Hello Reader Over the past few months, I’ve watched a lot of marketing teams adopt Claude. Most start in roughly the same place. Someone needs a campaign brief, so they ask Claude to write one. Someone else needs a LinkedIn post, so they open a new chat and start prompting. A third person uploads campaign data and asks for a summary. Everyone is technically using AI, but everyone is using it differently. Different prompts. Different context. Different standards. Different outputs. And...
8 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader Your website homepage can sound polished and still leave a buyer wondering what you sell. I know because I built one. I recently asked messaging and positioning consultant (and author of an excellent newsletter called Gobbledy), Jared Blank to review the Driver Labs homepage. I showed him the website before I explained anything about the business. Here’s the first headline he saw: “Now you can build a business your clients can't replace.” His response: “I've learned nothing.”...
15 days ago • 7 min read
Hello Reader People often ask me which AI platform they should use. My answer is usually the same: start with the one you have access to. Recently, I ran an informal poll asking marketers whether they use ChatGPT or Claude. The vast majority of those who responded use both. That surprised me. Getting an AI platform familiar with your work takes effort. You explain your business, upload reference material, build projects and teach it what good work looks like. Using two platforms means you...
22 days ago • 6 min read
Hello Reader Kaan Catalkaya manages 15 clients by himself. Each client has different goals, customers, campaigns, platforms and ways of working. Keeping track of it all would be difficult for a team. Kaan does it as a solo operator. He can manage that workload because every client gets its own command center. The command center contains everything his AI system needs to work on that account: meeting transcripts, audits, reports, agreements, instructions, standards and a record of what changes...
29 days ago • 8 min read
Hello Reader You’ve been meaning to set up AI correctly. Then a campaign needs approving, a client asks for changes and three meetings appear on your calendar. The setup gets pushed to next week while you continue dragging work through the same collection of chats, files and tools. You may already have several useful pieces. A Project containing your brand documents or a prompt that produces a decent brief. Maybe you even have an agent with a name and job title. But every task still begins...
about 1 month ago • 8 min read
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....
about 1 month 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...
about 2 months 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...
about 2 months 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...
2 months ago • 5 min read