I was traveling for work and used my credit card in two different states within 24 hours. That wasn’t typical for me, but it made sense given the route I was driving. Apparently, the combination of multiple states and an unusual purchase pattern was enough to trigger my credit card to be declined at the …
Marketing campaigns often fail when the creative misses the mark. The product may be good and the targeting accurate, but the message doesn’t connect emotionally with the intended audience. Traditional creative testing has always been a bit of a guessing game. You show people your ad, ask them if they like it and hope their …
I’m sitting in the Las Vegas airport writing this. Looking around, I see a familiar sight — people trying just a little too hard to project youth and status. A woman with too many plastic surgeries wearing clothes designed for someone half her age. The guy next to her has a bad hair dye job, …
Much of the marketing stack is priced and purchased as infrastructure, but many parts are actually coordination layers that AI can increasingly replicate. The shift introduced by AI is not collapsing the stack — it is repricing it. The misconception about large parts of the stack is that they’re priced and purchased as infrastructure. In …
Read more “AI is repricing the marketing stack, not collapsing it”
Consumers jumped on the AI search bandwagon soon after ChatGPT launched. Now, more than half of shoppers now use AI as a research supplement, and nearly 20% are moving to AI-powered LLMs for all or most of their search needs. Brands, on the other hand, are focusing on AI to power chat and customer experiences. …
Read more “AI’s disruption of online commerce is just starting”
Your CEO just decided it was time to send more emails. You have segments and even entire lists that haven’t seen an email in months — or years. Ads and organic social aren’t working like they used to, and suddenly, your CRM looks like the opportunity of a lifetime. Re-engaging dormant email lists can generate …
Read more “7 ways to revive dormant email lists without wrecking deliverability”
Publishers have spent the past few years watching their traffic slide — in some cases by more than 50% from search alone — while AI systems ingest and summarize their content at scale. The imbalance has been obvious. The infrastructure to power AI is highly commercialized. The information feeding it is not. The IAB Tech …
Read more “IAB proposes new payment rules for AI content access”
When people ask why AI has been so successful in code generation, the answer isn’t mysterious. Programming languages are structured systems. They have syntax, grammar, modularity, version control, testing protocols and shared conventions that engineers learn early and reinforce daily. Tasks can be decomposed, interfaces are defined and dependencies are explicit. When an AI model …
Read more “Why marketing needs a decision infrastructure for AI”
Buy-versus-build considerations are interesting martech scenarios. There’s never a clear answer, which makes martech far more an art than a science. At times, there’s also the buy-and-build option to consider. Recently, in an episode of Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast about vibe coding, guest Noah Brier, co-founder of Alephic, argued that AI models that produce software …
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A static annual plan is a liability in a zero-click world where AI models update their knowledge of a brand every few weeks. We must move from traffic seeker to authority source quickly. But how? For a few clients, I’m embracing the uncertain future of market behavior by developing a 90-day authority sprint content marketing …