PPC Land today set out a new structure for the site and confirmed the launch of Marketing Is Calling, a daily podcast that went live yesterday, October 18, 2026. The show is the audio edition of Landline, the daily newsletter, and is available on Spotify and YouTube. Alongside it, every story on ppc.land now sits in one of five sections: Pulse, Landline, Decoded, Intermission and Gridlock.

In Short

PPC Land now has a daily podcast called Marketing Is Calling, which reads the morning newsletter out loud in about 10 minutes. You can listen on Spotify or YouTube instead of reading the email. The website has also been sorted into five sections, so news, the newsletter, reference entries, culture stories and word games each have their own place.

Marketing Is Calling

Marketing Is Calling is published once a day under the PPC Land name. Each episode is built from that morning's Landline edition and covers the same stories in the same order: DSP and SSP shifts, privacy rules, measurement changes, and the deals and lawsuits that move budgets in digital advertising.

The show keeps the sourcing standard of the written briefing. Stories come from primary documents such as court filings, regulatory decisions and platform release notes, not press releases. Every episode points back to ppc.land, where the full stories and their sources are published.

Episodes are read by an AI voice. That is stated in each episode description, so listeners know from the start that there is no human presenter.

The first episodes

The first episode was released on Spotify at 08:50 UTC on October 18, 2026. Titled "DeepSeek prices AI web search as Cloudflare scores bots," it runs 10 minutes and 8 seconds. It leads with DeepSeek opening its Search and Fetch tools to all developers at $0.75 per 1,000 calls and Cloudflare's plan to score Verified bots on robots.txt compliance and request pacing. Temu's settlement with Texas, new Google Ads channel controls, Google's tests of pharmaceutical ads in AI Mode and AI Overviews, Ray Dalio's warning about an AI bubble and The Chosen moving to Prime Video follow. The written version is the Landline edition of October 18.

The second episode went out at 04:51 UTC today. "Targeted ads delivered spyware via a vendor Google listed" runs 10 minutes and 20 seconds and opens with Citizen Lab's finding that zero-click spyware reached at least 45 Al Jazeera devices through targeted ads bought by Discover-Tech. It then covers Google Ads Data Manager dropping its hashing requirement on November 16, the WhatsApp contempt bid against NSO, Meta's AI training clause, Google News payments to publications, Amazon advertising and device news, YouTube Music AI labels and Apple's App Store rules.

Where to listen

The show is on Spotify and in a YouTube playlist, both titled Marketing Is Calling. Each episode is also embedded in the matching Landline post on ppc.land, directly after the lead story, so readers can switch between text and audio on the same page. No sign-up is required to listen.

Five sections

The site has also been reorganised. Stories were previously filed under channel tags such as Search, Video and Social. They now sit in one of five sections, each with a single job. The section appears on every article, in the navigation and as the category in the RSS feed.

Pulse

Pulse is the daily news desk and the bulk of the site. It covers platform changes, regulatory action, litigation, acquisitions, research and product updates across programmatic advertising and ad tech. The section has been applied across the archive, which runs back to 2015, and holds more than 2,200 stories.

Landline

Landline is the daily newsletter. Each edition is also published on the site as a post, with a lead story, a run of shorter items grouped by theme, a closing section called "The common thread" and a "By the numbers" list. The first editions date from early August 2026, and the archive holds 79 so far. Marketing Is Calling is the audio version of this section.

Decoded

Decoded is the reference series. Each entry goes deep on a single ad tech term: a plain-language definition first, then the mechanics, origins, key dates, limitations and the adjacent terms most often confused with it. Entries are grounded in PPC Land coverage, platform documentation and industry standards from bodies such as the IAB. The section holds 721 entries. Earlier ones carry "Explaining" in the title; new entries use the term alone, as with TACoS, ACOS, TrueView and AdMob, published on October 18.

Intermission

Intermission is new. It covers music, film and TV, from album and release news to the directors, musicians and writers behind the work, and can take in books, art and games. It is the place for something other than bidding, targeting and attribution. The first stories ran on October 17 and 18: The Chosen season 6 streaming on Prime Video four months before its finale film, and the Turkish girl group manifest debuting at No. 4 on YouTube with 27.3 million views.

Gridlock

Gridlock holds the word games. A Connections-style grid every day sorts 16 ad tech terms into four hidden groups, and a weekly crossword is built from the vocabulary of programmatic briefs, DSP dashboards and measurement decks. The games started on August 13, 2026, and are free to play. Today's grid is titled "Sales and marketing still fight over who owns the pipeline."

Access

Membership remains free. It includes one email a day with the top news, access to Gridlock and commenting on articles. The RSS feed at ppc.land/rss is open to everyone, and the podcast needs no account at all.

Why audio, and why now

Podcast listening has moved toward video platforms. In an August 2026 survey of 5,473 US adults published on October 1, Sounds Profitable found that 63% of podcast consumers had used YouTube for podcasts in the past year, against 33% for Spotify and 21% for Netflix. In the UK, Edison Research data published in July put YouTube narrowly ahead of Spotify as the primary podcast platform, 29% to 28%. Marketing Is Calling is on both from the first day.

Newsletters and audio also feed each other. Sounds Profitable's Podcast Atlas study, presented at VidCon in June 2026, found that 87% of newsletter subscribers said newsletters lead them back to episodes. Embedding each episode in its Landline post puts the two formats on one page.

AI-read audio has become a familiar format too. In May 2026, Amazon added a feature to Alexa+ that generates AI-produced podcast episodes from more than 200 news publications. Marketing Is Calling is narrower: one fixed edition a day, produced by the publication from its own reporting.