Spinutech will sponsor the annual summit and lead a session exploring how AI, social media and fragmented search are reshaping brand discovery and marketing measurement.

The new product lets creative teams turn their repetitive creative work into automated workflows that any team can operate.

Refuel Agency, a media and marketing agency with 35+ years reaching hard-to-reach audiences at scale, today announced its 2026 Youth, College & Young Adult Explorer, a redesigned edition of its proprietary research series.

The study separates the total 1,545 respondents into four life-stage segments — teens (15-17), young adults (18-24), adults (25+), and college versus non-college students — rather than treating “youth” as one group anchored on the college decision. The redesign followed a data point Refuel’s research team could not ignore: roughly 40% of the youth population does not attend college, so a study built only around the college decision was missing a substantial share of the audience.

“If four in ten young people aren’t taking the traditional college path, a study that only asks about college decisions is only describing six in ten of them,” said Liz Carmo, EVP Audience & Brand at Refuel Agency. “We wanted to track what happens after the teen years, whether that’s college, no college, or something in between.”

The study’s most consequential finding: the social-brand-discovery peak has shifted past the teen years. Young adults (not teens) lead brand discovery on TikTok (30% versus 28%) and Instagram (29% versus 23%). Adults now log nearly twice the weekly hours on social platforms that teens do: 40 versus 24, with college students at 40.

“Most brand media plans still treat the teen years as the social-media high-water mark. Our data says the opposite,” said Liz Carmo, EVP Audience & Brand at Refuel Agency. “Brands allocating youth budgets on a decade-old assumption are reaching the wrong audience at the wrong intensity.”

Reach and conversion diverge, too. Social ads lead attention (51%), followed by influencer content (50%), but each converts only 29% of those exposed. Tangible incentives beat passive reach: campus free-food promotions converted 62% of exposed college students, and coupons converted 67% of teens and 70% of young adults. Sampling prompted 60% to research or buy, including 42% who purchased.

The study surfaces a financial paradox: young adults have the lowest credit-card ownership (58% versus 75% for adults) and lowest average spend ($676 versus $982), yet report the highest average number of investments held of any segment — a generation bypassing credit for a different entry into the financial system.

Parental influence recedes fast after the teen years. Parents lead 73-83% of teen decisions on autos, phones, insurance, and finance, including 78% of teen auto purchases; by college, 58% of students decide their own auto purchases.

This research directly feeds Refuel’s proprietary audience AI models, sharpening how the agency targets, plans, and measures performance for youth and young adult campaigns.

Learn more about how Refuel’s research helps brands reach youth better than any other agency at Refuel Research & Intelligence.

Business Intelligence in Sales and Marketing connects data, commercial context, and decisions to turn fragmented signals into stronger revenue outcomes.

Marketing might show high engagement metrics while Sales could see poor conversion. They could both be right.

Marketing can track content engagement, campaign engagement, intent triggers, and account activities. Sales would track deals and conversations. When these signals exist in two different systems, each team has its own understanding of what happens in the market.

That is why the problem is not about making Sales and Marketing share their data with each other. The issue is in establishing a shared commercial context where engagement, pipeline activities, and revenue will become parts of the same customer lifecycle.

This is how Business Intelligence is used across Sales and Marketing departments. Only then does BI become valuable and necessary for the business.

Table of Contents:
Why Connected Data Still Produces Disconnected Decisions
Integration Is More Than Connecting Systems
Turning Signals Into Decisions
The Quality of the Insight Depends on the Quality of the Foundation
Alignment Is Ultimately an Operating Model

Why Connected Data Still Produces Disconnected Decisions

Sales and Marketing teams acquire information in different ways as they see different aspects of the purchase process.

Marketing platforms gather information on web behavior, campaign interactions, content consumption, advertisement engagement, and intent. A lot of this engagement can take place among multiple people of the same account without anyone realizing a potential purchase.

However, Sales teams work in a different way; they collect contacts, accounts, activities, opportunities, opportunity stages, forecasting, and revenue.

Both approaches are not better than each other. But the issue comes up when they stay separate from each other analytically.

