Notes from the work · Tag
If you run Meta ads, you’ve felt it. Control is shrinking.Automation is expanding.And a lot of marketers are panicking because the “old levers” don’t work like they used to.
Google Ads is a different animal going into 2026. The trend has been clear: more automation, more AI decision-making, fewer levers for marketers—and if you’re still running Google like it’s 2019, your campaigns will struggle.
Imagine you’ve been training for a marathon your whole life. You know the course; you’ve paced your stride and nailed hydration. Then, the morning of the race, the organizers quietly swap the marathon for a triathlon. That’s what’s happening in social media right now.
When Apple quietly rolled out iOS 26 this fall, the marketing world let out a collective groan. The new update filters text messages from numbers not saved in a user’s contacts, automatically routing them into an “Unknown Senders” folder.
Imagine sitting at a dinner party while someone else tells your life story — not just the highlights, but the details you’d rather keep quiet. You’re right there, but nobody asks you to speak. That’s what’s happening to your brand right now.
Here’s the brutal truth: customers don’t care about your logo, your color palette, or the tagline your agency spent six months arguing over. They care about how your brand makes them feel—and now, AI is measuring that better than you are.
Imagine showing up at a customer’s front door with the perfect pitch, only to find a robot bouncer who won’t even let you knock. That’s the new reality of outbound sales. Apple’s latest iPhone update includes a “No Voicemail” screening feature. Translation?
Picture this: you wake up one morning, and your entire marketing playbook has been rewritten overnight. Not because of a new Google algorithm update, not because Meta decided to throttle your reach again—but because the future of search just got hijacked by a courtroom.
I remember the first time I realized Google wasn’t a search engine. It was a surveillance company. Think about it. Gmail receipts told them what you bought. Google Calendar knew where you’d be. Search captured what you were about to want before you even admitted it to yourself.
I used to think our biggest competitor was another agency. Then ChatGPT got a wallet. Now? Our biggest competitor is a machine that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t scroll, and doesn’t care about your founder story.
Search is changing fast. Google isn’t the only game in town anymore. Tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google’s own Search Generative Experience are reshaping how people get answers.
In 2023, the world witnessed a historic moment in music: The Beatles released “Now and Then”, a song decades in the making. But what made this release truly groundbreaking was the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to restore John Lennon’s voice from an old, low-quality demo—something that was…
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