Pumpkin Spice Rant

 

Yep, it’s pumpkin spice season. That magical time of year when the leaves turn orange, the air gets crisp, and very coffee shop transforms into a pumpkin-themed hostage situation.

And now, like a viral infection, it's spread beyond lattes and breakfast pastries: It seems that every corporation has collectively decided that everything you consume must taste like a scented candle. You can now pick up pumpkin spice cereal, popcorn, hummus … HUMMUS. What culinary genius decided chickpeas needed to taste like Thanksgiving dessert? 

At this point, I’m expecting my multivitamins to come in “Autumn Harvest” flavor and my dentist to offer a pumpkin spice root canal.

And heaven forbid you don’t like pumpkin spice. Suddenly, you’re not participating in the season. You’re a monster. A joyless, cinnamon-deficient goblin. No ... I just want to taste my food without feeling like I’m being gently strangled by a Yankee Candle.

But hey … I get it. Autumn is beautiful. The leaves are changing, the air is crisp, and everything feels a little cozier.

So, happy Fall.

May your coffee taste like coffee, your candles remain strictly decorative, and your pumpkin spice exposure be limited to medically acceptable levels.

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If you enjoyed this quick rant, you should enjoy this quick poem: The Sneering Pumpkin

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And, of course, this from Joe Lennon:

Marketing’s AI Volume Trap: More Output, Less Progress

 

Whenever technology makes something easier, we immediately do far too much of it.

Email got easier, so we filled everyone’s inbox. Social media made publishing effortless, so the internet became a crowded town square where everyone brought a megaphone. Now AI has made producing content, writing emails, generating reports, and building features faster than ever.

Naturally, we’ve decided to produce more of everything.

Three blog posts become 23. Fifty sales emails become 500. And in a meeting someone points to a graph and calls it progress.

But what actually improved?

That’s the question nobody wants to ask when the production numbers are going up and everyone looks busy.

AI makes production cheaper. It doesn’t make attention, judgment, or trust any less expensive.

Your audience still has limited time. Your customers still need a reason to care. Someone still has to review the work, check the facts, and figure out what the hell they’re supposed to do next.

We’ve sped up the production line without asking whether anyone needs more stuff coming off it.

That’s The Volume Trap: confusing the ease of making something with the value of having made it.

Volume is easy to measure. We can count posts, emails, reports, and completed tasks. Usefulness is harder. Did that article help someone understand a problem? Did that email start a worthwhile conversation? Did that report improve a decision? Or did we simply create another thing for someone to ignore?

I’m not arguing that AI-generated work is inherently worthless. That would be lazy thinking, and there’s already enough of that going around. AI can help us research, explore ideas, and get tedious work out of the way. The trouble starts when we treat the first draft as the finish line, or assume that because we can produce twenty versions, we should

More output creates more work downstream. Is you current system capable of handling that additional work? Someone has to check it, maintain it, respond to it, or decide whether it deserves to exist. Is the person/team reviewing the work? Are they questioning assumptions and improving the result? Or are they skimming through fifty items because another fifty are waiting? If production speeds up but judgment doesn’t, we haven’t removed the bottleneck. We’ve just moved it somewhere less visible. 

When review becomes a rubber stamp, we’ve made the machine faster at producing things nobody has time to assess properly.

The answer isn’t necessarily to produce less. Sometimes more genuinely helps. But more needs to earn its place.

Consider reducing the output of one AI-assisted workflow. Publish fewer pieces, send fewer emails, or generate fewer reports. Use the time saved to improve relevance, check accuracy, and follow through.

Then look at what happened.

If results hold steady or improve, some of that extra volume probably wasn’t doing much. If they worsen, investigate what you removed and why it mattered.

Either way, you’ve learned something more useful than how quickly you can fill a content calendar.

The real challenge is psychological. A full schedule feels productive. A growing pile of completed tasks looks impressive. Improving the usefulness of fewer things is harder to show on a dashboard. But it can get you back to a key question: What is this work supposed to accomplish?

Technology keeps giving us ways to do things faster. Our instinct is to fill the newly available space with more of the same. We rarely consider using that space to think, to pay attention, or to do the work a little better.

Maybe that’s the real opportunity AI offers: Not an endless supply of things to publish, send, ship, and file, but the chance to spend less time producing the unnecessary and more time getting the necessary right.

The machine can make the next thing in seconds. Before we ask it to, perhaps we should check what happened to the last one.

A House of Mirrors

 

Social Media: a house of mirrors where everyone’s taller, wiser, hotter, and way more profound than they really are. A carnival of self-portraits disguised as revelations. Step right up. Applause sold separately.

This is the opener that was exactly what the client didn't want for a presentation on social media. It was totally off-base for what they wanted and their voice.

But I liked it. So after I edited it out of an early draft, I saved it to post here. 