Think about an enterprise account that has been engaged for several weeks with the product content, revisiting pricing pages, and adding new stakeholders in the engagement footprint. For Marketing, this is an increase in purchasing interest. But if the Sales person sees no change in the opportunity stage in their CRM, they miss out on the context.

Alternatively, Sales can know why the deal has stalled because of the internal approval process, but Marketing continues to invest in campaigns with the aim of getting more engagement from the same account.

The organization has the information. What it lacks is the connection between the information.

Integration Is More Than Connecting Systems

A common misconception is that integrating BI means bringing CRM, marketing automation, advertising, and analytics data into one warehouse. That is necessary, but it is not sufficient. The harder problem is establishing common business definitions.

If Marketing defines an engaged account by content activity while Sales defines engagement through direct interaction, the organization can have a technically integrated data environment and still produce conflicting conclusions.

A shared semantic layer addresses this problem by establishing consistent logic for important commercial concepts. Teams need agreed definitions for metrics such as account engagement, pipeline velocity, opportunity progression, customer acquisition cost, and sourced or influenced revenue.

This creates an important distinction between centralized data and usable intelligence. Centralized data tells the organization what information exists. A shared analytical model determines what that information means.

Only then can different teams make decisions from the same commercial reality.

Turning Signals Into Decisions

The value of an integrated BI environment becomes clearer when data moves from reporting into operational workflows.

Suppose an account shows increasing engagement across several channels while an existing opportunity begins slowing down. A useful BI environment should be able to connect those signals rather than presenting them as unrelated activities.

The resulting insight might prompt an account executive to investigate a change in stakeholder priorities, help Marketing adjust its account strategy, or alert leadership to a developing pipeline risk.

This is where Business Intelligence for Sales and Marketing moves beyond descriptive reporting.

Traditional reporting asks what happened: How many leads were generated? How much pipeline was created? Which campaigns performed well?

Integrated intelligence can support a more consequential question: What is changing now, and what should the organization do about it?

That does not mean every BI system needs to make autonomous decisions. In many revenue environments, the better model is decision support: identify meaningful patterns, provide context, and allow the responsible team to apply commercial judgment.

The Quality of the Insight Depends on the Quality of the Foundation

Integration also exposes an uncomfortable reality: many organizations do not have clean commercial data.

Duplicated accounts, gaps in the CRM, inconsistencies in the definition of fields, obsolete contacts, and disintegrated account hierarchy can distort the analysis. When several contacts, systems, and touchpoints must be related to the same purchasing organization, identity resolution is especially significant. This means that data governance is part of the BI approach rather than an IT administrative activity.

Organizations require ownership of important data assets, definitions, quality assurance, and resolution of inconsistencies. However, perfection in data might mean never-ending postponement of business decisions. What organizations should do is build sufficient reliability for key decisions and progressively enhance the data quality.

Alignment Is Ultimately an Operating Model

Technology alone cannot resolve Sales and Marketing misalignment.

If Marketing is rewarded primarily for lead volume and Sales is measured primarily on closed revenue, a shared dashboard will not automatically change behavior. Teams may still optimize for different outcomes while using the same data.

Effective integration therefore requires shared commercial metrics and accountability for the information behind them. Marketing needs visibility into pipeline quality and progression, while Sales needs to recognize that accurate opportunity and activity data strengthens forecasting and account intelligence.

For leadership, this changes the role of BI considerably. Instead of spending time reconciling competing reports, executives can focus on questions that matter: Which accounts are gaining momentum? Where is pipeline deteriorating? Which acquisition channels produce efficient revenue? Where should investment or intervention change?

The objective is not to make Sales and Marketing operate identically. Their responsibilities remain different.

The objective is to give both functions a connected view of how market activity becomes pipeline, how pipeline becomes revenue, and where that progression is breaking down.

That is what makes Business Intelligence in Sales and Marketing more than a reporting capability. When the underlying data, definitions, and workflows are connected, BI becomes part of the revenue operating model itself.

Visit Our SalesMarkBlog Section to Uncover the Sales Strategies That Ignite Your Sales Journey!

