Hello Reader, A recent post in r/marketing collected dozens of AI-generated posters from different companies. Same blocky type, painted illustrations and crowded layout, even when the companies had nothing in common. At the start of this week the post had 932 upvotes and 250 comments. People had opinions. Some defended the posters as an effective way for small organizations to make something presentable. Others said they’d started scrolling past the style because every poster looked the same....
12 days ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader “Sorry we couldn’t find time to chat.” That sounds like a reasonable email to send a prospect who failed to schedule a meeting. Except this prospect had never received a meeting link. The email came from Zapier and landed in the inbox of a qualified enterprise buyer. The company’s automation blamed the buyer for failing to complete an action they’d never been given the chance to take. Angela Ferrante, who led enterprise marketing at Zapier (and is now head of marketing at...
19 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader I'm busy. You're busy. And every agency owner and fractional CMO I know is running the same two tracks right now. Track one is "deliver more with less, with AI, faster." Track two is "keep growing pipeline so track one keeps running." Track one wins my calendar most days. I don't think much about track two until the pipeline dries up and then I panic and go looking for a quick fix. I know I shouldn't, but I get sucked into the LinkedIn and YouTube hype. Someone posts about the...
26 days ago • 11 min read
Hello Reader When customer acquisition slows, you might be tempted to add more activity. -Launch another campaign.-Add a channel.-Increase paid spend.-Publish more content.-Buy another AI tool to produce it FASTER. More activity can create a welcome sense of momentum, but it's not going to help if you have weak positioning. I ran into this in my last VP of Marketing role. I worked at a SaaS platform serving the travel industry and our CEO, CRO and head of customer support each had a different...
about 1 month ago • 5 min read
Hello Reader I spent hundreds of dollars on ads for an early workshop I ran. LinkedIn, Reddit, all the channels. The content was solid: video, multiple angles, the whole package. I was targeting the right audience, the positioning felt right and I thought I'd cracked something. When I looked at the numbers, it was crickets. Five subscribers came through, and three of them unsubscribed. I was crushed. But that failure taught me something. Turns out my problem was bigger than the individual...
about 1 month ago • 9 min read
Hello Reader AI platforms now make it possible to spin up an agent or system for almost anything. Which means you're probably wondering if you should be building something yourself or asking your team to do it. But is it worth doing? If you follow all the hype online, you're probably feeling like you're missing out if you're not vibe coding a fully integrated content creation platform. But despite what these LinkedIn gurus are telling you, you can't spin up your own app in a day. If you want...
about 2 months ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader Everyone has a favorite image model. Ask a creative director or marketer which one they use and they'll tell you Midjourney or Gemini’s Nano Banana. If you’re like me you rely on ChatGPT’s Image 2. Once you’ve found the image gen model you like, you’re likely to stick with it for everything — concept boards, product shots, social graphics, webinar banners. Which is the entirely wrong approach. AI design expert (and my sister!) Toyah Perry does it differently. Toyah Perry, CEO,...
about 2 months ago • 9 min read
Hello Reader When I led marketing at an events company, content was the most time-consuming part of my job and the hardest to get right. Our niche took real work to understand, and no external writer we hired ever fully caught the tone we needed. Content creation was the largest line item in my budget. I was never willing to trade quality for quantity, and proving that the quality was worth the spend was a tough fight. My CEO wanted the same leads and the same revenue for less spend. Today...
2 months ago • 7 min read
Hello Reader Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Open AI CEO Sam Altman told reporters recently that enterprise customers were calling him to say their annual AI budget was gone by the end of Q1. If that sounds familiar, you're not alone. Budgets set in late 2025 weren't built for AI agents. A growing AI invoice is usually a sign your team is doing real work with the technology, running agents, building workflows and producing more than your headcount would normally...
2 months ago • 6 min read