#077 - The Most Important Aspect of Paid Ads in 2026

Minted’s founder, Marcus Milione, went on TBPN and broke down how he approached preventing bots from buying all of their sneakers with their recent Saucony collaboration.  Pretty sick technique!  But it might be done after Marcus revealed how they did it.The guys also discuss updates shared from Google’s I/O event where the company shared their thoughts around shifting from “search” to “ask”.  Google is beefing up their search engine with features like uploading images and videos directly to your search bar.And they end by discussing why conversion tracking and attribution is the most important thing you can have dialed when it comes to paid ads marketing in 2026 and beyond. Articles mentioned in the podcast:Minted’s Marcus Milione TBPN clip about how they tried to prevent bots making purchases:https://x.com/tbpn/status/2057257896170381573?s=20Google’s update from search to ask: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-intelligent-search-box-41343.htmlWant to learn more about us and our services? Reach out!Steve:https://collective42.com/Trevor:https://www.r40collective.com/#digitalmarketing #ai #aimarketing #ppc #seo #growthhacking #googleads #searchenginemarketing #sem #ga4 #googleanalytics #growthmarketing #demandgen #pmax #performancemax #gtm #tagmanager #marketingagencies #chatgpt #claude #perplexity #llms #openai #aimode #aimax