AI & Marketing Archives - Page 3 of 7

Category: AI & Marketing

AI didn't make marketing cheaper. It made the gap between people who can direct it and people who can only prompt it enormous. These pieces cover what actually changed: why one person with the right systems now replaces work that took five vendors, why AI-generated ads all look identical and what a specification does that a prompt can't, and how buying decisions increasingly get made inside ChatGPT before anyone opens Google. Practical rather than speculative — what to build, what to stop paying for, and where the leverage genuinely sits now that the tooling is available to everyone.

An iron railway switch lever at the divergence point of two tracks, one leading to a distant horizon, the other curving away out of frame

The Question Peter Drucker Said You Can’t Afford Not to Answer

The executives of the Pennsylvania Railroad gathered in 1958 to address a shrinking business. Traffic was down. Revenue was eroding. Their market share—once untouchable—was quietly bleeding to highways and airlines.They spent three days on strategy. How to get more passengers back on...

A physical dial positioned in the "safe" setting, casting a shadow over what it's holding back — illustrating a Google Ads cost-per-acquisition cap that looked like protection but was restricting campaign performance.

The Safety Setting That Was Costing You Leads. We Found It With AI.

The slide deck came with a diagram.Boxes connected to boxes. Arrows looping back on themselves. Labels like “Orchestration Layer” and “Memory Module” and “AI Decision Engine.” It took up the whole screen. The consultant clicked through it slowly,...

A hand carefully adjusting a small clay figure under warm studio light, tools visible on a dark workbench behind

The Sextopus Strategy

A bakery truck is driving back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge.Inside, hidden among the bread trays, a camera crew is shooting stolen footage for a film the city of San Francisco has already refused to cooperate with. The city fathers said no — they worried that depicting the...

A weathered harbour pier post photographed at low tide, the current waterline sitting significantly below a prominent tide mark stained into the wood — a visual metaphor for a business whose revenue continues but whose growth momentum has quietly receded, leaving an irrefutable mark of where things used to reach.

Your Revenue Is Growing. Your Business Might Not Be.

Here is a company that never existed. I built it to make one point, so treat the numbers as an illustration and nothing more. The shape is the part that is real.It opens in 1920 doing $20,000 a year. Forty years later it is doing a little over $600,000. Every five-year period has...

A theatrical spotlight illuminates a small business storefront, representing the idea of engineering a press-worthy moment rather than waiting to be discovered.

Stop Waiting to Be Discovered. Here’s How to Engineer the Press Moment That Makes Coverage Inevitable.

“Sources say NBC suspects the ad was deliberately created to be rejected.”That line ran in a 2009 Hollywood Reporter piece about PETA’s Super Bowl submission — a lingerie-clad ad featuring models doing things to vegetables that you can probably imagine. NBC rejected...

A single water droplet strikes a dark surface, sending concentric rings expanding outward — representing how one small press placement ripples upward through larger and larger media outlets.

The Honest Version of a Dishonest PR Strategy

His name was Evan Meyer. He didn’t exist.Ryan Holiday invented him at 2am, under the yellow wash of a Kinko’s parking lot, stuffing freshly printed stickers into a jacket pocket. He drove to a billboard he’d designed and paid for himself, taped an obscene message...

Your Best-Looking Ad Is Probably Your Worst Performer

Neatness rejects involvement. Three words from a direct mail creative director more than fifty years ago, and what the platform data since then does and does not support. The production company sent the final cut on a Tuesday....

A laptop screen showing a Google review reply box with a half-written defensive response and a cursor hovering over the delete key

What a 1920s Gangster Taught Me About Google Reviews

Why defending yourself in the reply box costs you customers — and what to write instead Her fingers were on the keyboard. The review had been up six hours.“Terrible experience. Staff were rude and unprofessional. Would never...

Two fishermen side by side — one casting a wide net into empty open water, the other dropping a single line into a clearly visible school of fish below the surface.

Your Marketing Is Working. For Your Competitors.

Mark spent $2,800 a month on Google Ads. He followed the targeting recommendations. He hired someone to write the copy. He ran it for eight months.The phone rang. Sometimes.Not enough. Never consistently enough to justify the spend or the anxiety that came with it. So he did what...

A closed front door photographed from low angle in near-darkness. A thin line of warm golden light seeps underneath it — vivid, insistent, impossible to ignore. The door is shut. The light was always there.

Sam Jones Didn’t Buy an Encyclopedia

Sam Jones told you himself, over the garden fence, with the confidence of a man who has never been wrong about anything:“You’ll never catch me getting stuck with a set of books. Matter of fact, I hear the salesman’s still in the neighbourhood. Hope, for his sake, he...