[This post was first published as a LinkedIn article on my profile for distribution. Re-posting it here for record keeping]
People say AI is going to kill marketing.
Honestly? Some days, it kind of feels like it might.
Scroll through your newsfeed, and you'll see the headlines: Mark Zuckerberg envisions a world where you hand Meta your pr…
Category: 2. Interesting Stuff
Why Can’t We Fully Automate Media Yet?
Too many variables: audience shifts, inconsistent metrics, and creative impact. Automation optimizes, but strategy needs human inference. The challenge is balancing tech efficiency with smart decision-making.
Last week, a colleague hit me with a question that seemed incredibly simple on the surface: If we know the drivers of impact and the KPIs that influence them, why canโt we automate 99% of media planning, buying, and optimization? Itโs not even AI, just basic automation.
I had to pause. Not because the question wasnโt validโbut because a…
Balancing Risks: Hedging Bets in Marketing and Corporate Strategy
The other week, I came across this AdWeek article about Nike’s marketing team’s restructuring, which inevitably piqued my interest. The article linked to a post by Massimo Giunco, former Nike Brand Director, who shared his take on how Nike’s CEO, John Donahue, and Nike’s President of Consumer, Product and Brand, Heidi O’Neill, decided to enact a series of changes between August 2020 through March 2021 to eliminate all categories from the organization, focus entirely on D2C (direct-to-consumer) divesting from wholesale, and shift the marketing model to prioritize digital content generation over brand narrative. According to Giunco, going all-in on this strategy led to record-low performance over the last few quarters, and now that the market cap is at its lowest since 2018, the company is reversing its approach.
While it’s somehow evident that Massimo Giunco has personal issues with Nike’s leadership, his narrative allows us to draw a parallel with the question we often grapple with: how can we invest in something that may yield long-term value like brand building but doesn’t offer good short-term measurability or certainty for success?
Continue readingFour Ps
Anyone with a Business or Marketing degree has likely heard of the following framework from the illustrious marketing professor Philip Kotler.
Marketing is the combination of the 4Ps: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place.
While many can agree with it, when we think of Marketing in most companies and business circles, we tend to focus on a subset of one P: Promotion.
If you reacted to the previous sentence by thinking, “Yeah, that’s kind of true,” you may be interested in taking a few minutes to think if your Marketing team is doing everything it’s supposed to do in your company.
Continue readingControversial Marketing Hot-Take #1
In October last year, I thought of starting a series of posts on ๐ฐ๐ผ๐ป๐๐ฟ๐ผ๐๐ฒ๐ฟ๐๐ถ๐ฎ๐น ๐บ๐ฎ๐ฟ๐ธ๐ฒ๐๐ถ๐ป๐ด ๐ต๐ผ๐ ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ฒ๐. I posted one a day for four days straight. This was the first one.
"๐๐ ๐ฎ๐ค๐ช๐ง ๐๐๐ข๐ฅ๐๐๐๐ฃ ๐๐ค๐ข๐๐จ, ๐๐…