Q1 Mistakes still killing Q3

Hey there Smarty 👋

Are you geared up to catch the latest and greatest in quick shorts?

And just a quick heads-up! If you stumbled upon us through a friend, make sure to subscribe here! That way, you’ll never miss out on the trending shorts.

🥲Q3 Is Paying For Lessons Q1 Already Learned

The most expensive context loss is not between tools. It is between time periods. 

Nobody documents what was learned in a format that survives past the team's short-term memory. 

By Q3, the same audience segment killed in February gets retested. The creative variant that lost in March gets rebuilt. The media budget pays for the same education twice and nobody notices because the original lesson never became an artifact.

The recap discipline does not exist because nobody is accountable for institutional memory.

The One-Page Format That Actually Survives

Most post-mortems either do not happen or happen as a meeting that produces no document. The meeting is not the point. The artifact is.

Three sections. One page. Non-negotiable.

Filed in a consistent location. Tagged so it surfaces when the next related campaign is being planned. If it takes longer than 20 minutes to write, it is being overcomplicated.

Make It A Gate, Not A Nice-To-Have

Optional recaps get rescheduled until they disappear. The fix is structural.

No new campaign brief gets approved without the recap from the most recent adjacent campaign attached to it. 

That single rule makes the recap happen because the next campaign cannot start without it. It also makes the recap useful because the team writing the next brief is the team reading it.

The incentive structure changes completely. The recap stops being administrative overhead and starts being the thing that unblocks the next sprint.

An Archive Nobody Searches Is Not An Archive

HubSpot's 2026 Essential Apps for Marketers brings together 14 apps across creative, ads, events, and more so context travels with every campaign, decision, and handoff. 

The cross-quarter memory problem is structural, and the archive needs to be searchable by campaign type, audience, channel, and outcome before it earns the name. Browse apps

A folder of PDFs titled by date is not institutional memory. It is a graveyard.

Build the archive so future briefs reference it by default, not by heroic effort from whoever happens to remember a test existed. The Q3 team should not be paying to relearn what Q1 already proved.

Together with AirOps

Stop running AI like it's 2023

Most growth teams using AI are still doing the same work, just faster. The prompts exist, but the system holding them together doesn't.

On June 11, growth leaders from Chime, Bitly, and Udemy are showing exactly how they moved past one-off prompts into agentic Playbooks that run, improve, and maintain themselves.

You'll walk away with:

• The exact path from one-off prompts to agentic Playbooks that run on autopilot
• How to build oversight into your workflow without slowing execution down
• What to say to leadership to get AI initiatives approved fast

Tyler Roehmholdt (Director of SEO Strategy, Bitly), Nicholas King (Sr. SEO and Digital Experience Manager, Udemy), and Bridget Nelson (AI Search Strategist, Chime) are walking through what they've built and what's moving the needle right now.

If you're still patching AI into your workflow manually, this is the session that changes that.

Can't make it live? Register anyway and get the recording in your inbox within 24 hours.

🔍 Google adds more transparency to AI Search and Ads

Google announced new reporting and control features across Search Console and Google Ads, giving publishers more visibility into AI Search performance while helping advertisers better track invalid traffic and refunded ad spend.

The Breakdown:

Publishers get new visibility - Google is rolling out Search Console reports for AI Overviews and AI Mode, showing impressions, pages, countries, devices, and performance trends, though click data remains unavailable.

Publishers gain AI controls - Google is testing a new Search Console toggle that lets site owners block content from appearing in AI Overviews and AI Mode without affecting traditional Search rankings.

Google surfaces invalid traffic credits - Advertisers can now access detailed reporting showing refunded spend from invalid clicks and interactions, including campaign-level impact and adjusted performance after credits are applied.

Traffic quality becomes clearer - The Invalid Activity Credit Report helps advertisers reconcile billing credits, evaluate traffic quality, and understand how Google’s fraud detection systems affect campaign performance.

Google is gradually opening the black box around AI Search visibility and advertising quality metrics. Publishers are getting more control over how AI uses their content, while advertisers gain better insight into where campaign spend is actually going.

👨‍💻 Quick Hits

🎬 Meta is testing a Series feature for Instagram and Facebook Reels, allowing creators to link related videos into episodic collections, supporting longer-form storytelling, and could help creators build deeper audience engagement beyond standalone short videos. 

🎥 Reddit is launching video replies in comments, allowing users to respond with videos alongside text, images, and GIFs. Moderators can disable the feature, with a broader rollout to public communities starting June 11.

📈 LinkedIn is expanding mobile post boosting, allowing users to promote organic posts directly from the app. Campaigns start at $10/day for a minimum of 2 days, with audience, budget, and duration controls built into the mobile workflow. 

📈 OpenAI is rolling out conversion-optimized campaigns in ChatGPT Ads Manager, adding CPA bidding, Pixel and Conversion API tracking, and conversion reporting as it expands beyond CPM and CPC advertising.

🥳Events

🔥 Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, Is Revealing How AI Forms Brand Opinions From Signals Most Marketers Never Controlled

June 9 | Virtual Event | Free

AI already has an opinion about your brand, and you didn't write it. Rand Fishkin, Co-Founder of SparkToro, and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search at Wix, show you exactly which signals shape it and how to own them across 30 sessions zero vendor pitches. Can't make it live? Every session lands in your inbox.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't attend every session live? Register anyway, you'll get the recodings withn 24hours.

🔥 L'Oréal's Former Global Communications Lead Is Explaining the High-Reach Low-Trust Trap Live

June 11 | Virtual Event | Free

Eric Ford spent years managing creator relationships at one of the most influential beauty brands on the planet. This session, he's breaking down the reach versus trust tradeoff that quietly derails most influencer programs and how his team learned to navigate it.

✅ Reserve Your Free Spot

Can't attend every session live? Register anyway, you'll get the recodings withn 24hours.

That’s a wrap for today! Tell us your thoughts about today's content as we line up more Shorts! And don’t hesitate to share this with someone who’d adore it. 🥰