Author: Geek Planet

Fine dining and globe-trotting travel have been displacing mere objects as consumer status symbols ever since Instagram first arrived on the app store way back in 2010.It’s a shift that brand marketers have long sought to connect with. Few have been as persistent as Mastercard, though. The payments brand first began marketing around “experiences” almost 10 years back, according to CMO Raja Rajamannar; it first unveiled its “Priceless.com” loyalty platform in 2016. A recent survey by research firm Dynata of 15,000 European consumers appears to validate that strategy. Despite the hairy economic circumstances facing shoppers across the continent, 70% said…

It’s only been six months since Perplexity launched its ad business, but advertisers are already hungry for it to grow up fast and prove it’s more than just another shiny object.Six media buyers Digiday spoke to say they want to see more from the AI-powered search engine, which has been tested by the likes of Indeed, Whole Foods, Universal McCann and PMG since November, when they signed up as the first brand and agency partners to the platform. The ads, tucked beside answers and marked “sponsored” are subtle but the expectations are anything but. Marketers are curious, the buyers said,…

If you’re thinking about upgrading to Samsung’s new Galaxy S26 series, you don’t have to wait until the release date and drop serious cash to get a feel for what it’s like. Samsung is letting you get a taste of its next-gen flagships with a new web-based interactive experience. This clever virtual try-before-you-buy tool is for curious buyers who want hands-on familiarity before pulling the trigger on the pricey upgrade. What is TryGalaxy and how does it work? The TryGalaxy platform from Samsung isn’t a full emulator or downloadable app. It is just a mobile-optimized web experience designed to run…

Laptop deals are usually small discounts on underpowered configs, or big discounts on models that already feel dated. This one is different because it cuts the price on a modern, everyday premium machine in a way that actually changes the decision. The Microsoft Surface Laptop (Copilot+ PC, 13.8-inch touchscreen, Snapdragon X Plus, 16GB RAM, 512GB storage, 7th edition) is $849.99, which is $350 off the $1,199.99 compared value. If you’ve been waiting for a “buy once, use it for years” Windows laptop price to come back down to earth, this is the kind of markdown that makes sense. What you’re…

When the economy turns sour, marketers are the first in their businesses to taste it, especially the ones on in-house teams.Just last month, PepsiCo reportedly handed off parts of its internal creative studio to VaynerMedia, prompting some staff exits. Weeks later, Keurig Dr Pepper pulled the plug on its in-house creative team entirely, according to Ad Age. And this may just be the start.  With inflation, interest rates, tariffs and global unrest tying the economy in knots, businesses are scanning for cuts. Marketing budgets are an obvious target — easy to dial back and often the first to go. In-house…

Digiday editors asked the Digiday+ community for any questions it had during their first Ask Our Editors event on Thursday, which covered off expectations for the Google trial, updates on M&A activity and privacy workarounds. Digiday editor in chief Jim Cooper kicked off the conversation between Seb Joseph, executive director of news and Ronan Shields, senior editor, discussing the potential outcomes between Google’s trials concerning Search and its ad tech business. Google trial outcomes On whether the trials would result in Google breaking up — both Joseph and Shields poked at whether it was too late. For publishers’ reliance on…

The ongoing memory crisis has rippled past smartphones and is now affecting laptops. Samsung’s Galaxy Book 6 Pro (16-inch), for instance, starts at KRW 3.51 million (about $2,373) in the company’s home market, which is around 25% higher than the same variant of the Galaxy Book 5 Pro, which was launched at KRW 2.80 million ($1,749 for an equivalent variant). Yes, the company has upgraded the notebook with Intel’s new Panther Lake chipset, but there’s more to it than just increased CPU cores. It is the dramatic rise in the cost of RAM and storage chips that is driving the…

Samsung’s bold experiments with radical foldable phone designs, like the ultra-slim flagship Galaxy S25 Edge and its first triple-folding device, may not see a traditional yearly release. An executive has revealed that the company remains uncommitted to launching more insanely pricey smartphones anytime soon. Why the next TriFold isn’t a given During an interview with Bloomberg, Won-Joon Choi, chief operating officer of Samsung’s Mobile Experience Business, said the brand is skeptical about successors for the Galaxy S25 Edge and Galaxy Z TriFold. The sales of these devices lagged behind expectations compared with their more mainstream models like the Galaxy S…

Accenture Song is in for change, as its leader and creative power, David Droga, steps upstairs to the parent company Accenture’s corner office as vice chair. Droga, considered by many to be one of the last of a generation of creative agency leaders, is being replaced by Ndidi Oteh, who’s been running Accenture Song’s Americas unit for the last 17 months but is a longtime Accenture vet.  The immediate question is how will Droga’s absence from Song affect that company’s creative chops? For one, Nick Law, a creative exec who joined Song a little over three years after a career…

University of Washington researchers built a smartphone app that tracks fetal heart rate as accurately as clinic tools. No extra hardware, no gel, just the phone’s own speaker and microphone. It’s called DopFone. The system plays an 18kHz tone and listens for the echo. A machine learning model estimates the heart rate from subtle shifts in that reflected sound. In a study of 23 pregnant patients, the app landed within about 2 beats per minute of a medical-grade Doppler. That’s well inside the 8 BPM margin doctors accept. The idea is to give more people access to regular fetal monitoring…