What a hometown concert, a marathon, and nearly 200,000 event attendees can teach us about what makes a destination worth visiting. On a moonlit Saturday evening, cool fall air chilled the 102,000 fans waiting for Twenty One Pilots to begin their largest and longest show to date. Suddenly, Ohio Stadium exploded in a wash of red as every screen and every [...]

The future of travel marketing isn't about creating more content. It's about creating something AI can't reproduce without you. There is a fundamental problem emerging in travel marketing, and it has very little to do with whether you're using ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, or whatever new AI product showed up while I was writing this sentence. The problem is that we have [...]

The future of destination marketing isn't simply about being discovered. It's about becoming a destination that travelers, and the AI systems helping them, can trust. Imagine planning the perfect family vacation. You want hiking trails with spectacular views, restaurants worth traveling for, beautiful beaches, and enough activities to entertain the kids. Maybe there's skiing in the winter, incredible shopping, and a quiet [...]

Earlier this week, I taught a graduate class on effective communication at the University of Michigan. I brought four stories I have used in keynotes and, after telling each one, broke down what made it work. Where did the audience become curious? Which detail carried the idea? What changed in the way they understood the subject? The question underneath all of [...]

Sometimes You Just Had to Be There “You had to be there.” Usually when we say that, we mean the story isn’t doing the moment justice. You can show someone the pictures. You can send them the videos. You can explain exactly what happened. But none of it quite recreates what it felt like to actually be in the room. The [...]

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 customers [...]

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 [...]