In Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the emotional tension hinges on a simple idea: what if artificial beings had memories like ours? What if they carried experience, longing, and narrative continuity? We are tempted to project that same idea onto large language models. We shouldn’t. There’s a growing conversation about “AI memory [...]

  If you’ve been on the internet this week, you’ve probably seen one recurring theme: Staples. More specifically, Staples’ response to an employee now known as the “Staples Baddie.” For the last decade, brands, and plenty of DMOs, have treated “brand voice” like the engine of the machine. Nail the tone. Polish the copy. Standardize the look. That worked. Until [...]

Last week, McDonald’s surprised people by announcing the return of Changeables—those late-’80s and early-’90s Happy Meal toys that transformed menu items into characters. For a lot of people, it was pure nostalgia. For marketers, it was a signal. What caught my attention wasn’t just the toys. It was the language. McDonald’s teased the return with a line about something coming “from [...]

Reid Hoffman has a LinkedIn newsletter called “Long Reads,” which might be one of the best newsletter titles on the platform. In a recent issue, he talks about a product called Replit, a tool that helps people code and build programs using AI. But the product itself isn’t the most interesting part of the piece. It’s worth paying attention to is [...]

Travel has always been collectible. We just don't tend to see it that way. Think about what people actually keep from trips. It’s rarely the generic hoodie. It’s the oddly specific thing that, six months later, still sparks a story: a stamped passport from a trail, a patch from a ski weekend, the ticket stub they can’t throw away, the weird [...]

Instagram’s leadership made headlines this week with a clear signal that the visual culture that once defined the platform is changing. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, shared a candid assessment of where the platform is headed, arguing that highly polished imagery no longer holds the same value it once did. Advances in AI, he noted, have made beautiful visuals easy to [...]

Your Content Goes Here Netflix and Stranger Things ended the year and a decades-long series with mind-blowing consumer attention. 1.1 million people packed into over 620 theaters for 3500 showtimes to see the final episode of the series on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day. The “ticket” itself was a clever twist: seats were free, but attendees had to purchase [...]

The Zero-Click Era Is Here — And Your Brand’s Visibility Strategy Needs a Reset In 2025, something quietly but decisively changed: your audience stopped behaving the way your dashboards think they behave. Organic traffic flattened, even declined for many. But demand didn’t. Discovery didn’t. Attention didn’t. Instead, everything is shifting to "zero click discovery, " the growing ecosystem where people get [...]

The Birthday Trip That Became a Masterclass in Hospitality On a recent family trip to Chicago to celebrate my son’s birthday, we planned the kind of weekend any kid, and any parent, would love. A stroll down Michigan Avenue. A stop at the Spider-Man exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. A downtown hotel near Millennium Park glowing with Christmas [...]