Instead of reps filtering and burning credits, one prompt does the targeting, qualification, enrichment and scoring. Customers see 2x the connects and meetings.

The company’s channel goes live on YouTube with four original series premiering September through November, featuring N3on, Zach Justice, Matcrackz, and Bloody Osiris

New leaders deepen the agency’s senior client counsel and sector expertise in Financial Services, Professional Services and Impact as Highwire scales its integrated model

Nine AI-infused media and analytics tools are now available through flexible monthly subscriptions, supported by the experts who built them.

NP Digital Canada has secured the No. 2 spot in the marketing category and No. 24 overall out of 375 companies on the 2026 Report on Business ranking of Canada’s Top Growing Companies, with a three-year growth rate of 1,406%.

The recognition comes after five years of rapid growth for NP Digital Canada, building on the agency’s strong global footprint. Over the past five years, NP Digital Canada has grown to a team of more than 50 people, while expanding its client base and capabilities and capabilities across SEO, paid media, creative, Digital PR, content strategy, influencer marketing, Reddit marketing, data and analytics, AI and generative search to meet the changing needs of brands across Canada.

Alongside this growth, NP Digital Canada has continued to expand its client roster, adding brands like Mitsubishi Motors, Tangerine, Lee Valley Tools, Running Room Canada, CMiC, and Schulich Executive Education

Canada’s Top Growing Companies is an editorial ranking launched by The Globe and Mail in 2019 to celebrate the achievements of innovative businesses across Canada. Companies complete an application process and must meet revenue requirements to qualify for the program.

For NP Digital Canada, the 1,406% growth rate reflects more than the expansion of its business. It also reflects how the agency has evolved alongside a rapidly changing marketing industry. Building on NP Digital’s global foundation in SEO, the agency has evolved its approach as LLMs reshape how people search for and discover brands. With authority and expertise becoming increasingly important to visibility, NP Digital Canada has expanded its capabilities to help brands strengthen their presence across both traditional and AI-driven search and discovery.

“I’m incredibly proud of the team we’ve built and the trust our clients have in us,” said Ronnie Malewski, Managing Director of NP Digital Canada. “That has been at the heart of our growth, along with our ability to adapt quickly. Marketing is constantly changing, and we have stayed focused on what matters now, evolving our strategies, capabilities, and reporting as the industry changes. That agility ultimately helps us deliver better results for the brands that trust us.”

The agency has also continued to grow its work with brands across financial services, technology, construction, retail, and consumer sectors, bringing together specialists across disciplines to respond to the changing ways people search, discover, and engage with brands.

The recognition marks the latest milestone for NP Digital Canada as the agency continues to invest in its people, strengthen its capabilities and expand its presence in the Canadian market.

Omnicom (NYSE: OMC), the world’s leading marketing and sales company, today announced it has been ranked first across all evaluated categories in the 2026 Gartner® Critical Capabilities for Global Digital Marketing Agencies report. Omnicom was also named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant™ for Global Digital Marketing Agencies.

In the Critical Capabilities evaluation, Omnicom ranked highest among global agencies in each of the evaluated use cases, including Global Brand / Marketing Campaign Execution, Omnichannel Content Generation, AI-Driven Marketing Innovation, Data-Driven Performance Marketing, B2B Marketing, Digital Commerce and CX Overhaul, and Website and Digital Product Design.

The Critical Capabilities report considered several factors in its evaluation, including the clarity of the provider’s AI vision, as well as the depth of capabilities in creative execution, martech strategy and implementation, content supply chain optimization, first-party data enrichment, and digital marketing performance.

“Our ranking in Gartner’s Critical Capabilities report and our Leader position in the Magic Quadrant™ reflect Omnicom’s commitment to delivering AI-powered, data-driven marketing solutions at scale,” said Paolo Yuvienco, Chief Technology Officer of Omnicom. “This recognition validates the value that our investments in Omni as well as our data, identity and AI solutions are delivering to Omnicom’s clients. We are proud to be leading the market in the future-facing tools and capabilities shaping modern marketing.”

Omni is Omnicom’s AI-enabled intelligence platform, connecting enterprise teams, AI agents, data, identity, activation and measurement in one system. Omni connects Acxiom’s industry-leading identity and data, Flywheel’s unique commerce intelligence, our superior media scale and marketplace access, and trillions of proprietary content and cultural signals — driving smarter decisions, faster action, and better outcomes for clients.

Omnicom’s leadership in global digital marketing is further bolstered by the deep consulting capabilities of Credera, its award-winning digital transformation consultancy. Together, Omnicom’s expertise in marketing technology strategy, organizational design and change management complemented by our proprietary AI and data capabilities, enables us to help clients not only implement cutting-edge marketing solutions but also transform their organizations to maximize the value of those investments.

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.

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