Social Media

 Life online is a meat grinder for the soul. 

Scroll long enough and you’ll start to believe everyone else is better looking, better dressed, making more money, doing more yoga, scaling mountains, founding companies, gaining followers, losing weight, gaining muscle, and generally smashing life like it’s a video game they’ve already mastered.

Meanwhile, you’re just sitting there with a half-eaten bagel and cold cup of coffee, wondering where you went wrong.

Social media is a comparison trap wrapped in neon lights. It doesn’t matter how good your life is, two swipes in and you’ll be convinced you’re failing at everything. 

Spend too much time there and it will hollow out your sense of self until you’re little more than a reflection in somebody else’s sunglasses.

You’re Not Paying for the Hour. You’re Paying for the Decade.

 

There’s a moment that happens in every career: You’re staring at an invoice from a senior pro ... and your stomach drops.

Three times what you usually pay.

Three times the hourly rate.

Three times the tiny voice in your head screaming “Are you out of your mind?”

And yet… three days later, you’re looking at the results thinking:“Oh. That’s what I’ve been paying for.”

Experience is sneaky. It doesn’t show up wearing a badge that says “Worth Every Penny.” It shows up in the quiet stuff: the work that doesn’t need fixing ... the problems that don’t happen ... the weeks you don’t lose because someone forgot to ask one critical question.

A seasoned pro isn’t just faster. They’re cleaner. They’ve seen this movie before (the one where everything goes sideways halfway through) and they know exactly which scene to cut.

That’s what you’re really buying when you hire experience: the ability to skip the blooper reel.

The first time I worked with a  senior contractor, I worried I was overpaying. Until I realized what I’d actually been doing all along: underpaying for chaos.

Because the truth is, juniors are great. They’re hungry. They’re learning. But learning costs time. Mistakes cost time. And time? Time is the most expensive thing in the room.

The senior already paid for that education. They paid with failed projects, with late nights, with that sinking feeling of “oh no” at 2 a.m. when something breaks in production. Now, you get to rent all that experience for the low, low price of not having to live through it yourself.

So when you see a senior’s rate and think, “That’s steep,” remember this: You’re not paying for how long it takes them to do the work, you’re paying for how long it took them to get this good.

Experience isn’t an expense, it’s insurance.

And if you’ve ever been burned by the cheap option, you know that good insurance is always worth it.

Healthy Twinkies?

Here are three videos that expose some of the "tricks of the trade" used to brand and sell products:

Pepsi

 Snickers

Twinkies

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Thank you, Matt Rosenman who's focus is simplifying the world of health and fitness and cutting through misinformation in that world.

The Evolution of AI Prompting

 

Say the magic words to the AI and it behaves.

Prompts feel like control without the paperwork. Whisper the right words and the machine behaves.

The appeal is easy to understand: Prompts feel like control without the mess of actual management … no policies, no audits, no awkward accountability. Just vibes in a text box.

But as AI systems become more agentic* (less like tools, more like tireless junior employees) clever phrasing stops being governance. Vibes are not a control system.

CEOs already know how real control works. With humans, we use identity (who are you?), policy (what can you do?), and accountability (what happens when you mess up?). Nobody runs a company on tone of voice alone.

Yet with AI, we keep pretending a polite sentence is infrastructure. Like adding “be safe and ethical” is the same as locks on the doors. It’s charming. It’s also useless at scale. AI won’t be trustworthy until it’s wrapped in the same dull, necessary scaffolding we use for humans.

Trust comes from boring things: permissions, logs, enforcement. Not magic words. Which means the future of AI management probably looks less like poetry and more like compliance.

Not exciting. Just real.

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*QUICK BRIEFING: Generative AI vs Agentic AI

St. Patrick’s Day Rant

 

Ah, St. Patrick’s Day. The one day a year when the entire planet wakes up and collectively decides, “You know what would really honor Irish culture? Neon green beer and plastic hats.”

Every advertisement suddenly becomes a cultural historian. “Celebrate Irish heritage!” they say, while handing you a cup of something that looks like antifreeze and calling it festive.

I’m not an expert on Irish history, but I’m fairly confident that somewhere in the centuries of poetry, rebellion, and complicated politics, nobody said, “You know what would really capture the spirit of this nation? A beer dyed the color of a malfunctioning highlighter.”

