Brands are beginning to celebrate AI visibility when the more important question is whether AI is building the case for them—or against them. Marketing is beginning to make a familiar mistake. We are taking a new form of customer behavior and measuring it with an old model. Search visibility was largely positional: Did we appear, and where did we rank? As [...]

Google Just Changed the Rules on Paid Search. Here's What That Actually Means. Search advertising has operated on the same basic premise for two decades: you write the copy, set the bids, and control the message. Google announced last week that era is ending. At Google Marketing Live, the company unveiled two new ad formats for AI Mode—Conversational Discovery and Highlighted [...]

For the last two years, perhaps marketers have been asking the same question: “How do we optimize for AI search?"   Google just answered that question with unusual clarity. It is editorial. In its new guide on optimizing for generative AI features, Google repeatedly emphasizes something that should make every content marketer slightly uncomfortable: Non-commodity content. For years, SEO rewarded scale. [...]

Frida BahjaFrida Bahja came into tourism through environmental engineering, which means she never learned to see a destination as just a product. She sees it as a system , one with feedback loops, pressure points, and failure modes that don't announce themselves until something breaks. Now Director of Research at Experience Kissimmee and a researcher with SETTRA, she's spent her career studying [...]

Ktimene AxetellKtimene Axetell has been on both sides of the data table, and that changes how she talks about it. Before she became CEO of Arrivalist, she ran a DMO — and led that team to a National Geographic Traveller Platinum Award in sustainability, which is not a marketing achievement. It's an operational one. It requires community alignment, economic modeling, and the [...]

Josh GibsonJosh Gibson has visited all 57 of Tennessee's state parks. That's not a trivia detail — it's the origin story. He came up through digital and social strategy for the Tennessee state park system, left for a stint in product management at FedEx, and came back because mission-driven work turned out to matter more than the compensation that replaced it. Now [...]

This is the shift most teams are still underestimating. The website is no longer the center of the journey. It’s just one input. In the episode, Eric Hultgren frames this as a “Copernicus moment” and it’s exactly right. We’ve spent years optimizing for: TrafficClicksSessions But now: Travelers get answers without visiting your siteAI systems synthesize information before users ever [...]

She was six years old when she found YouTube. By nine, she was on Instagram. By ten, she was hurting herself. By thirteen, she had been diagnosed with body dysmorphic disorder and social phobia. At trial, she went only by her initials: KGM. This week, a jury found Meta and YouTube liable for creating addictive products engineered to hook young users. [...]

When you sit down to record a podcast, you usually think you know what the conversation is going to be about. AI.Social media.Destination marketing tactics.Campaign strategy. But after recording a series of interviews during the Oregon Governor’s Conference on Tourism for my podcast Field Notes: Insights and Observations for the Travel Marketer, a different theme started to emerge. Not technology.Not marketing [...]