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The $200 plastic box opportunity

If you ever needed an example of the increasing importance of personal brands in the AI era, I’ve got a whopper.  Over the past few months, I’ve noticed something that construction professionals and jewelry makers on Etsy have in common: they’re always looking out for better ways

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Principles for Creating with AI (update)

Back in April 2023, I posted a list of principles for creating with AI, attempting to separate fact from fiction and find some universal truths about working with AI. How did it hold up?  For the most part, I think it stood up well. But there’s one thing I

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Personal brands to the rescue

Let’s close out summer on a high note — a business doing it right. My wife signed us up for this summer camp-themed dinner at a local restaurant. We were greeted with Old Fashioneds, served with the chefs’ high-end interpretation of camp food, and read a ghost story from the

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Can personal brands save big business?

NP Digital asked 200 companies about their employees’ personal brands. If you’re guessing that most companies said, “Huh? what?” you’re probably right. Over 80% of the companies didn’t support their employees’ personal brands. Only 18 of the companies reported that they both supported employees with personal brands,

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The best things in life don’t scale.

The best things in life don’t scale. I wrote this past week about how the same is true in marketing. I’ve come up with a list of examples since writing that post, but I’d love to hear yours. Feel free to respond and I’ll share the

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Do shit that doesn’t scale.

I get questions from marketers all the time about what to do as more and more of their work is eaten by AI. They see their clients happy with AI content, even if conversion rates and sales go way down. Why? The amount of cost-cutting involved is so massive, the

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Stop asking me if I exist.

Is this true for you? I keep getting emails from newsletters asking me if I’m still around. Maybe it’s because I use Apple products, which emphasize privacy, and mask a lot of opens and clicks that newsletters (still?!) use to determine engagement, as if we were living in

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This newsletter model is dead.

Matt McGarry just posted about what he’s calling Newsletters 3.0. “If you’re running a ‘newsletter business’ the way most people do, you’re doomed to fail.” His post could be mistaken for a summary of the topics in my book on newsletters, but his take is from

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What’s the job?

The Criterion Collection just put out their 4K edition of No Country for Old Men, which includes a new interview with the Coen brothers. The Coen brothers made two of my favorite films of all time: The Big Lebowski (a film about life trying — and failing — to change an oblivious

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Brands became bands.

Rick Beato just posted a video about why bands have disappeared from the charts, replaced by solo artists and collabs between solo artists. Before recorded music gained mass popularity in the 1950s, music branding was all about individuals. As the industry became a well-oiled machine with global distribution, bands became