And the outfits. Grown adults willingly dress like a kindergarten craft project. Felt shamrocks, glitter beards, suspenders with tiny leprechauns doing calisthenics. And, somewhere a marketing team decided novelty hats were the natural evolution of Celtic history.

Then there’s the leprechaun mythology. A tiny man guarding gold at the end of a rainbow ... basically the original financial influencer. “Trust me,” he says. The treasure is definitely there. Just keep chasing it.”

Meanwhile bars are full by noon. Green cocktails with names like “Shamrock Slammer” or “Leprechaun's Kiss.” People shouting “Slainte!” with the confidence of someone who hadn't learned the word 45 seconds ago from a bartender.

And the “authentic Irish celebration” includes “Irish nachos,” which appear to be regular nachos having an identity crisis because someone replaced the chips with potatoes.

Somewhere behind all this is the real history: centuries of Irish storytelling, politics, music. Complicated, fascinating stuff.

But what we ended up with is green bagels ... the cultural equivalent of putting sunglasses on a historical statue and saying, “Look how fun history is now.”

I’m not against celebration. I’m not even against absurdity. Absurdity can be wonderful. Humanity has always loved costumes and loud gatherings and an excuse to yell in public without filing paperwork.

What fascinates me is how quickly culture becomes a product.

You take a holiday with real history, run it through three marketing departments, add food coloring, and suddenly the meaning dissolves like sugar in soda.

But maybe that’s the real modern tradition: turning complicated human stories into something you can sell in bulk near the seasonal aisle.

Anyway, pass the soda bread ... preferably a loaf that has survived the marketing department and avoided the green dye.

Contractions

When I read marketing copy without contractions, I feel like I’ve wandered into “Pride and Prejudice” and someone’s about to discuss the price of lace.

“We are pleased to announce…” No one talks like that unless there’s a fainting couch nearby.

Just say it like a person. It’s, don’t, you’ll, can’t. Real words for real mouths in the real world (where we’re buying toothpaste on line while watching TV).

Formal isn’t trustworthy, it’s just distant. And distance is an ineffective way to have a conversation with a prospect. 

What happened to creative marketing?

No, creativity isn’t dead. But, in advertising and marketing, it has been evicted.

It’s been shoved out to the edges, crowded off the table by consolidation decks, metric dashboards, automation pipelines, KPIs with more decimals than soul, and the cult of “efficiency” that believes faster is automatically better. Creativity didn’t disappear. It just got buried under a landslide of well-intentioned optimization.

But here’s the thing no spreadsheet, no matter how color-coded or cleverly pivot-tabled, can keep underground:

Ideas still matter.
Taste still matters.
Craft still matters.
Human judgment (messy, instinctive, gloriously unquantifiable) still matters.

We don’t create great work by worshipping the frictionless. We create it by wrestling with the unpredictable, the subjective, the inconvenient spark that refuses to be reduced to a metric.

Efficiency can ship a product. But only creativity can make someone care that it exists.

And that’s something no dashboard can automate, consolidate, or KPI its way around.

Buckle Up

 

AI isn’t killing copywriting … but it is dismantling the old rules at speed.

We’re in the uncomfortable middle of a major shift. The tools are powerful, accessible, and moving faster than most people can think through their implications. As a result, confusion is everywhere. Copywriters are experimenting, overusing, underusing, or misunderstanding AI. Clients are doing the same … sometimes replacing judgment with automation, sometimes expecting “AI magic” without strategy.

Mistakes are inevitable. Some copy will get cheaper. A lot of it will get worse. And a smaller slice will get noticeably better … not because AI wrote it, but because someone knew what to ask, what to edit, and what to ignore.

This is how change always looks from the inside: messy, uneven, and uncomfortable. Entire categories of work will be devalued. New ones will emerge slowly and without clear labels. People who equate copywriting with typing words will struggle. People who understand positioning, persuasion, and context will still be needed. Maybe more than ever.

The future of copywriting isn’t clear yet. Anyone claiming certainty is selling something. But one thing is clear: the road there will be tough for many.

An Aging Warhorse Takes Stock

Seventy years old. Let that rattle around a minute. 

For a lot of businesses, that’s long past the expiration date they stamp on your forehead. Thanks for your service, now shuffle off to the golf course, maybe buy a recliner, fade politely into irrelevance.

Not me. Not yet.

I’m still here, still raising hell, still stringing words together like they owe me rent. Still laughing at the wrong jokes while also knowing when to button it up in a client meeting. Still learning, still cussing, still showing up.

