Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope you’re all doing well and enjoying the (semi-official) start of summer, also known as Memorial Day. After a few heavy issues on marketing strategy, I thought we’d change course with this week’s issue, and focus on current events + big-picture ad tech trends. It also just so happens that Google held Marketing Live (part of I/O) this past week. In a surprise to exactly no-one, this was less a product showcase and more an AI infomercial. For two-hours this past...
7 days ago • 14 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! After a whirlwind spring conference season, I’m (finally) back for a few weeks. This past week, we rolled out a series of new initiatives to our team – and I found myself explaining Jevons’ Paradox. Afterwards, I saw many people found it helpful in thinking about the impacts of AI on marketing. This inspired me to start thinking about what other paradoxes, razors and mental models I use in my day-to-day, as well as how those might be helpful to you all. To be brutally...
14 days ago • 26 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope you all are having a fantastic start to May (difficult to believe that we’re already more than 35% of the way through 2025). For me, it’s been an incredible week in South Africa - fantastic food, wonderful, welcoming people and a remarkable event (Converge 2025). In a surprise to precisely no-one, the most-discussed topic among the speakers and by the attendees was (by far) GenAI - followed somewhat distantly by tariffs and ad platform evolutions. But, what was...
21 days ago • 19 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! As you’re reading this, I’m likely on a plane to South Africa for Converge - one of the largest eCommerce conferences in Africa/Asia/Middle East. I’m beyond excited to check off continent #6 (just need to find a marketing conference in Antarctica), meet some wonderful people, and share some of what I’ve learned. For this week’s issue, I want to talk about the most pervasive, insidious, silent killer of ad account performance: creative. More specifically, it’s the...
28 days ago • 18 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope you’re all enjoying the final weekend of April - it’s difficult to believe we’re already nearly 33% of the way through 2025, but here we are. Over the last few weeks, I’ve met with a number of clients and had more than a few conversations with sales leaders. Some were wonderfully productive, some were tense and some were downright confusing – but they got me thinking: where is the opportunity for marketing to learn from sales (and sales from marketing), and how...
about 1 month ago • 18 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I’ve spent much of the past week traveling – which has given me plenty of time to both write and think. As I’ve been doing that, I keep coming back to one uncomfortable conclusion: most marketing is built on a foundation that’s about as stable as quicksand. That sounds extreme, but it’s true: we assume our target audiences are rational decision-making machines. Everything we do from a marketing communications standpoint flows from that assumption - we meticulously...
about 1 month ago • 30 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I hope your Q2 is off to a fantastic start. This week’s issue is one that I’ve been working on (intermittently) for the last few weeks in response to a number of frustrations I've heard from CMOs, investors & operators about Meta. The gist of each of those conversations has gone something like this: the ads are running, the creative seems like it should resonate, the account "should" be performing, but in place of sales, all we’re seeing is more money flying out the...
about 2 months ago • 19 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! Q1 is officially in the books, and Q2 is off to one of the most volatile starts in recent memory. Welcome to the Whiplash Economy On April 2, 2025, President Trump announced a sweeping series of "reciprocal tariffs" targeting every country - including key U.S. trade partners like China, Mexico, Vietnam, Japan and South Korea. As one of the many people watching both the announcement (on X, where else) and the markets, the impact was near-instant: every major index...
about 2 months ago • 16 min read
Happy Sunday, Everyone! I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting with clients & speaking at several fantastic events (if you’re looking for conferences to add to your agenda for 2026, I can’t recommend SMX Munich, SMX Paris & Friends of Search enough - each one is absolutely fantastic. You are guaranteed to learn something new at each one). One of the major topics discussed at each of these three events was the evolution of marketing - and, in particular, how that evolution will impact what we...
2 months ago • 23 min read