And on social media. Hmmmm.

I thought it paired nicely with this cartoon from ex-copywriter Hugh MacLeod.

Scrutiny

Maybe they’re not clueless.

Maybe your idea’s just not clear.

Or not good.

Or both.

Communication isn’t telepathy.

If nobody gets it, it might not be them.

Is It Me or Is It a Machine?

 

If you write a decent sentence these days, people suspect you of being a machine. A focused, well-written paragraph is potential evidence of artificial intelligence, and using an em-dash may as well be a confession.

The deluge of AI produced writing has made us suspicious of prose itself. When people know that writing can be generated by a non-human, they can use that uncertainty to deny even authentic evidence. A thoughtful essay can be dismissed as AI generated. A personal story can be accused of being manufactured. An argument can be waved away because it sounds a little too polished, as if clarity were a crime scene and good grammar the getaway car.

We already live in a world where people read headlines instead of articles and scan opinions for ammunition. Now we have another convenient excuse not to engage with something we dislike: it can be dismissed as artificial ... no need to answer the argument, just blame the algorithm and move along. Marking something as "AI" becomes a convenient excuse for tossing it in a trash can for inconvenient ideas.

Personally, I’m less interested in whether a human or a machine assembled a sentence than whether the sentence has something worth saying. Who wrote it matters, certainly. But so do honesty, originality, experience, and the willingness to say something that hasn’t been polished into meaninglessness.

Me? I’ll keep writing. I’ll use the words I want to use and include the occasional em-dash. And I’ll try not to confuse polish with wisdom or awkwardness with authenticity.

And if someone decides that my writing sounds too much like AI, I guess I’ll have to live with that.

I spent years learning to write well. It would be a shame to stop just because the machines have caught up with the grammar and punctuation.

7 lines to use to pick up a copywriter in a bar

 

Are you a headline? Because you have my full attention.


Are you a keyboard? Because you're just my type.


Are you a trending topic? Because you've got me engaged.


Are you a brand story? Because I feel emotionally connected to you.


Are you a meta description? Because you just summed up everything I've been looking for.


Are you an engagement metric? Because you're driving my interest way up.


Are you organic traffic? Because I didn't see you coming, but I'm glad you're here.

Ya gotta market yourself

Marketing yourself and selling your services can be incredibly stressful. 

You're not alone.

Here are a dozen videos that can inject a little fun into the process. Hopefully this will help lighten the load the next time you have to bust out of your comfort zone and ask a prospect or client to make a commitment to buy your services.

Tommy Boy: We Don’t Take No for an Answer

The Office: Our Prices Have Never Been Lower

Key and Peele: The Telemarketer (Uncensored)

Used Cars: Fishing For Customers

Best Sales Lesson Ever: Jeremy Piven

Alec Baldwin Glengarry Glen Ross Speech

Key and Peele: Bagels are for Sales Associates (Uncensored) 

Robert DeNiro: Mob Boss Car Salesperson

The Wolf of Wall Street: Best Sales Pitch

Boiler Room: Daily News

Saturday Night Live: PowerPoint

Mad Men: Don Draper’s Best Sales Pitch Ever

Introducing a New Campaign

Seen this?

Watch it again.

Haven't seen it? Buckle your seat belt.

Required viewing for every person involved in marketing and branding:

Steve Jobs introduces Apple's "Think Different" campaign.

Columbus Day Rant

 

These days it seems that Columbus Day is a holiday that manages to start more arguments than actual celebrations.

Most holidays know what they are. Halloween? Costumes. Valentine's Day? Chocolate. Labor Day? Sales. Columbus Day, however, walks into the room like, "Good morning. Today we'll be discussing five centuries of history, exploration, colonization, national identity, and public policy."

And while I’m trying to determine if the banks and post offices are open, everyone else becomes an expert on 1492 … and whether we should be having a parade celebrating Columbus’ voyage or proclamations denouncing it. Social media transforms into the world's least organized graduate seminar, where every comment begins with "Actually..." and ends with someone muting their uncle.

Meanwhile, the retail industry has no idea what to do with the holiday. There's no official Columbus Day candy. No inflatable explorer decorations. No "Christopher's Pumpkin Spice Voyage." Just a handful of mattress sales awkwardly pretending this has always been a shopping event.

The result? Millions of people collectively discovering that history is a lot more complicated than the version that fit on an elementary school worksheet with instructions on how to build a construction paper Santa Maria.

Happy Columbus Day.

Or Indigenous Peoples' Day.

Or Monday.

Whatever you're calling it, I hope you at least remember to check whether the post office is open before leaving the house.

Readers Don't Care

All this hand-wringing about “human writing vs AI writing” feels slightly off. Readers don’t care about the process nearly as much as we think. They care if it holds their attention. If it gives them something.

The real shift is this: competence is now cheap.

