Archives
All the articles I've archived.
Humans Buy The Package. Agents Need The Proof.
Your website sells by implication: imagery, fonts, language, the whole package. An AI agent researching your product can't see any of it. Keep the crafted page, and ship a second explicit surface with proof attached to every claim.
Start Where Failure Is Loud
Marketing teams start AI with content generation, and the rollout quietly dies because nobody can see it failing. The fix is aimed at management: do content quickly, then pick a project where failure is loud.
What Breaks When Marketing Gets Unblocked
Marketing's production ceiling was set by somebody else's capacity. AI is removing it, and the work nobody had to be good at is segmentation, reporting and retirement.
Exploring Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Some ideas on how to test different variants of NRR to uncover SaaS insights
Why we love ChatGPT: No question is stupid
Being able to ask questions without fear of judgement is powerful. So what happens to answer sites that used human generated content?
Telling powerful and compelling business stories
A great example of storytelling from a D2C founder
The 2 types of trust in a b2b buying process
The SVB collapse stirred up discussion on the nature of trust in banking. How does this relate to b2b purchases?
Chris Higgins – Netcore Cloud: Our new identity reflects a powerful, forward momentum
My recent interview with Mediabrief on the launch of Netcore's new brand identity.
3 most common Push Notification mistakes that brands make
many brands struggle to unlock the full potential of their notifications, failing to develop a comprehensive strategy for the channel that includes planning, creative and technical approaches.
Customers should love unboxing your product
Apple turned opening a box into part of the product. Most companies still ship brown cardboard and cable ties.
Matching search ads with consumer journey
What a buyer needs to know changes at every stage. Most search ad copy is written as though it doesn't.
Searches for your old products are valuable!
I went looking for a laptop and found a mess of retailer pages for products nobody sells any more. That traffic is worth something.
Why your website shouldn't have FAQs
The UK Government style guide argues against FAQs. Once you read the reasoning it is hard to justify keeping them.
Why video games are making beautiful ads
Video games outsell the global box office several times over. The advertising budgets have started to show it.
How spiders fly - fascinating science!
Spiders can fly, and the science of how is stranger than expected. A reminder of how much is still undiscovered.
Should SME e-commerce offer coupons? A step-by-step guide.
Coupons went from newspaper cutouts to email codes. A step-by-step look at whether a small e-commerce business should use them.
Do companies need a CMO?
Only 70% of Fortune 500 companies have a CMO, and the number keeps falling. Where does the work go instead?
Losing pitches to boring work
Why do mediocre ads keep getting made? Sometimes the boring pitch is the one that wins.
Getting started with AI in marketing
We keep hearing AI will transform marketing. The people who could build it are being hired to do more interesting things.
The war on fake social media accounts
A long game of cat and mouse is starting between social networks and the governments running fake accounts on them.
Digital Ad Fraud is Huge and it Doesn't Matter to Advertisers
Ad fraud still takes a huge share of the ad economy. The strange part is how little advertisers seem to mind.
Deepfakes and the race to detect them
Fake text already did plenty of damage. What happens when the fake news is a video of someone you trust?
What is your B2B digital marketing attribution model?
Survey data on the attribution models B2B marketing managers actually use, and what the spread says about the discipline.
What does a data scientist do? Not just math
India has plenty of people strong at math and coding. The shortage in data science is problem solving.
When should you start marketing?
The best time to start marketing is before you have anything to sell. Real estate developers understand this.
Amazon vs Swiggy: Customers vs Merchants
Amazon polices merchant pricing while Swiggy courts restaurants. Whose side is a platform really on?
How 2014 Was Supposed to Be...
A 2014 whitepaper promised the end of spreadsheets for lead management. In 2019 I still meet companies emailing them back and forth.
What 3 Words - What's Your Unique Address?
What3Words gives every 3m square on earth a three word address. Worth a look, and worth asking why addresses fail.
How We Remember Genius
Newton did alchemy and Jobs washed his feet in the office toilets. We remember genius selectively.
Nostalgia and Marketing
Vinyl was supposed to disappear and instead grew every year for a decade. Nostalgia is a product category.
Making Scared People Feel Respected
The best speaker at a conference I nearly skipped ran a mall in a small Indian town. His catchment numbers explain a lot.
Why Most Content Marketing Fails
Most content marketing fails for an unglamorous reason. It gets stopped before it had a chance to work.
Do You Have a WhatsApp Phone?
In rural India, an internet phone is just a WhatsApp phone. There is a lesson there about explaining products.
What The Placebo Effect Can Teach Marketing
The placebo effect is real and still poorly understood. Naming and packaging change how well a thing works.
Digital Marketers Need to Understand Statistical Significance
Marketers are using more data, which is good. Most conclusions drawn from PPC tests are not statistically significant.
Lose the (marketing) excuses
It is easy to list what you don't have that others do. The dice were thrown long ago, so the complaining is wasted energy.
Why in-housing digital marketing often fails
In-housing promises control, savings and focus. The arguments for it are mostly about agencies rather than capability.
The Basics of Management
The basics of management are simple to write down. That is not the same as easy to do.
Kids and Technology: The Digital Divide
We worried that poor kids would get less technology. The divide turned out to be about something else.
Be inspired by marketing systems, not ad campaigns
Campaigns are easy to copy, which is why copying them rarely works. Look at the system behind them instead.
How to use Analytics to check whether your SEO efforts are working
SEO produces a maze of metrics, rankings and results. Which of them actually tell you it is working?
Who Is (Not) Your Ideal Customer?
A cold caller asked how likely I would be to invest. The phrasing was clever and the question was still useless.
What are we improving this week?
Get excited about AI and chatbots and the redesign. The question that actually moves numbers is what you improve this week.
How to stop doing low-value work
Early in your career someone else sets your priorities. After that, choosing what to ignore becomes the hard part.
Other people have it easy...
When it goes well it was our skill. When it doesn't, it was someone else. A note on how we account for our own work.
Fear of failure doesn’t feel like a fear
Real fears make you scream. Fear of failure is quieter, which is exactly why it goes unnoticed.
Useless Metrics
Digital marketing makes it very easy to measure things that cannot change a single decision.
Being Great at What You Do
A great marketer grows brands and sells things. A great programmer ships. What does great look like in your job?
When is Conflict Constructive?
Conflict is useful when everyone wants the same outcome and disagrees on the route. It stops being useful when the outcome itself is up for grabs.
Are you getting better, on average?
Sport is obsessed with averages, and most of them are objective. The useful ones for your team probably aren't.
Choosing For or Against?
Every choice feels like picking something. Usually it is really about what you are giving up.
The Right Obsession
Companies pour enormous energy into watching competitors. That attention has a better use.
Will it be different this time?
A complaint about machines replacing labour, written in the early 1800s. Every automation wave sounds the same.
The power of asking "Why do we do it this way?"
Our agency is changing a few small things. Most of them came from asking why we did it the old way at all.
Levi’s documentary on the 501 – Discover the story of the legendary Jeans
The story of the 501, and how a piece of clothing we take for granted began as a collision of engineering and tailoring.
GE Helps a Snowball to Survive Hell and Captures Lightning in a Bottle.
GE's Unimpossible Missions is what happens when a brand treats its own technology as the story.