Yogi Berra said it best. We’ve watched this exact movie twice – once in print, once in pixels. 1. The classifieds massacre was never really about Craigslist. U.S. newspaper ad revenue peaked near $49.5 billion in 2005 and limped to about $9.8 billion by 2022 – an 80% haircut. Craigslist? Researchers put its damage at…
You hired a spokesman you never interviewed. He works around the clock, sounds certain, and quotes 2025 prices. It Isn’t Lying. It’s Repeating. 1. The damage is measurable. One audit found 72% of brands had at least one flat factual error in AI answers about them, usually stale pricing lifted from a review site that…
Fred hasn’t shot new material since April 1, 1966. He’s still on television. Your best piece is buried on page nine of your own site. Here’s the fix, and it takes an afternoon. 1. The people reading you now are not who you wrote it for Audiences turn over constantly. Email lists rot about 2.1%…
Your next customer may never look at your website. A machine will read it, compress it, and hand a human three options. You are no longer charming a person in a chair – you are being quoted by something with no patience and no taste for adjectives. PART ONE: HOW OFTEN IS THIS ACTUALLY HAPPENING?…
Book Two of the Iliad stops the war cold so Homer can list the ships. Who sailed, from where, how many hulls, under whose command. It is the passage every reader skips, and it is the passage scholars have been citing for three thousand years, because it is the one place the poem quits singing…
Why directories, associations and conference programs quietly decide whether an AI ever says your name For twenty years the game was ranking. Ten blue links, everybody elbowing for the top three, and an entire industry built on the theory that page two of a search result is where URLs go to die. That game is…
There’s a moment in Mad Men where the ad man tells a panicking client that when the conversation is going badly, you don’t argue with it. You start a different one. That was about cigarettes in 1960. It’s a pretty good job description for your website right now. Here’s what nobody warned you about with…