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.
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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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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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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Omnicom’s Duncan Painter Out, Christine Gambino Steps Up in Leadership Shuffle
Omnicom shakes up its top deck as Duncan Painter exits and Christine Gambino, the COO behind its digital platform push, takes the CEO helm. This is no routine shuffle—it's a sign of the times.
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TikTok’s Billboard Ads Are Not Just Resized Videos — They’re Rebuilt From Scratch, Thanks to Vistar
TikTok is ditching lazy repurposing and rebuilding their ads from scratch for billboards through a strategic partnership with Vistar, demanding better creative control and execution.
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Programmatic Media’s Civil War: New Trade Bodies Expose Industry’s Turf Wars and Stalled Innovation
New rival trade bodies battling over programmatic media’s future expose an industry stuck between legacy turf wars and the desperate need for real disruption.
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AI Data Brokers: The New Middlemen Who Swipe 100% of Publishers’ Content—and Profits
Publishers are facing a new breed of middlemen: AI data brokers who scrape 100% of their content without paying a dime, far worse than the old ad tech tax.
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Stuck in the Grind: Why Marketers Are Trapped in Career Limbo and Who’s to Blame
Most marketers are stuck in career limbo, crushed by lazy agencies and hollow metrics. The industry’s obsession with fluff over real impact is soul destroying.
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Fox Sports’ World Cup Promo Is a Celebrity Circus, Not a Strategy
Fox Sports’ new World Cup promo is less about strategy and more about star-studded spectacle—a celebrity circus masking a lack of digital savvy.
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Fox News Still Tops April 2026 Cable Ratings Despite Viewer Slide—The Rest of Cable News Is Still Chasing Shadows
Fox News still leads cable ratings in April 2026 despite ongoing viewer losses, while CNN and MSNBC flounder without growth or innovation.
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Why Data-Driven Audience Connections Are Still Mostly Marketing Bullshit
Marketing’s fetish with complex data to decode purchase intent is mostly a lazy narrative that confuses correlation with genuine audience connection. Here’s why.
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Incrementality Measurement Isn’t Magic — Stop Treating It Like It Is
Marketers drown in data but starve for truth on incrementality. The grift of lazy attribution models and SEO plugin hype must end — clean measurement demands rigor.
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The Myth of Unified CTV Measurement: Why Independent Metrics Are Still a Pipe Dream
The CTV measurement hype cycle is spinning out of control, but the dream of a truly independent, unified system is still a farce. Marketers deserve better.
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Applebot-Extended Visibility: The Mirage Behind Most Site Invisibility
Despite Apple launching Applebot-Extended visibility in late 2023, over 80% of tested sites remain unseen in Apple Search results as of June 2024.
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Core Web Vitals in 2026: Google’s Overhyped Metric Nobody Actually Measures Right
Since its 2021 rollout, Core Web Vitals have morphed into SEO’s biggest distraction despite 73% of sites misreporting metrics in Google’s own data.
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Marketers Ignoring CTOs and Specsavers’ Cringe Tagline Tweak Prove the Industry Still Doesn’t Get It
Marketers ignoring CTOs and Specsavers’ weak tagline change reveal a marketing industry stuck in shallow tactics and tech ignorance.
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Authenticity in Creator Campaigns Is a Myth Until You Nail Prep, Not Just The Shoot
Authenticity in creator-led campaigns isn’t born on shoot day. It starts in the ugly, overlooked prep work that most brands and agencies skip.
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The Brutal Truth About Growing a CPG Challenger Brand: Why Grit Beats Gloss Every Time
Launching a challenger brand in CPG isn’t about grit and storytelling alone—it’s a brutal fight over distribution, margins, and real consumer access.
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