And here’s the kicker: I like it better now. The pressure’s gone. I don’t have to pretend to be twenty-five with a full head of hair and a bulletproof plan. I get to be seventy, scars and all, and keep creating without asking permission. That’s freedom.

So if you think there’s an expiration date on relevance, think again. Age doesn’t close the door ... it blows it wide open.

Long live the ones who stay engaged. Long live the ones who keep swinging long after the crowd thinks they should’ve sat down.

I’m seventy. I've got places to be. Things to do. Get the fuck out of my way.

Stop Throwing the Map at Them

 

There’s a certain kind of pitch that feels like being chased through the woods by a very aggressive slide deck.

     Slide one: You are lost.
     Slide two: Very lost.
     Slide three: Shockingly, almost impressively lost.
     Slide four: Good news. We sell compasses.

It’s dramatic. It’s urgent. It can be effective ... and also exhausting.

Because the truth is almost always this: your prospect knows what to do. It just isn’t translating into steps.

Think of strategy like a beautifully drawn trail map. It has contour lines. Landmarks.

Execution, on the other hand, is the muddy incline with the loose rocks and the bug that won’t leave your ear alone.

Most pitches confuse the two. They point at the map and say, “See? You’re failing to follow it.” As if the hikers haven’t noticed.

Consider instead saying something like:

“You already know where you’re going. The issue isn’t intelligence. It’s traction. Let’s talk about where your boots are slipping.”

That changes everything.

When you soften the pitch, you stop positioning yourself as the all-knowing cartographer and start acting like a good trail partner. The kind who says, “Yeah, that hill is brutal. Let’s zigzag it instead of charging straight up.”

This allows you to reframe the pitch: “You already know what to do. The problem isn’t insight. It’s translation. Let’s build the bridge between knowing and doing.”

Now you’re not the hero with the helicopter. You’re the steady hiking partner. The one who says, “Let’s take this in switchbacks. Ten clear steps. We’ll adjust as we go.” Because most leaders don’t need another map, they need someone to help them walk it.

Your presentation should acknowledge autonomy, assume competence, and treat the client like a capable adult who hit a patch of mud, not a lost child in the forest. No humiliation. No theatrics. No 87-slide autopsy.

Because underneath the theatrics of most consulting decks is a quieter truth: people don’t need more insight. They need support in acting on the insight they already have.

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Executive Summary: Replace your 87-slide pitch deck with a simpler offer: "You already know what to do. Here's why that isn't translating into results yet, and here's how we actually get it done together."

Bad Markets Don’t Kill You … Standing Still Does

 

Everyone loves to swagger when the market’s booming.

Chest out. Pipeline fat. Every guru suddenly a genius, every agency “crushing.”

But then the wind shifts. The headlines are heavy with gloom and doom. Budgets sneeze and the whole world catches fear. And even brave brands become timid little field mice whispering the same sentence: “We’re just going to wait this one out.”

But markets don’t actually “go bad.” They don’t rot like fruit, they morph like weather.

Clients don’t stop needing help. They start needing different help. Problems don’t vanish, they upgrade into new, weirder, scarier shapes.

Slow markets are just crowded markets where everyone stopped talking at once. Which means there’s suddenly more oxygen for the ones still breathing.

Separating the builders from the bunker-dwellers: When the environment changes, builders don’t fold. They mutate. Listening harder. Studying what’s breaking.

You gotta look for the “oh shit” moments inside your clients’ heads and run toward them while everyone else is guarding their lunch money.

You think it's optimism, but it's evolution.

Your offer isn’t carved in stone , it’s clay … re-shape it to serve the moment.

A “bad market” is not a crisis. It’s a diagnostic tool. It reveals who was riding the wave … and who can surf when the ocean’s angry. It shakes out the hobbyists. It rewards the ones who bother to stay in the water when the weather shifts.

You don’t grow in spite of slow markets. You grow because of them. Because when the world panics, attention gets cheap. When your competitors curl up, loyalty goes on sale.

When buyers get scared, they cling to the ones who actually show up with a plan.

The market isn’t bad. Your old strategy is. Thank God, because stale strategies deserve to die. Let the timid conserve their courage. Let the cautious take long naps. Let the “we’ll pick things back up later” crowd rehearse their comeback speeches … while you’re rewriting offers, solving the new problems, reallocating budgets, and planting seeds where the soil is suddenly wide open. Because slow markets aren’t a winter. They’re spring dressed as winter … waiting to see who still believes in growth.

