What we are thinking about.
Notes from running 8 publications and building tools for them. Restaurant SEO, local marketing, the boring parts that move the needle.
Brand Health Metrics: The Marketing Industry’s Latest Magic Trick to Mask Falling ROI
Marketers are fleeing hard performance data for brand health metrics, propped up by AI tools that promise more than they deliver. It's a retreat from real accountability.
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Brand Health Metrics: The Marketing Industry’s Latest Magic Trick to Mask Falling ROI
Marketers are fleeing hard performance data for brand health metrics, propped up by AI tools that promise more than they deliver. It's a retreat from real accountability.
Read →
Samsung’s AI Living Push: More Than Hype, But Still Trapped in Device-Centric Narratives
Samsung’s AI living push claims to go beyond devices, but it’s mostly repackaged ecosystem marketing with familiar pitfalls. Real AI innovation demands more than flashy gadgets and data-driven buzzwords.
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Anchor Butter Ditches Pastoral Clichés for Gritty Realness in a Saturated Market
Anchor Butter throws out the tired cow-in-a-field trope in favor of bold, attention-grabbing campaigns that challenge the dairy category’s stale marketing norms.
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Samsung’s AI Living Push: More Than Hype, But Still Trapped in Device-Centric Narratives
Samsung’s AI living push claims to go beyond devices, but it’s mostly repackaged ecosystem marketing with familiar pitfalls. Real AI innovation demands more than flashy gadgets and data-driven buzzwords.
Read →
Micro-Influencers Dump Paychecks for Equity, Shaking Up Brand Sponsorships
Micro-influencers are ditching short-term sponsorship paychecks for equity in brands, exposing the broken influencer marketing model and forcing a reckoning.
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Retailers’ AI App Gold Rush Is a Feature Fetish, Not a Shopper Magnet
Retailers are rushing to build AI apps, but with little evidence shoppers actually want them, these features risk becoming expensive digital window dressing.
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Yahoo’s DSP Dream: Kochava Collab Is Just Another Agentic Buzzword Play
Yahoo’s new partnership with Kochava promises ‘agentic DSP workflows’ but delivers little more than jargon-drenched repackaging of old interoperability myths.
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Why Yahoo and Dow Jones Are Making the Sports Business Beat Their Next Cash Cow
Yahoo and Dow Jones are doubling down on sports business coverage, targeting high-value audiences and advertisers with specialized verticals that go beyond generic game recaps.
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Brand Health Metrics: The Marketing Industry’s Latest Magic Trick to Mask Falling ROI
Marketers are fleeing hard performance data for brand health metrics, propped up by AI tools that promise more than they deliver. It's a retreat from real accountability.
Read →
Samsung’s AI Living Push: More Than Hype, But Still Trapped in Device-Centric Narratives
Samsung’s AI living push claims to go beyond devices, but it’s mostly repackaged ecosystem marketing with familiar pitfalls. Real AI innovation demands more than flashy gadgets and data-driven buzzwords.
Read →
Why Marketing’s Neglect of CTOs Is a Slow-Motion Trainwreck—and Specsavers’ Tagline Tweak Isn’t Saving It
Marketers ignoring CTOs while obsessing over tagline tweaks is a recipe for failure. Specsavers’ safe rebrand move won’t fix the underlying digital disconnect.
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Anchor Butter Ditches Pasture Clichés to Cut Through Advertising Noise
Anchor Butter is abandoning the tired trope of cows in fields, aiming to break through the dairy category’s advertising monotony with fresher storytelling.
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McDonald’s UK and Ireland Puts Longtime Insider Tim Kenward in the Hotseat as CMO—Marketing Stuck in a Comfort Zone?
McDonald’s UK and Ireland’s new CMO Tim Kenward is a longtime insider whose appointment signals a refusal to disrupt a stagnant brand marketing strategy.
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The Very Group’s Chief Customer Officer Jessica Myers Bails After 3.5 Years — What Now for the Retailer?
Jessica Myers has left The Very Group after over three and a half years as Chief Customer Officer, highlighting ongoing leadership instability amid the retailer’s customer experience struggles.
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Canva’s Cannes Lions Playbook: Tripling Beach Space to Monetize Creativity and PR Theater
Canva tripled its Cannes Lions beach space after a modest 4,000 visitors last year, doubling down on spectacle over substance with The Creative Cabana. More gelato, more parties, less real innovation.
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The Bullshit Trust Equation in Health Marketing: Why Your Campaigns Are Failing Before They Start
Health marketing’s obsession with viral campaigns and buzzwords is a shallow trust game that’s losing audiences. Real trust demands brutal transparency, not PR stunts.
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Agentic AI Isn’t Your Marketing Magic Bullet—It’s Just Another Funnel Fix You’ll Screw Up
Agentic AI isn’t a magical fix for marketing funnels—it’s another overhyped tool brands misuse because they ignore foundational data and strategy work.
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