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Alphabet’s Google has long dominated the digital advertising landscape, but its recent AI advancements unveiled at the 2025 Google I/O conference signal a new era of innovation. These tools are not just incremental upgrades—they’re foundational shifts that could further solidify Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) position as the advertising ecosystem’s backbone. For investors, the question is clear: How do these AI-driven changes impact Alphabet’s stock valuation, and is now the time to buy?
Google’s latest AI features are redefining how advertisers engage users, with implications for both revenue streams and competitive advantage. The AI Mode in Search, now fully rolled out in the U.S., allows users to ask longer, more complex queries, driving deeper engagement. Early data shows queries are two to three times longer than traditional searches, enhancing Google’s ability to serve hyper-relevant ads. The Visual Shopping feature, which leverages Gemini 2.5 and Google’s 50-billion-item Shopping Graph, is a game-changer. By enabling users to find products via visual preferences and even “try on” apparel virtually, this tool could boost conversion rates and reduce shopping cart abandonment—a direct boon for advertisers.

Meanwhile, Agent Mode in the Gemini App automates tasks like apartment hunting, integrating with third-party services like Zillow. This not only improves user efficiency but also creates new ad opportunities by streamlining interactions between users and advertisers. For instance, Agent Mode could recommend a Zillow listing based on a user’s search history, generating a commission for Alphabet’s ad network.
The financial benefits of these AI tools are already visible. Alphabet reported a 12% revenue increase to $90.2 billion in Q1 2025, with Google Search, YouTube, and Network ads all contributing. Net income surged 46% to $34.5 billion, driven by margin improvements from AI’s cost efficiencies. The new Agentic Checkout feature, which automates purchases via Gemini, could further reduce transaction friction, increasing ad-driven sales pipelines.

Critically, Alphabet’s AI infrastructure—like the seventh-generation TPU (Ironwood), which boosts performance 10x over prior versions—reduces compute costs, enabling higher profit margins. This hardware advantage, combined with its vast data trove, creates a moat against competitors like Meta and Amazon.
Google’s AI tools aren’t isolated; they’re woven into its entire ecosystem. For example, Veo 3 and Imagen 4 allow marketers to generate high-quality ads quickly, reducing production costs and speeding time-to-market. Meanwhile, YouTube’s integration with Gemini’s creativity tools ensures advertisers can deliver seamless, personalized content across platforms.
Meta’s AI efforts, while aggressive, lack Google’s search data and cross-platform reach. Amazon’s ad push struggles to match Google’s contextual understanding. This ecosystem synergy gives Alphabet an edge in capturing incremental ad revenue from small businesses and enterprises alike.
Alphabet’s stock currently trades at a forward P/E of 23x, slightly below its five-year average of 25x. Given its 12% revenue growth and margin expansion, this could signal undervaluation. Competitors like Meta (FB) trade at 28x forward P/E, suggesting Alphabet’s stock may have upside.

However, risks remain. Regulatory scrutiny of data practices and economic downturns could dampen ad spending. Yet Alphabet’s AI-driven margin improvements and recurring subscription revenue (e.g., Google AI Ultra/Pro plans) provide resilience.
Alphabet’s AI advancements are structural wins, not one-off gimmicks. They enhance user engagement, improve ad targeting, and open new revenue streams (e.g., subscriptions). With a dominant market position and a widening lead in AI infrastructure, Alphabet is well-positioned to capitalize on digital advertising’s $600 billion market.
Recommendation: Investors should consider adding Alphabet to their portfolios, especially if the stock dips below $100 (a 20% discount to its current price). The AI dividend is still in its early innings, and Alphabet’s ecosystem dominance ensures sustained growth.
In the digital advertising arms race, Google’s AI is no longer just a tool—it’s a competitive weapon. For investors, that means long-term value.