And if you do the work now? You won’t just survive the storm. You’ll own the forecast when the sun comes back.

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Here are some responses to “Bad Market” concerns from your clients (courtesy of Jamie Brindle):

From the Client: We’re pausing all marketing until things pick up.  

Response: That’s when growth stalls for good. While others go quiet, let's build something that steals the attention they just gave up.

 

From the Client: Budgets are frozen right now.

Response: Understood. What’s still funded this quarter? Let’s align to that instead of waiting for the thaw.

 

From the Client: We just need to conserve cash.

Response: Then every dollar needs to perform. Let’s focus on the channels already producing and amplify what’s working.

 

From the Client: People just aren’t buying right now.

Response: They are. They’re buying from whoever helps them save, survive, or get leaner. Let’s reposition to speak to that.

 

From the Client: We’ll restart when the market rebounds.

Response: By then you'll be fighting every company who waited. Let’s build while they sleep so you’re ahead when the rebound hits.

 

From the Client: Maybe it’s just not the right time.

Response: Everyone in your industry is saying that. Which is exactly what makes this the right time.

 

From the Client: You really think we can grow right now?

Response: Absolutely. Slow markets concentrate opportunity ... but only for the ones still playing.

 

AI … What Happens After the Hype?

 

I keep seeing the same AI demos, just remixed. A model writes a poem, draws a picture, argues with confidence it hasn’t earned. It’s impressive in the way a street performer is impressive: crowd gathers, phones come out, everyone claps, then we all move on and forget the name.

That phase is fading.

The next phase of AI is less about imagination and more about infrastructure. Less “look what it can do” and more “can it run all day without breaking.” Power, memory, deployment … those unsexy words are starting to matter more than clever prompts and viral demos. The future isn’t being decided by who can make a chatbot sound the most human. It’s being decided by who can keep the lights on and the latency down.

You can feel the shift inside companies. The AI that actually survives doesn’t feel magical. It feels like software. It’s embedded into workflows, half-invisible, mildly annoying, and useful enough that no one wants to turn it off. Enterprises aren’t adopting AI because it’s inspiring. They’re adopting it because it saves time, reduces errors, and doesn’t call in sick.

This is where the romance drains out of the room. At scale, AI stops being a muse and starts being an appliance. And appliances live or die on reliability. Nobody brags about their dishwasher’s personality. They just want it to work every night without flooding the kitchen.

At the same time, AI is slipping out of the screen and into the physical world. Warehouses, factories, logistics … places where nobody cares about clever language but everyone cares about reliability. It’s less “humanoid robot walking like a toddler” and more “this machine never drops a box and never asks for a raise.” Quiet automation doing one task forever without complaining. Boring. Profitable. Real.

Who benefits? It won’t always the loudest AI brands or the ones with the best demos. Often it’s the companies doing the dull, foundational work: chips, power, data centers, deployment tools, integration layers. The ones who know where the breaker box is. When things flicker, suddenly they’re the most important people in the room.

And now the sorting begins. Winners and losers. Which is just another way of saying gravity is back. Not every model survives. Not every startup becomes a platform. Revenue, reliability, and maintenance matter again. The market has stopped being impressed by potential and started asking annoying adult questions.

This phase is less hype, more consequences. AI isn’t replacing imagination. It’s replacing chaos. Fewer fireworks. More wiring. That’s usually how technology actually changes the world: quietly, inconveniently, and all at once.

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NOTE: I’m still curious. I still think AI will reshape how we work, build, and automate the boring parts of life. But I’m no longer impressed by cleverness alone. Cleverness without infrastructure is a beautiful thought with no spine, collapsing the second it has to stand on its own.

Suggested Reading:

QUICK BRIEFING: Generative AI vs Agentic AI

Why Every Copywriter & Content Writer Needs an AI Usage Policy 

The Adolescence of Technology

Generative AI: TO BE (a tool) OR NOT TO BE (a tool)?

Don't Let AI Kill Your Analog Intelligence

Beverage Bucket

 

Dunkin' just launched a 48-ounce coffee bucket.

The Beverage Bucket (with a handle) is priced so you can hydrate like a suburban livestock animal on your morning commute and still pocket change from a 10-dollar bill.

"Beverage Bucket." The name grabbed my attention: “bucket.” Not “carafe.” Not “jug.” The word “bucket” used to imply utility. You got water from a well with it. Now it’s a lifestyle accessory.

