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 [...]

For most of the internet’s history, a photograph arrived online with a strange kind of authority. If you saw it, you assumed someone had taken it. A camera pointed at the world. Light hit a sensor. A moment froze in time. Photography had a kind of built‑in credibility. Not perfect truth, photos can lie, of course, but at least there was [...]

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 [...]