As B2B buyers do more research before ever speaking to sales, video, YouTube and thought leadership are becoming critical parts of the buying journey, shifting lead generation from capturing prospects to helping them make better decisions.
Most brands are using AI to make advertising more efficient. Japan Airlines is demonstrating something far more important by showing how AI can become part of the customer experience itself.
AI hasn’t killed search. It has broken the way marketers have measured it for the past two decades, forcing the industry to rethink what visibility actually means when answers are generated instead of retrieved.
For the first time in generations, alcohol is no longer central to how young adults build identity, community, or status, leaving marketers with a challenge that branding alone cannot solve.
The recent wave of science fiction television adaptations, from Alien to Blade Runner, isn’t evidence that Hollywood has run out of ideas. It’s evidence that shared cultural attention has become one of the most valuable assets in modern media, and marketers should be paying very close attention.
Netflix gets cultural credibility, Condé Nast gets distribution at scale, and advertisers get something far more complicated than either side is admitting.
Funko transformed thousands of niche obsessions into one of the most recognizable collectibles businesses in the world, proving that emotional relevance could outperform traditional branding. Its struggles since then reveal a much broader lesson for marketers.
B2B marketing spent two decades building a vast machine to capture, score and nurture leads, but buyers learned how the machine works and quietly stopped cooperating. The result is an industry generating more contacts, more dashboards and more artificial intent while sales teams increasingly wonder where the actual customers went.
Direct mail may look like a relic of marketing’s past, but the transactional data behind it could solve one of digital advertising’s biggest problems. As AI takes greater control of audience modeling, knowing what real people actually bought may prove far more valuable than another mountain of clicks, browsing behavior and inferred intent.
AI is giving marketers unprecedented power to understand, predict and optimize human behavior, but the bigger question is what they choose to optimize. As marketing evolves from persuasion into systems design, the industry must decide whether AI will simply make extraction more efficient or help create value for everyone participating in the system.