We’ve skipped past “cup,” blown through “large,” laughed in the face of “extra large,” and landed squarely in hardware-store chic. What’s next? A kiddie pool of cold brew?

Oddly, however, calling it a bucket feels honest in a way that marketing rarely is. No artisanal backstory. No whisper about origin farms. Just aggressively honest. Like, yes, this is excessive. Here’s the handle. Commit.

I sort of get it. In an economy where everything feels smaller and more expensive, a bucket reads like a win. Look at all that abundance. It’s less a drink and more a declaration: “I will not be rationed.” It’s Costco energy in liquid form.

And in our social media driven world, a bucket fits the feed. It’s absurd enough to grab attention ... subtlety never goes viral. A sensible 12-ounce cup doesn’t stand a chance against a beverage container you could use to bail water out of a canoe.

Anyway, I’ll probably try one.

Not because I need 48 ounces of coffee. But because I want to see what it feels like to carry my morning around like construction equipment.

Sometimes you have to hold the absurdity in your own hand.

Preferably with a handle.

Prospect Participation

 

When writing, leave a little air in the room.

Because the moment your reader starts painting their own picture, the message stops being yours and becomes theirs.

And that’s when it sticks.

Your job is to sow the seeds. And then step back and let their brain do what it’s built to do.

Will my job exist in the future?

 

A fellow copywriter said something to me recently that stuck.

“We’re in a job that won’t exist in the future.”

She wasn’t being dramatic. She was being practical. Her reasoning boiled down to a simple question: who will care about great copy in the future?

At first, that sounds like heresy coming from inside the church. Copywriting is persuasion. Persuasion is timeless. Humans don’t suddenly stop responding to words.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I realized she wasn’t really talking about words. She was talking about where power will be coming from in the near future.

For most of advertising history, copy mattered because access mattered. If you controlled the message inside a limited set of media channels (TV, radio, print) you could shape perception. Great copy amplified that advantage.

But today, access is on its way to becoming infinite. We don’t have a media shortage problem. And that trend will continue. There are more outlets than anyone could possibly pay attention to. More brands publishing. More creators posting. More “content” than time. Audiences are becoming increasingly decentralized, fracturing into micro-communities, niches, group chats, and algorithmically-curated feeds.

And in that environment, traditional copy loses leverage.

Not because words don’t work, but because ownership of attention has shifted.

Influencers will continue to grow in power, carrying more trust than institutions. Already, word of mouth travels faster than campaigns: a single TikTok can out-deliver a million-dollar launch. And increasingly, AI summarizes, remixes, and reframes whatever you say.

Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth: great copy in traditional media can’t reposition/save a mediocre product anymore. In fact, it might not even get a chance to try.

Because what really moves the needle now is product quality experienced and shared. Increasingly, people aren’t discovering brands through ads as much as they are discovering them through other people. Through recommendations. Through screenshots. Through stories told without the brand’s permission. That’s where the real persuasion is settling in for the future.

And AI is accelerating this shift. It’s not just generating copy, it’s flattening it. When everyone can produce “good enough” words instantly, the value of words alone drops. The differentiator moves upstream. To the product. To the experience. To the story customers tell for you.

The Long Term View

So, does copywriting disappear?

No. But the role changes.

Copy stops being the hero and becomes the translator. The clarifier. The connective tissue between what a product actually does and how people actually talk about it.

The future copywriter isn’t a clever wordsmith hired to grab attention and ignite desire. They’re a strategist shaping narratives that already exist in the market … and making them easier to spread.

Great copy in the future won’t be about clever lines or viral hooks. It’ll be about:

• Understanding the customer better than the customer understands themselves
• Articulating truth so clearly it spreads
• Creating language people want to borrow, not avoid

So, the job doesn’t vanish. The illusion does. The illusion that persuasion starts at the headline. The illusion that marketing can out-run reality.

In the future, the best copy won’t convince people a product is good. It'll simply make it easier for people to notice that it already is.

The Short Term View

AI doesn’t kill this job. It exposes who never really had it.

AI can generate words. It can remix patterns. It can mimic tone.

What it can’t do -- at least not yet -- is decide what deserves to be said.

That decision still comes from judgment. From empathy. From strategy. From taste. And these have always been a scarce resources. Resources that strong, experienced copywriters know how to access.

So, for the time being … No, copywriting isn’t going away.