So the question for writers isn’t “Should I use AI?” It’s “Am I saying anything that isn’t interchangeable?”

Because if the answer is, “No,” the machine’s already got you covered (and it doesn’t even need coffee).

Memorable Business Names

Near Nørreport Station in Copenhagen I walked past Regret Tattoo Removal. I appreciated the name so much I took a picture and made a mental note to write a blog post about clever business names.

To research I prompted ChatGPT:

List 15 real businesses with clever names and a concise one line explanation of why the name is clever. For example: a restaurant named "Thai Food Near Me" that uses its name to appear at the top a common search that people enter when looking for a restaurant serving Thai food near them.

Here is ChatGPT's response (I didn't bother to rewrite it 'cause it did a decent job of doing the research for me and that was enough for this particular blog post):

Absolutely. Here are 15 real businesses whose names do more than just sound catchy—they communicate what the business does, create a memorable association, or cleverly exploit a phrase people already know.

	Business	What it does	Why the name is clever
	Fur-Get Me Not	Pet care in Northern Virginia/DC	A play on “forget-me-not” that instantly signals pets and creates an affectionate, memorable brand.
	The Great Impasta	Italian restaurant, Brunswick, Maine	Combines “The Great Imposter” with pasta, making the cuisine obvious while giving the name a familiar phrase to latch onto.
	Bread Zeppelin	Salad/bread restaurant	A riff on Led Zeppelin that turns a famous rock reference into a food brand—and makes the product category surprisingly memorable.
	A Salt & Battery	British fish & chips, NYC	Twists “assault and battery” into a perfect description of battered fish, salt, and British chippy food.
	The Codfather	Fish & chips, UK	Replaces Godfather with cod, instantly communicating the restaurant's specialty while borrowing the cultural recognition of a famous movie title.
	Pho Real	Vietnamese restaurant, Pensacola	Sounds like “for real” while using pho to make the cuisine immediately identifiable.
	Hair We Are	Hair salon, Virginia Beach	A simple phonetic transformation of “Here we are” that puts hair directly into the business name.
	The Mane Attraction	Hair salon, Arizona	Turns “main attraction” into mane attraction, making a familiar phrase directly relevant to hair.
	Curl Up & Dye	Hair studio	A darkly funny twist on “curl up and die” that simultaneously describes two core salon activities: curling and dyeing hair.
	Sew What!	Sewing/embroidery shop	Sounds exactly like “So what?”, but the spelling immediately identifies sewing as the business category.
	Barkingham Palace	Dog daycare, boarding & grooming	Buckingham Palace → Barkingham Palace turns a famous place into a playful promise that dogs are treated like royalty.
	Pawsh Dog Wash	Dog & cat grooming, Alexandria, VA	Posh → Pawsh gives the business an upscale feel while replacing the key sound with “paw.”
	Dough-Re-Mi	Sourdough bakery, Meridian, Mississippi	Replaces “Do-Re-Mi” with dough, linking a familiar musical phrase to baking.
	Lickety Split	Ice cream & deli, The Bahamas	“Lickety-split” means very quickly, which is a fun fit for an ice-cream shop selling a quick sweet treat; the name is also inherently playful.
	Maid in Heaven	Residential & commercial cleaning, Virginia	A play on “made in heaven” that simultaneously communicates maid service and implies an almost heavenly level of cleanliness.

The particularly interesting naming patterns

A few of these illustrate different business-name strategies:

• Search/category insertion: Pho Real, Hair We Are, Sew What! — the clever word also contains the thing people are looking for.
• Famous phrase + business keyword: The Great Impasta, The Codfather, Dough-Re-Mi.
• Famous brand/title + industry pun: Bread Zeppelin, Barkingham Palace.
• Phonetic substitution: Pawsh, Mane Attraction, Curl Up & Dye.
• Name that communicates the service without sounding generic: Fur-Get Me Not and Maid in Heaven.

The “Thai Food Near Me” example you gave is actually a particularly interesting category of naming because it goes beyond wordplay into search-intent naming: the business name itself contains a phrase a potential customer might type into Google. That's a different—and potentially very powerful—naming strategy from ordinary puns.

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AI can be a very helpful with research ... but double-check the response (for example, the link for The Codfather is "suspicious" and should've been The Codfather) and, please, before committing fully to using AI, invest a few minutes reading Generative AI: To Be (a tool) or Not To Be (a tool).

We'll circle back.

Businesses across America have a habit of treating chaos as evidence of importance.

• If everyone is overwhelmed, the work must be meaningful.
  
  
• If nobody has enough time, the organization must be moving fast.
  
  
• If priorities change every Tuesday, we must be agile.
  
  
• And if someone finally says, “This isn't sustainable,” we call it a mindset issue.

