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.
NHL's TikTok Play Exposes How Legacy Sports Suck at Global Growth
The NHL’s TikTok blitz to grow beyond North America is less innovation and more lazy marketing, exposing the league’s cluelessness about real global expansion.
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Retailers Deploy Fuel Perks Amid $4 Gas to Trap Shoppers—A Short-Term Band-Aid on a Long-Term Crisis
As gas prices soar above $4, retailers scramble to offer fuel discounts that promise relief but deliver little more than a marketing band-aid on a systemic crisis.
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YouTube’s Audio Ad Pivot: SiriusXM Gets the Sales Play, Everyone Else Gets Left in the Dust
YouTube’s exclusive deal with SiriusXM to sell “audio-first” ads isn’t innovation — it’s a power grab that squeezes advertisers and stifles competition in digital audio.
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Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist Nails the Human Element Missing from Marketing’s Machine Age
Tom Fishburne’s Marketoonist exposes the marketing industry’s dangerous drift away from human insight toward soulless automation and AI hype.
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IPA Calls Out ‘Opaque’ Walled Gardens, Demands Industry-Wide Measurement Overhaul
The IPA is calling out the marketing industry’s dangerous reliance on opaque walled garden data and demanding a shift to transparent, joint measurement standards.
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Santander’s ‘Digital with a Human Touch’ Is Just Another Bland Global Brand Play
Santander’s new global brand positioning touting a “digital with a human touch” approach is just another shallow corporate play. It masks deeper strategic laziness with buzzwords and a one-size-fits-all creative platform.
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Sanlorenzo’s Brand Playbook: Why Luxury Yachts Are Finally Learning from Fashion and Cars
Sanlorenzo is ditching specs-heavy yacht marketing in favor of emotional branding inspired by luxury fashion and automotive giants. It’s a necessary shake-up in a stale industry.
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Account-Based Marketing Didn’t Just Happen—It Was Engineered by a Relentless Visionary
Account-based marketing was never an accident or a buzzword; it was a deliberate, disciplined shift pioneered by Bev Burgess that B2B marketers still fail to execute properly.
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PayPal’s Streaming Adtech Play: A Clumsy Power Grab Targeting TV Advertisers
PayPal’s new streaming TV ad partnerships with Spectrum Reach, Tubi, and Warner Bros. Discovery are a desperate bid to turn payment data into ad dollars—without truly understanding the adtech landscape.
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Social Media Week 2026: What Actually Moved the Needle and What Was Just Noise
Social Media Week 2026 brought the real social media operators together to cut through the noise and call out the industry's lazy strategies and hype. Here’s what actually matters.
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Code and Theory Hires JJ Schmuckler to Babysit CMOs Lost in the AI Fog
Code and Theory’s new president JJ Schmuckler is stepping into the AI chaos to help CMOs cut through the hype and grasp what actually matters in digital transformation.
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Tim Cook Made Apple Ads Invisible Gold; John Ternus Faces the Nightmare of Scaling That Secret Sauce
Tim Cook turned Apple’s discreet ad business into a silent revenue powerhouse. His successor, John Ternus, faces the brutal task of scaling that success without selling out Apple's privacy-first ethos.
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Hulu’s Get Real House: Brand Cameos Masquerading as Reality TV Stardom in Year Two
Hulu’s Get Real House doubles down on branded content by weaving brands directly into its reality show this year, turning participants into walking commercials. It’s a move that highlights the ongoing grift of commodified authenticity in modern marketing.
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IndexNow's Real Impact on SEO? A Peak Nothingburger Exposed with Traffic Logs and Crawl Data
IndexNow is hyped as a crawl-boosting miracle, but traffic logs and crawl data show it's a peak nothingburger. Microsoft and lazy SEO vendors are selling smoke, not results.
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Core Web Vitals Are a Nothingburger - Here's the Real UX Signal Google's Hiding From You
Everyone’s lost their minds chasing Core Web Vitals like they’re the holy grail of UX, but Google’s hiding the real user experience metric that actually moves the needle. Spoiler: it’s not LCP or CLS.
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Yoast and Rank Math AI Features Are Garbage: Stop Trusting Plugin Buzzwords and Fix Your Content Yourself
The so-called "AI-powered" features in Yoast and Rank Math are a marketing stunt. If you rely on these plugins to write or optimize your content, you're wasting time and dumbing down your site.
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The IndexNow Illusion: Why Microsoft's 'Instant' Indexing Is SEO's Biggest Lazy Grift of 2026
IndexNow promises instant SEO indexing miracles, but it’s nothing more than a lazy rebrand of existing crawl habits—peddled by Microsoft and co. as the next big thing.
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The Devil Wears Prada 2: How Brand Placements Just Became a Runway for Corporate Sellouts
The Devil Wears Prada 2 isn’t just a movie sequel; it’s a parade of shameless brand placements by Diet Coke, Grey Goose, and L’Oréal. Welcome to the new era of corporate grift.
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