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See how Airbnb uses digital marketing to grow a loyal fan base of travellers, celebrities, and influencers, among others. Its 360 marketing efforts are well worth it to explore.
Airbnb makes travel an immersive experience. It has become a household name for every globetrotter in a short time. 
The rental-turned-travel company uses various forms of marketing tactics that boost a lot of revenue. And it continues to win more conversions today. So, let’s find out the success of Airbnb digital marketing strategy. 
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See how Airbnb utilises a strong digital marketing strategy. But before that, check out how it began and how it is one of the travel market giants in the world. For those looking to execute a good digital marketing strategy for a travel agency, it will help.  
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Airbnb co-founders are former roommates, Brian Chesky, Joe Gebbia, Nathan Blecharczyk. It is short for Air Bed and Breakfast. And, it launched in 2008 as an online marketplace for finding accommodations. 
The accommodations that the company profits from, are lodgings. These lodgings are not hotels but homestays. 
With its headquarter in San Francisco, California, it began as a budget alternative to hotels with the website, Airbedandbreakfast.com. Fast forward to 2022, its net worth is $38 billion (Statista). 
It is now present in more than 200 countries. Travellers not only find great budget stays but also luxe rentals today. 
Airbnb launched in India around 2016. For the company, India is among the top 3 markets with over 400 million millennials. This age group enjoys travelling. 
The company went further in the country by launching the ‘Trips’ option. With it, tourists could immerse themselves in the local culture more. By 2019, it had 54000 accommodation listings covering 110 cities in the country. 
Airbnb has a non-traditional business model. Its stakeholders are guests, hosts, employees, shareholders and communities. 
For the company, its partners are Airbnb hosts. From the point of view of economics, the hosts are also the suppliers and the guests/travellers are the customers. 
The CEO, Brian Chesky in an interview with The Verge further mentioned that the partners have a ‘customer-like’ relationship with the company. 
How does its business model compete?
Airbnb’s motto is ‘Live like a local’. That means it believes in integrating people into the community. Travellers get to feel like ‘good neighbours’ in any region. 
Some of its main competitors are Tripadvisor, Booking.com, Agoda, VRBO, etc. What most competitors don’t offer to partners is that Airbnb offers $1 million of damage protection, according to Brian Chesky. 
Also, the listings on Airbnb are cheaper. According to the Starting Business website, the homestay prices in the United States and Europe are 6 to 8 percent cheap. 
The old marketing mix uses the 4Ps – product, price, promotion, and place. Airbnb’s marketing strategy adds people and positioning, along with the 4Ps. 
 
That’s how it has a strong brand presence. 
Its target audience is vast. It covers both Gen Z and millennial populations. They are between the ages of 25  – 44 (Starting Business). It spends a lot on marketing research to address the changing demographic. 
 
It invested $367 million for marketing and sales in the first quarter of 2019 (Business Insider). 
Let’s have an in-depth look into the success of Airbnb’s digital marketing planning. It is like a two-sided coin. Both Airbnb hosts and the company utilise a variety of tactics in digital marketing. 
The logo stands for ‘Belong Anywhere’. This indicates how people want to belong, connect, share, feel accepted and safe. 
Airbnb calls its logo the Bélo icon. It outlines people, places and love. German designer Kurt Wiedeman’s theory on this is that a great logo “is ‘something you can draw in the sand with your toe’”.
 
The Bélo icon is like a paper clip with the letter A that symbolises the brand name. Then it also characterises an upside-down heart, a happy or satisfied individual with hands above their head and a location marker on digital maps.  
Its app won Google’s Material Design Award in 2016. 
The interface of the app is according to Google Guidelines. The customer feels at home with the variation in type sizes that is based on content hierarchy. The sans-serif typeface Circular for a warm and friendly character. 
The app design is also very unique. It uses the concept of motion. That is the photos enlarge upon taps like a travel brochure. 
The app offers a highly uncluttered experience when you navigate through the listings. This aspect, as you know, helps in customer retention rate.  
Mobile marketing is one of the strongest suits of Airbnb. It does more than convince users to install the mobile app. It uses a unique linking infrastructure that pushes users to specific (location and user-based) in-app content instead of the homepage on the mobile app. 
This was done with the mobile linking solution – Branch. With Branch, the brand could employ deep links in the digital ads. 
Let’s see how these deep links work.
Every paid ad of Airbnb has Branch links. These links direct the users straight to the content within the app. This is for those who already have the app installed. 
For new users, these links direct them to the website. Now that encourages them to download the app. Once they download it, they can see the specific listings on the digital ad link they clicked. 
 
