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Happy Friday! Christmas is less than two weeks away, and if you celebrate like I do, you’re probably stressing about gifts that you should’ve bought during Cyber Monday but didn’t… That’s this weekend’s problem. Anyway, let’s get into this week’s content.
🔥 Headlines of the Week
• How to Build a Q1 Pipeline Before December Ends
• Google Just Signaled a Shift in How Brands Reach Their Audience
• 5 Moves to Reinvent Your Brand Before January 1st
📈 How to build a Q1 Pipeline Before December Ends
December is the most underrated month for growth.
Most agency owners slow down and hope January brings momentum.
The smart ones use the final three weeks of the year to pre-build conversations, warm up leads, and stack opportunities that convert immediately once budgets reset.
The strategy is simple.
Create a short list of dormant leads from the past year and send each one a quick value-first update that solves a problem you know they still have.
Publish one strong piece of content per week that directly speaks to the pain your best clients feel in January.
Build a tiny nurture sequence that every new contact receives so you stay top of mind without manually following up.
While everyone else is checking out for the holidays, you are quietly building the runway that makes Q1 your biggest quarter.
Shoppers are adding to cart for the holidays
Over the next year, Roku predicts that 100% of the streaming audience will see ads. For growth marketers in 2026, CTV will remain an important “safe space” as AI creates widespread disruption in the search and social channels. Plus, easier access to self-serve CTV ad buying tools and targeting options will lead to a surge in locally-targeted streaming campaigns.
Read our guide to find out why growth marketers should make sure CTV is part of their 2026 media mix.
Riddle break 🧠
I’m taken before you work,
and after you’re finally done.
I’m spent on big decisions,
and wasted just for fun.
Everyone wants more of me,
but no one gets a refund.
What am I?
(Answer at the bottom)
🤖 Google Just Signaled a Shift in How Brands Reach Their Audience
Google made updates this week that tighten privacy expectations and push marketers toward cleaner data collection.
The biggest shift is that first-party engagement is becoming more valuable than raw reach.
Brands that rely on wide targeting will continue to feel performance decline, while marketers who build their own data ecosystem will win year after year.
This means your audience lists, your email subscribers, and your owned content now carry more weight than ever.
Treat this update as a green light to redesign your data strategy.
Clean your lists, build better lead magnets, and tighten your tracking.
The marketers who adapt first will be the ones who enjoy the lowest acquisition costs and the highest retention next year.
🛜 The Quiet AI Tools That Can Double Your Output in 2026
AI is shifting again, and the newest wave is less flashy and more practical.
The biggest wins are coming from operators who plug AI into daily workflows rather than treating it like a novelty.
The standout updates this week are in autonomous research, automated reporting, and email workflow automation.
Tools like ChatGPT Advanced Analytics and agent-style assistants can now summarize entire months of performance, build clean reports, and even identify patterns you might miss.
Use this as your signal to explore AI for back-end efficiency.
Automate research for new pitches.
Use AI to draft the first 60 percent of every piece of content.
Let it handle your weekly performance recaps so you can spend your energy on strategy.
The agencies leaning into this quiet layer of automation are the ones scaling without burning out their team.
Here’s a list of valuable AI tools that can help double your output:
ChatGPT Advanced Analytics
Perfect for building financial forecasts, campaign reports, and customer segmentation models without a data team. Upload CSVs, analyze trends, and generate insights that normally take hours.
Perplexity AI
A research engine for competitive analysis and trend scouting.
Use it to find what your competitors are launching, what keywords are heating up, or what offers are working in your industry.
It saves days of research.
Jasper AI
A creative engine for producing on-brand ad copy, social content, and landing page ideas.
Great for agencies that want a scalable content workflow.
Descript
A full stack podcast and video editor powered by AI.
Turn long videos into shorts, edit filler words in seconds, and repurpose your content across platforms.
ElevenLabs Voice AI
Good for voiceovers, training content, ad creative testing, or creating a consistent audio identity without hiring talent over and over.
Zapier AI Actions
Lets you plug AI into your existing operations.
Use it to automate lead scoring, write CRM notes automatically, or create a daily insights summary from all your platforms.
OpenAI Canvas
Great for building custom growth systems.
Use it to create automated email workflows, content engines, onboarding sequences, or client reporting frameworks.
Midjourney or Ideogram
Use these for creative testing.
Generate ad concepts fast, build branding options, or test product mockups before sending anything to a designer.
Data Scraper plus GPT
Use web scrapers paired with GPT to extract leads, analyze competitor sites, categorize businesses, or enrich prospect data in minutes instead of manually.
Rundeck or Make.com
For advanced shops that want to automate multi-step operational workflows, especially across marketing tasks, CRM, and project management tools.
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Riddle Answer - Time
