Marketing on The Findings Report

The Missing Middle

Fri, 17 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I.

Last year, my friend Jeremy Korst co-authored a great piece for Harvard Business Review that opened with a bold prediction, “among all the managerial functions, marketing is likely to be the one that’s most disrupted by generative AI.” That turns out to be an understatement. The changes are occurring so rapidly marketing’s foundation feels like it rests on quicksand. In the most recent release of The CMO Survey, senior marketers said they were using AI to automate and optimize marketing about a quarter of the time, a 40% increase from the 2025 study. The same audience forecast that they will be using the technology for this purpose more than half the time in 3 years—representing a 131% increase in AI’s power over marketing.

When We Throw Caution To The Wind

Sun, 05 Nov 2017 07:31:00 -0800

Did you buy the new iPhone X?

Despite a lot of consumer jawboning about the oddly placed top notch, the loss of the home button, and the hefty price tag, the Internet was abuzz on Friday with mostly favorable reviews and complaints of short supply.

For someone who came of age with the personal computer, I have a love/hate relationship with product upgrades. In the 80s and 90s, technology was too expensive to upgrade with every product cycle. Yet, the tech nerd in me obsessed with rapt desire over the new features and innovations. I was the guy friends mocked for being too much of an early adopter. Today, most of the technologies we carry are designed to be fleeting companions. In fact, Apple (along with many other product manufacturers) has faced minor backlash over allegations of planned obsolescence—a practice of designing products to have a shelf life that guarantees purchase of new models.

The Gender Quotient

Sun, 29 Oct 2017 08:29:00 -0700

The late David Ogilvy is credited with one of marketing’s most famous axioms. “The customer is not a moron; she is your wife.” The quotation reminds managers that we are all customers, but it is striking because of its decisive use of pronouns. The pivot from “customer” to “she” brings the message home. It is a prime example of the role gender can play in our communications.

Gender has become a challenging landscape for marketers. On the one hand, there are brands that are creating value by aligning themselves with gender-specific themes. One example is the femvertising trend, in which brands such as Dove, Always and GoldieBlox have tailored their messaging campaigns to feature stories of female empowerment. The approach is not exactly new. Although distasteful to today’s more enlightened audience, Virginia Slims wooed women to tobacco by celebrating the strength of the female sex.

The Thing To Fear

Sun, 13 Aug 2017 07:01:00 -0700

Throughout the 1970s and ‘80s, when I was growing up, life in the shadow of a potential nuclear war was a trope that occurred everywhere in culture. It was in music (The Clash’s “London Calling”), movies (War Games), and countless television mini-series (“The Day After,” which drew an audience of more than 100 million people when it aired on ABC in 1983). The threat of nuclear holocaust was a reality that lingered persistently in the background. We lived with it for so long that we developed coping mechanisms that allowed us to carry on. Like a case of arthritis, it always reminded us it was there, but the fear and anxiety it provoked didn’t keep us from daily life.

When Men Decide Together, Compromise Takes a Hike

Sat, 05 Nov 2016 20:39:00 +0000

I’d never heard of a line search. But the ranger looked very serious when he told me I was needed for one. I soon learned it was a necessary rescue technique to find two of my colleagues who were lost in the forrest.

We had been participating in a team-building exercise in Leadville, Colorado (elevation 10,152 feet). The “we” in this story was a cadre of corporate marketing executives gathered together to discuss “the future” and “synergies” and “team-based ROI.” The year was 1998 and I was still too junior to have much of an opinion on any of these topics, but I was thrilled to get an all-expense-paid trip to the Rockies for a fully-sanctioned summer boondoggle.

In defense of Super Bowl commercials ... when executed well

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 05:03:00 +0000

There isn’t a bigger forum for television advertising than Super Bowl commercials. It was once Carnegie Hall and the Grand Ole Opry rolled into one—a place for brands and their agencies to raise the stakes and entertain the largest television audience in the world. Some of the most memorable advertisements of all time debuted on a Super Bowl broadcast. So, why was 2013 so lackluster?

Let’s roll back the clock about a dozen years. 2000’s Super Bowl XXXIV is a great case study year—one that set the stage for what ills us now. Just a few months before the dot-com boom would crash, 2000 would go down as a year when advertisers clearly went “over the top.” Flush with cash from a hot economy and an insane startup mentality, agencies convinced their clients to go big or go home. Budweiser unveiled “ Wassup,” 7-Up asked us to “ Show Us Your Can”, and a bevy of .com companies that aren’t with us today proved just how irreverent they could be thanks to work done by a lot of disruptive advertising agencies who are also not with us today. It led many critics to decry the blatant waste of media dollars and argue that advertisers needed to tone down the frenzy. In truth, it was pretty crazy.