These deep links are also the CTAs in Airbnb’s digital channels. Be it, for email marketing or social media. 
The result: seamless transition into the mobile app and more conversion.
Airbnb utilises SEO for all search engines including Google and Bing. But it also uses its own SEO for its listings. It controls the content on its own site. 
It analyses more than 100 algorithms. And there are specific search engine optimization (SEO) guidelines that Airbnb hosts have to follow. 
Metrics such as response rate is important for SEO listings. 
For any Airbnb host, keeping a high response rate is important. That is they have to respond to queries of travellers and prospects within 24 hours or even faster. This increases the credibility of the site and mobile app. 
There is also a feature for its partners called ‘Instant Book’. When the partners use this free tool, guests can filter the search listings. 
Another metric the website uses is review quality. 
Also, the company does not upload photos of accommodations on its app, the hosts provide them. As part of Airbnb SEO tip, they have to put around 20 photos with high resolution. 
So the Airbnb hosts put accurate information with safety and convenience details. They have to specify landmarks, amenities, correct language, etc. 
Airbnb hosts utilise paid advertising tactics to stay on top the Airbnb listings. Also, Airbnb itself uses targeted paid ads. With paid advertising, the users know that it is a legitimate business. 
Content marketing helps achieve business goals for the long term. 
The website blogs of every location make the Airbnb site information-rich. Travellers can look for destinations they are going to visit next and make a decision. These blogs outline people, places, cultures, etc. 
Just visit the official website or blog.atairbnb.com. You will find so many categories, including Stories From Our Community and Local Lens, among others. 
The local city guides cover the best places to eat, party and enjoy unique adventure activities. This helps tourists feel what an experiential vacation may entail. 
It makes a difference among many competitors. Airbnb’s content marketing strategy goes beyond to inform about the local life instead of listing the key attractions such as museums, historical monuments and archaeological wonders. 
Check out the Local Lens series. It covers the best places from the eyes of popular local people and their suggestions. 
Read about some unique content marketing examples 
You will find a great presence of the brand across the major digital channels. In its social media networks, you are going to come across posts that promote the digital marketing campaign slogan,  ‘Don’t Go There – Live There’. 
Then they use specific hashtags that instantly remind the target audience about the brand. One example is #belonganywhere. 
 
Let’s talk about Airbnb’s celebrity marketing strategy in India. Since the majority of the millennials here follow Bollywood, the company could tap into that framework in marketing. 
You may have seen a popular ad of Shahrukh Khan’s Airbnb stay at a posh mansion in Beverly Hills. For Indian holidaymakers, this kind of marketing influences their travelling decisions.  
But this celebrity marketing tactic is not useful only in this country. The brand has done the same in the United States with Hollywood celebrities – Britney Spears and Mariah Carey. 
Apart from celebrities, the brand also relies on influencer marketing. This is one of the important marketing efforts that is relatively new but works wonders. Here, Airbnb utilises all the tools, from attractive images, stories and reels that all viewers enjoy. 
You know, Instagram is the online hangout hotspot for Gen Z and millennial users. A majority of the Airbnb prospects are there on the social media channel. The company collaborates with local influencers. This kind of digital marketing helps in building trust among potential tourists. 
With influencer marketing, it drove online traffic of 91 million visits in January 2020. This is a stat from Staring Business. 
Airbnb rewards customers who refer their friends or anyone they know of places and listings on the app. Once they book an Airbnb through reference, the customers are awarded travel credits. The new customers too, get travel discounts. 
Now, such kind of referral programme retains existing customers. As a result, it brings new ones at the same time. 
You know the pandemic affected the travel and tourism industry to a great extent. Many travel websites had to lay off their employees, and hotels and homestays were out of business. As major losses spread, the market also changed. 
Airbnb adapted. 
What Airbnb did was introduce Online Experiences. It has various categories such as Culture & History, Wellness, Food and Drink, among others. 
The product helped hosts from all over the world earn some income. It also allowed people to enjoy a connection with other local cultures, virtually over the Zoom app. 
According to the Airbnb website, Online Experiences helped homestay owners earn up to $500,000.  
Airbnb’s success is owed to its digital marketing strategy. It focuses on the customer relationship.  And, it offers the most meaningful experiences. For hosts and holidaymakers, alike.
 
Aquib is a seasoned wordsmith, having penned countless blogs for Indian and international brands. These days, he's all about digital marketing and core management subjects – not to mention his unwavering commitment … Read Full Bio

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All rights reserved. @2025 Info Edge (India) Ltd

