tests “at a fraction of the cost of traditional mailing testing.” Their trick is to have an online survey panel preview mailer elements and then pick the best combination. Clever and effective but I had imagined something more magical.

More bad news: GlobalWebIndex found personalized Web site recommendations ranked a dismal 17th on the list of product discovery sources. Ray of hope: they were ahead of ads in movie theaters. Most cited sources were search engines, TV, and word of mouth.

YouTube is not just a video platform, of course, it’s also a powerful search engine and it has begun testing a Google AI Overviews carousel that will appear in results for selected queries. Given the threat AI Overviews is perceived to pose to click-thru traffic in Google Search results, there’s a question about whether the YouTube initiative could depress click-thrus to brand and creator videos. Right now, the feature is only visible to a sub-set of U.S. premium users.