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Ventura County event will bring together women business owners and leaders for an evening focused on leadership, mentorship and meaningful connections

Competitive intelligence in about four minutes demonstrates the GTM Kernel—a machine-readable source of truth for AI-native marketing systems

The deal unites Right Hat’s brand strategy and creative expertise with Granite’s depth in engineering, data and AI, giving clients one accountable partner for integrated brand and digital solutions

• US-based Right Hat brings more than 20 years of specialization in professional services marketing
• It is Granite’s tenth acquisition since 2020 and its second in North America this year, adding a presence in Chicago and Washington DC to its New York base
• Right Hat Partner Jeorjina Tegel and Founder Charlyne Fabi join Granite’s US leadership team: Jeorjina Tegel as VP of Client Strategy & Growth, North America, and Charlyne Fabi as Executive Creative Director of North America
• The Right Hat brand continues, serving clients, including Troutman Pepper, American University, Microsoft, BakerHostetler, BCLP, Vedder, Bracewell, CHRO Association, Hinshaw & Culbertson, Crowell & Moring and JAMS.
• The move follows the acquisition of Creative Media in March and supports Granite’s ambitious US growth plans.

Granite, a global independent digital agency, today announced the acquisition of Right Hat, a US-based agency that designs and builds brands for professional services firms and other B2B enterprises. The deal unites Right Hat’s brand strategy and design expertise with Granite’s depth in engineering, data and AI. Financial terms were not disclosed.

It is Granite’s tenth acquisition since 2020 and its second in North America this year, following the acquisition of performance marketing specialist Creative Media in March. The deal gives Granite a presence in Chicago and Washington DC alongside its base in New York and supports its target of North America accounting for half of its global revenues by 2028.

Two decades of professional services brand expertise

For more than 20 years, Right Hat has helped law firms and other professional services organizations strengthen their brands and compete more effectively in their markets. Its work spans research and strategy, brand positioning and messaging, content, creative and digital experiences. Right Hat has served more than 200 clients worldwide, including Troutman Pepper, American University, Microsoft, BakerHostetler, BCLP, Vedder, Bracewell, CHRO Association, Hinshaw & Culbertson, Crowell & Moring and JAMS. Its ‘Top of Mind’ report, a biennial survey of 100 legal services buyers, has become a reference point for how law firms communicate and win work.

Brand strategy, backed by engineering, data and AI

The Right Hat brand will continue, now backed by Granite’s 200+ specialists in strategy, engineering, design, data and marketing. For clients, the combination means brand strategy that carries through to execution: websites, digital products, performance marketing, analytics and AI-powered tools, delivered by one accountable team.

New US leadership appointments

Right Hat partner Jeorjina Tegel will serve as VP of Client Strategy & Growth, leading business development and client relationships across Granite’s US portfolio and helping drive the agency’s continued growth. Charlyne Fabi will serve as Executive Creative Director, leading Granite’s US creative offering. Both join Granite’s US leadership team alongside Rob Carpenter, Chief Commercial Officer.

Jeorjina Tegel, Partner at Right Hat, said: “For more than 20 years, Right Hat has built its reputation on a deep understanding of professional services firms and businesses with a consultative sales approach. Joining Granite allows us to preserve that specialization while bringing clients capabilities we haven’t historically offered at this scale, from technology and performance marketing to data and AI. It means we can think more broadly about our clients’ businesses and carry the strategy all the way through to the digital experiences their audiences see and use.”

Rob Carpenter, Chief Commercial Officer, Granite, said: “Right Hat brings an exceptional combination of specialized expertise, strategic thinking and longstanding relationships in the US market. The firm’s strength in legal and professional services accelerates our momentum in a sector we know well, while their leadership and experience will contribute to our ambitions across North America. Ten acquisitions in, the playbook is unchanged: find brilliant specialist teams and connect them to enterprise-grade delivery.”

Conor Buckley, Co-Founder and CEO, Granite, said: “The US is key for Granite’s ongoing growth, and Right Hat is our third acquisition in the market and our second in 2026. With North America expected to account for around half of our global revenues by 2028, we’re investing with real intent in our people, our capabilities and our presence on the ground. Increasing our footprint in the US gives us an even stronger platform for that growth, and means we’re better placed to meet our clients’ growing needs with deeper local expertise and a broader range of capabilities on their doorstep.”

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