Writing on positioning, narrative, demand creation, and how signal beats noise in modern marketing.
38 posts
I was clicking through Reuters Agency and stopped on a simple shift I had not registered before: verification sits in the Solutions menu as a product. Not an ethos. Not a footer trust statement. A contractual capability. That placement changes the workflow question for marketing teams shipping clai…
Salesforce is pushing Agentforce Commerce into general availability, with commerce agents designed to take shoppers from discovery through checkout and post-purchase. The surprising lesson: the chatbot is the surface. The durable advantage is the channel layer that carries commitment state across s…
Gen Z did not reject phones. They complained about interfaces that never learn how users disagree. Reuters 2026 finds AI chatbot news trust at 44% among users, while overall news trust falls to 37%. My read: usage rises faster than trust because product teams assumed trust would follow capability.…
AI-assisted websites are starting to look alike, including underlying tells. If output is cheap and similarity rises, the market premium moves to managed variance. Semafor Intelligence is an early example of curation becoming infrastructure: anchored claims, preserved disagreement, and structured d…
I was pricing a pilot and realized the hard question was not what the model could do. It was whether we could sustain throughput and experience through real, year-two load. Apollo and KKR financing AI compute make that question the new marketing primitive: a capacity-backed promise you can underwri…
A customer asks for a product variant on WhatsApp late at night. Two years ago, the thread waited for humans and later rights clearance. Now Meta’s Business Agent and Shutterstock’s licensing-aware generative workflow sketch a new standard: channel-native action paired with provenance-safe creation…
A France heatwave warmed nuclear reactors enough that operators throttled output. RTE said the grid was secure. Both statements were true, and the contradiction felt like a preview: “always-on” AI agent promises lean on assumptions that capacity can stop guaranteeing. Marketing and customer-facing…
A testimonial landed in my inbox last week and I did not forward it. The cadence was too clean, the arc too neat. My read: customer trust is now a design constraint because AI can mimic high-trust genres on demand. Genre cues no longer protect you. The fruits test does.
I keep noticing that the label is no longer a back-office checkbox. As New York requires conspicuous synthetic-performer disclosure and Meta embeds AI info labels in the ad UI, provenance becomes a creative field with its own pipeline constraints.
AI assistants are now reorganizing the journey before the shopper ever hits your site. Adobe’s Analytics data suggests AI-referred visitors browse longer and convert more strongly. The strategic question is what happens after the click: the adaptive storefront middle layer that turns pre-sorted int…
Fragmentation is not the enemy. The U.S. camp industry has treated it as a structured map of belonging for 150 years. Frontier agents can now read that map and pre-assemble identity-fit offers, shifting customers from search to assent.
The debate about AI ad labels misses the frontier shift: creative loops can now iterate, test, and publish faster than humans can reconstruct an auditable archive. In 2026 politics, narrative coherence becomes an operator-owned discipline, not an external compliance fix.