Blog
Bridging commentary on the art & science of content; content marketing, branded content, native advertising and the analytics, attribution and intelligence that powers it.
Edition #526 Why you should check out Joes book, Meta acquires the social network for AI agents, new ad formats & more. I was lucky enough to get an early preview of Joe Lazers book, on why storytelling is the super skill in the age of AI. And it’s kind of the book I wanted for this moment. Rewind 18 months and Joe and I were talking about Ai and its impact on creativity, and I said, what if… Continue reading
Edition #525 The rise of personal AI agents, what it might mean for the web, News Corp & Meta strike a deal and Meta attribution changes. I went to Clawcon earlier this week in the village, it’s the event around OpenClaw. OpenClaw is the open source personal AI agent, OpenAI acqui-hired the founder a few weeks back. The event was fun, with people sharing what they were building with OpenClaw. Examples were, people adding ‘ai agent’ employees to their team,… Continue reading
Edition #524 Your margin is my opportunity, OpenTable & a new social network from AppLovin? Zuckerberg has talked about the ole your margin is my opportunity for advertising. If they can squish the cost to produce or scale creative, that expands the budget available for working media. And we see Google just quietly executing on this same exact thesis. AlreadyCMO shared: Google is assembling a full-stack marketing suite inside Labs, and the iteration speed is aggressive. If… Continue reading
Edition #523 Apple video ads, ChatGPT ads and Bedrock raises a round. Apple’s foray into video ads is coming. At least, this week they announced video in the podcasts app. A funny about loop, as Apple arguably invented the podcast. But others ran with video. Although, I vaguely recall in the early days, you could offer video. But it was lost somewhere along the way. The other neat thing Apple is doing, is they’re going to get F1… Continue reading
Edition #522 The protocol that will change the internet, Super Bowl Ads and everything OpenAI ads. Fun fact, a kiwi directed three of the Super Bowl ads! Taika Waititi. I love that. When I watch, I’m usually trying to figure out which were filmed in New Zealand, often it’s at least three to four. But that was a neat fact I didn’t know. And who doesn’t love Taika, right? The AI ads, didn’t get much credit from the… Continue reading
Edition #521 Modes of thinking, advertising agent interoperability & Lego’s new programmatic team. I was at Davos the week before last, great to see some readers there too! A few friends asked what Davos was really about, so I put together A spirit of dialogue from Davos. A lot of recent pieces have been very forward looking, 2x, Humans in the loop, The Machines. And that is because we are facing a lot of change and… Continue reading
Edition #520 Off schedule, social & TV, creating for Netflix and AI performance reports. A little off schedule this week, with travel interruptions at my end! Apologies. My friend Noah was on Odd Lots recently, talking Claude Code. If you’ve heard of Claude Code but not really dug in, give it a listen (or a watch). Why the tech world is going crazy for Claude Code. The other undercurrent in this weeks stories, is how digital video is… Continue reading
Edition #519 The vernacular switch to machines, Instagram authenticity and agentic ads. I saw a tweet this week about how you can ask an AI agent to make a media recommendation and it won’t include TV. Because none of the training data included tv in a meaningful way. “The television industry faces an invisible crisis. The AI systems that will soon make billions in media-planning decisions don’t seem to favour TV. Not because the data says so, but because… Continue reading
Edition #518 Welcome 2026, CES and Nike’s new mind lab. Welcome to 2026. I kicked off the year with a couple of days in Vegas (just the right amount of time) for CES. We forget it is first and foremost a consume electronics show. TechCrunch had a summary of the gadgets launched this week, including some of the bizarre. My fav being the smart Lego brick. Looking forward to playing with those. Robotics is a big trend… Continue reading
Edition #517 Final recap of the year. One of the things about newsletters is, it is a one way medium (generally speaking). I’ll have someone come to a breakfast, who has read for years, but you don’t know! But it also means there’s a quiet community of like minded people who are and have subscribed (for years). Sometimes an email just hits on a week where people are more engaged, sometimes the subject matter pops in the inbox. And sometimes… Continue reading