That mindset issue is often tagged as burnout. And burnout is often discussed as though it were an unfortunate personality trait, not a result of being asked to compensate indefinitely for a system that has no intention of fixing itself.

And, after years working to remain functional while surrounded by decisions that seemed specifically designed to test the limits of human patience, you learn to understand the vocabulary:

• “Resource constraints” means we aren't staffing this properly.
  
  
• “Operational agility” means nobody knows what the hell is happening.
  
  
• “Stretch opportunity” means congratulations, you're doing someone else's job.
  
  
• “High visibility” means everyone will notice when something goes wrong.
  
  
• “Ownership” means you will be held accountable for a decision you were never actually allowed to make.
  
  
• And “we're all in this together” generally means you should probably cancel your weekend.

The Great Escape: Once you break free from this environment (and hopefully, you can), you'll have learned a great deal about leadership, communication, organizational psychology, human endurance, and the impressive number of ways a person can say “We'll circle back” without ever actually circling anywhere.

 

The Sneering Pumpkin

 

The Sneering Pumpkin

Put it in coffee, put it in cake,
put it in candles for goodness’ sake.
Room spray? Shampoo? Dog treats? Why not?
Heavy hand that pumpkin spice in all that you’ve got.

“Limited edition!” the signs claim in the stores,
“Our pumpkin spice make-up can de-clog your pores.”
And while shoppers may grumble, “Really? In everything?”
The pumpkin just sneers: “Yep, makes the register ring.”

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If you enjoyed this, you should like my Pumpkin Spice Rant.

Just Give Me the Cup

I ordered a large coffee. Not a cortado with a backstory. Not a single-origin pour-over that required a short lecture. Just … a coffee.

The transaction took maybe eight seconds. The counter person rang it up, turned the screen toward me, and there it was: The little moral checkpoint disguised as a payment screen:

The counter person stood there, waiting. Not impatiently, not aggressively … just existing in that way that made me painfully aware of an invisible social contract I hadn't considered before walking in.

Why should I tip to be handed an empty cup so I could walk over to the coffee station and perform the rest of the service myself: choose between light roast, dark roast, hazelnut, decaf, and then negotiate with a small army of creamers and sweeteners.

What exactly am I tipping for here ... and was I really about to hit “No Tip” in front of another human being?

I’ve always viewed tipping as a considered act. You sat down, someone took care of you, and at the end, you left something that reflected how that went. Great service? Leave more. Indifferent service? Leave the standard. Genuinely terrible service? Leave less, feel slightly bad about it, and argue with your dining companion about it on the drive home. The whole point was that the tip was earned. It was a grade. A signal. A small piece of feedback written in dollars.

Now it's like a tax. A tax with guilt built in, collected before any service has been rendered, at a counter, in public, with someone watching.

It's not only about the money. Fifteen percent more on a $5 coffee isn’t gonna ruin me. It’s the broken logic underneath it. Tipping, in its original form, was about incentive. Do a good job, get rewarded. That feedback loop made sense. It kept everyone honest. It gave servers a reason to be present, attentive, warm … because their income depended, in part, on the quality of their effort.

Pre-tipping destroys that entirely. You're asking me to evaluate a performance before the curtain goes up. You're asking me to pay for value that hasn't been created yet. And once I've paid, there's no mechanism left … no lever, no signal, no way to say "actually, that was excellent" versus "actually, you ignored me for twenty minutes while the coffee got cold." It's all collapsed into a single anxious moment at the register before anything has happened at all.

The moment of payment has turned into a tiny social negotiation. You’re not just buying coffee, you’re performing generosity under observation. It’s like being asked to applaud before the show starts.

“Give me 25% now… and we’ll see how it goes.”

This doesn't work in my old-fashioned brain. Incentives matter. Timing matters. Value matters. These aren’t abstract ideas, it’s how work functions: You offer something of value. Someone else recognizes it. There’s an exchange. That’s the deal. Handing me a cup is not the same as taking care of me. One is a transaction. The other is an experience.

Blurring that line turns exceptional effort into just another checkbox. And ironically, it removes the very thing tipping was supposed to encourage: the incentive to do something well.

So yes, I stood there for a second too long. I felt the weight of a decision that shouldn’t have been that heavy. And then I pressed “No Tip.”

I don't feel great about the look I got. I don't feel terrible about the decision. I feel mostly tired. Tired of the machine pivoting toward me like a moral test.

I took my cup, walked over to the coffee station, and poured it.

The coffee was fine.

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The payment screen swivel is one of the stranger social innovations of our time. The way it turns toward you like an accusation. The way a number above 15% (I’ve seen 30%) is always pre-selected, glowing, suggesting. Like the screen itself is disappointed in you for even hesitating. Tapping "No Tip" feels less like a financial decision and more like publicly announcing you kick dogs.

I don't kick dogs. I just want a coffee.