— INSIGHTS
Agency Insights + Perspectives
Agency perspectives, marketing insights and inspiration for businesses who want to connect and understand the digital economy and grow their brands in impactful ways.
Collaboration Is Not Work. It Just Feels Like It.
Every line in your budget has survived an argument. The $300 seat license got questioned in a comment thread. The $40,000 renewal got three meetings and a procurement review. The offsite got a spreadsheet with two scenarios. Somebody, somewhere, defended every dollar your company plans to ...
Stop Forwarding Every Problem to Marketing
Two research firms measured marketing leadership this year and published findings that cannot both be good news. In January, Spencer Stuart released its twentieth annual study of chief marketing officers and titled it a snapshot of an expanding role. Built on the 346 named marketing chiefs ...
Name One Thing You Deleted Because of AI
Every technology that ever paid for itself removed something. The spreadsheet removed the ledger and the clerk who reconciled it by hand. Email removed the interoffice memo, the mail cart, and the two day delay attached to both. The shared document removed the version control ritual ...
You Sound Just Like the Company You Are Trying to Beat
Stock photography has a specific look. Two people in a bright office, mid laugh, pointing at a laptop nobody is using. It is polished. It is competent. It is also on four hundred other websites, and that is why your eye slides off it without registering ...
You Are Not Data Driven. You Are Data Justified.
Answer this before you read another sentence. Name the last time data made your company do the opposite of what leadership already wanted to do. Not a time data confirmed a plan. Not a time it sized an opportunity someone had already picked. A reversal. Somebody ...
— FEATURED
LinkedIn Built the Slop Machine. Now It Hands Out Smoke Detectors.
Did you hear the one about the arsonist handing out smoke detectors? As we all know by now since it’s been posted about ad-nauseam, LinkedIn added a button that says “Seems like AI slop”. In its ...
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More articles and valuable reads from our team of digital experts.
A crown made of paper only holds its shape indoors.
Play Bigger gave the business world a phrase it could not resist. Category King. Their research team tracked 35 companies and ...
Nobody Believes Your Case Study
Your last software purchase is the most honest focus group you will ever run. Walk back through it. A vendor sent ...
Product-Market Fit Does Not Exist. Market Timing Does.
Product-market fit is the most expensive lie in startups, and almost everyone repeats it. The story goes like this. You build, ...
You Are Buying Back Your Own Customers and Calling It Performance
In 2013, eBay did something almost no marketing team would volunteer for. They turned off their branded search ads and waited ...
Good Strategy Does Not Fail. It Gets Killed Before It Can Work.
Here is a question that splits a room of marketers faster than almost any other, and I want a real answer ...
1 in 7 Marketers Sees Strong ROI. The Other 6 Are Following Best Practices.
The entire marketing industry runs on a comforting lie: that there is a right way to do this, a set of ...
Personalization Was Supposed to Win Deals. It Is Killing Them.
Every marketing tool you pay for is selling you the same promise: personalize harder. One to one messaging at scale. Dynamic ...
You Can Win the AI Citation and Still Lose the Customer
For the past 18 months, the entire marketing and SEO industry has been screaming the same instruction at every business that ...
Your Nurture Campaign Is Not Broken. Your Buyer Journey Is.
Every quarter, somewhere in a B2B company, a marketing team sits down and says the same thing: "Nurture is underperforming. We ...
The “Book a Demo” Model Is a Tax on Your Buyer’s Patience. They Stopped Paying.
Name one industry other than software where the customer has to sit through three meetings before they are allowed to see ...
What Your Startup Should Actually Do in Its First 90 Days of Marketing
I have handed some version of this plan to roughly 30 founders over the last five years. The ones who follow ...
You Do Not Need 14 Marketing Tools. You Need One Clear Strategy.
Pull up your company credit card statement right now. Search for the word "subscription." Count the marketing tools.If you run a ...