Category: Marketing

  • 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…

  • Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories

    What makes people believe nonsense for which there is no evidence? As I first wrote a year ago, you can see the elements of persuasion in this simple quadrant: Mostly, people decide with their hearts and then justify with their heads. They’re also more keen to avoid loss than to pursue gain. Knowing where your argument…

  • Why Amazon Blew it Killing “Smile”

    The country’s largest ecommerce company ended a program that donated 0.5% of eligible purchases to charities customers selected. This might have surprising negative consequences for Amazon’s brand. This week, Amazon announced that it was ending its “AmazonSmile” program that enabled customers to support charities with most purchases. The program will end on February 20th. I…

  • What’s Curious about Microsoft and OpenAI

    It’s more than a flurry: we’re seeing a monsoon of articles about OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft’s proposed $10B investment in OpenAI, and how Microsoft would recoup that investment by getting 75% of OpenAI’s profits—of which there are currently none. (Nina Schick has a nice summary.) Even without that 75% of profits provision, this is a great…

  • What Happens When Companies Become Partisan?

    Elon Musk’s right-wing posts on Twitter have plummeted the stock at Tesla, the public company where Musk is CEO. I discuss this with Lana McGilvray of Purpose and Peter Horan of Horan MediaTech. Background: On Tuesday, December 13, Peter shared this article from Inside EVs about recent research from YouGov and Morning Consult, each arguing that Tesla is now…

  • Scarier than Skynet: AI and Persuasion

    Most dystopian fantasies concern monsters we can see conquering us, but with new technologies will we even know if we’ve been conquered? You can tell a lot about a culture by its dystopias: its fantasies of fear. When you have dueling fantasies, you can tell even more by what they agree on and what they…

  • Frontiers of Scale

    As media continues to fragment in the face of changes in legislation and technology, where will new big audiences come from? A few issues back, I explored how changes in legislation and technology are signaling the end of cheap digital scale for media. (Don’t worry: you don’t have to read that issue to understand this one.) If…

  • Surveillance Capitalism Bedtime Stories…

    … if you don’t want to get much sleep. Although the privacy issues are paramount, another problem with companies compiling vast amounts of information about us is that we don’t know what they know. Companies spying on Americans for our entertainment and their profit is nothing new. How else can we understand Candid Camera, the show…

  • Why Walmart Should Buy Paramount

    Note: I wrote and first published the following column on Sunday, August 14, before the rumors came true the following day: Walmart had signed an agreement with Paramount. You can find a review of that news here. However, nothing about the news changes my argument that Walmart is missing a bigger opportunity, which is the topic of what follows. …