Category: Marketing

  • The End of Filter Failure?

    How soon will technology start working for users rather than big tech companies when it comes to information overload? Last time, I shared a microfiction (1,000 words or less), a short science fiction story called “Fleeing the Emerald City,” about Calvin, a man who uses advanced filtering technology to lose weight but doesn’t much enjoy…

  • Wendy’s, Google, and Instagram

    Three times the media missed important context in the last week. I read a lot of High Quality News and avoid the Low Quality variety (see the helpful way that Ad Fontes Media defines these categories). Even topflight news can be so focused on short term events that they forget to ask context questions, by which I…

  • A “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” Happy Meal?

    The giant luxury goods company LVMH is getting into the entertainment business. What are the opportunities and obstacles it faces? A few days ago, luxury conglomerate LVMH announced that it was getting into the entertainment business. In a joint venture with Superconnector Studios (a consultancy): LVMH will seek to bolster promotion of the group’s brands—which include fashion houses Louis…

  • Walmart, Vizio, Amazon, and Experience Stacks

    This week, WSJ reported that the grocery giant is in talks to acquire a TV manufacturer: why is this a good idea, and how does it help Walmart compete with Amazon? (Issue #106) Attentive readers will remember my earlier explorations of Experience Stacks, which are the idiosyncratic collection of prior experiences somebody brings to bear on…

  • Elon’s Just Zis Guy, Y’know?

    What the chattering classes missed about Musk’s very busy two weeks in November. (Image created by Ideogram.ai.) There’s a recurring segment on Sesame Street called “three of these kids belong together” where the viewer’s job is to identify a fourth kid playing a different sport, not getting rained on, etc. Let’s play that game with a slice…

  • Let’s Stop Calling it “Social” Media

    Calling Facebook, Twitter/X, TikTok and the rest “social media” downplays the negative aspects of those services and platforms. What’s the alternative? Image created by ChatGPT. We already know that words have power. We know that non Black people who use “the N word” are proclaiming themselves as racists. Decades ago, the LGBTQ+ community reclaimed “queer”…

  • Tribal Shopping

    How realistic is the idea that economic incentives will coax people to choose a single digital ecosystem? (Image created with Adobe Firefly.) Writing near future science fiction lets me exaggerate a handful of features of life today to see what life tomorrow might look like. When I put these exaggerations into a story, it makes…

  • Amazon, AI, and Ads on Prime Video

    The trillion dollar ecommerce giant is adding ads to its Prime Video streaming service because everybody else is, but the secret story is about Amazon’s growing AI capabilities.  On September 22, Amazon announced that it would follow Netflix, Max, and Disney+ and start running ads on Amazon Prime Video. Ad averse Prime subscribers can cough…

  • Digital Transformation: Three Stories

    The ingredients for Digital Transformation are institutional pain, inflection points, and tools lying around, but you also have to get the people part right. Usually, when we talk about Digital Transformation, we focus on the physical: paper and ink newspapers dissolve and go online; albums become cassettes then CDs then MP3s then streams; physical books…

  • Adventures in Self-Disruption

    Apple is preparing to cannibalize its most profitable product, the iPhone. It’s a pattern we’ve seen before. Remember the Newton? This week in The New York Times, we learned about uncharacteristic debate in the executive ranks at Apple around the long-awaited Augmented Reality (AR) glasses that the company will release in June. Some execs worry that there is…