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More than 4 million advertisers are now using the company’s generative AI offerings, which include image, video and text generators.
Pricing growth continued to propel Meta’s core advertising business in Q4 2024, with the average price per ad up 14% around the period that includes the holiday shopping window. The social media giant for some time has tried to balance the ramp up of newer, lower-monetizing surfaces that are popular with users, such as short-form video Reels, with improved precision for mature advertising formats. Meta also recently introduced ads to Threads, a micro-blogging app that competes with Elon Musk’s X, but doesn’t expect Threads advertising will meaningfully contribute to revenue in 2025.  
Strong earnings results followed a whirl of media attention around Meta, including CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s chummier relationship with President Donald Trump, a pullback on fact-checking initiatives and the fast rise of a generative AI platform from China called DeepSeek that has threatened U.S. rivals like OpenAI. The fact-checking retreat has raised some alarms in the advertising community but has not appeared to deliver a material impact on advertiser demand. 
“From an ad revenue perspective, Meta dominated Q4 by pulling in considerably more revenue than any other quarter in the last two years,” said Forrester Vice President and Research Director Mike Proulx in emailed comments. “The big question is whether advertisers will stick with Meta in Q1 against a backdrop of heightened brand safety concerns. While they might not like it, they will continue to spend given Meta’s reach and effectiveness.” 
Meta has focused its generative AI efforts around open-source technology that other developers can draw on when building their own models. That’s exactly what DeepSeek did, as reported in The New York Times, and Meta sees potential upsides for its own business as AI dominates the agenda. 
“I think there’s a number of novel things that [DeepSeek] did that I think we’re still digesting … they have advances that we will hope to implement in our systems,” said Zuckerberg, who has called 2025 a “defining” year for AI, on a call discussing the earnings with analysts. “That’s part of the nature of how this works, whether it’s a Chinese competitor or not.”
Meta plans to spend between $60 billion and $65 billion on its AI infrastructure bets and hiring this year. Meta AI, its personal assistant, currently reaches about 700 million monthly active users, with leadership projecting that number could reach 1 billion this year.
Continuing to advance generative AI could also convince more advertisers to try out the technology. Meta has steadily rolled out generative AI advertising tools, including image, video and text generators, that are now used by more than 4 million advertisers versus 1 million six months ago. 
“There has been significant early adoption of our first video generation tool that we rolled out in October, Image Animation, with hundreds of thousands of advertisers already using it monthly,” said CFO Li.
Advantage+ shopping campaigns, part of a larger suite of AI-powered ad products, saw 70% year-over-year growth in Q4, indicating strong demand around the holidays. Advantage+ shopping campaigns have surpassed an annual revenue run-rate of $20 billion, according to Li. Meta is working to streamline access to Advantage+ so advertisers no longer need to choose between running a manual campaign or one powered by the AI offering. 
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With global ad spending set to surpass $1 trillion, marketers must navigate myriad challenges, including an uncertain regulatory landscape, with finesse.
Nike’s first big game ad in 27 years and other purpose-driven spots won the night, while ads built on celebrities, humor and politics had an uneven showing.
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This is a tricky inflection point for associations when it comes to AI. Organizations have gotten more comfortable with using it for low-hanging-fruit situations—content generation, chatbots—and increasingly recognize the importance of communicating its value and dangers to their membership. 
But the next step is to determine whether they want to use it more dynamically. Last year, a 2025 meeting forecast from Amex GBT Meetings & Events suggested that organizations were ready to expand AI use:  “AI features are now more present within registration for personalized communications, within sourcing tools for more robust and consistent RFPs, and we look forward to more AI enhancements in onsite event technology,” Ariana Reed, Director of Global Strategic Partnerships told me in December. “Our interest in AI is not just to solve for efficiencies in creative content but also to allow us to improve attendee experience with more personalization.”
But halfway into 2025, leaders are holding back. According to a new report from Forrester on B2B events, 39 percent of organizations are already using AI for content generation around events. But after that, current usage falls precipitously: only 23 percent are using it for event data analysis, and 15 percent use it for attendee personalization, such as session and networking recommendations.
According to a report on the study, leaders are still anxious about how much they want to be seen as intruding on attendees’ privacy: “Leaders we spoke with were more focused on exploring AI to drive productivity and efficiency improvements and expressed nervousness with AI that directly touches attendees.”
Only 15 percent of organizations use AI for event personalization.
The cautiousness isn’t out of place. Even setting aside the headline-grabbing examples of AI falling down on the job—the hallucinations, the sudden emergence of rocks as a food group—AI is essentially a data-management issue, and organizations need to pay attention to the security questions inherent in AI, just as they would with their AMS or other member-sensitive technologies.
To that end, taking the next step around AI and meetings—more personalization, more predictive intelligence about what attendees want before and during the event—means establishing clear protocols around what data is used and how. On top of that, association leaders need to be transparent with both members and staff about what information it’s using as how.
As Sidecar Chief Marketing Officer Erica Salm Rench told me for a recent Assocations Now Deep Dive story on AI usage, “ “Association leaders have two very big obligations — they’re separate, but they’re both very important. One being to educate their staff, and the other being to be the thought leader for their space so that they can teach their members how to use AI.” 
The care is important, since the meetings landscape is increasingly uncertain. Will recession concerns eat into travel? Will international travel diminish? How much will increase costs eat into profits? Associations will likely look for opportunities to increase efficiency. The gee-whiz factor will be hard for some to resist: As the Forrester report puts it: “AI’s promise in event management is undeniable. Some trailblazers we spoke with are experimenting with cutting-edge applications such as facial recognition to understand attendee sentiment.” But associations will have to prove they can respect their attendees’ privacy before they rush to scan their faces.
Mark Athitakis, a contributing editor for Associations Now, has written on nonprofits, the arts, and leadership for a variety of publications. He is a coauthor of The Dumbest Moments in Business History and hopes you never qualify for the sequel. MORE
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Generative AI in Marketing: Friend, Foe or Frenemy?  CMSWire.com
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