A negotiation guide for the meeting you are about to have with your own lawyer. When you were seven you wanted to be an astronaut or a fireman. So did the person across the table in that review meeting. One of you grew up to write marketing copy. The other grew up to be the…
Your hiring costs are being set by a Reddit thread, a Glassdoor rating, and a lawsuit that got covered once in 2023. The employer-side AI audit that no one in your company owns. Every casino in Nevada knows something most employers have never bothered to learn: the number that ruins you is small, invisible, and…
Your champion is fighting for you in a room you will never enter, and you sent them in with a slide deck about ROI. Somewhere in your best open deal is a person who cannot buy anything. No budget, no signature, no quota, no upside if this goes well. What they have is a checkbox,…
Every article about repositioning assumes a launch. Real firms have to change what they sell while still carrying a client base that hired them for the old thing. Here is how to do it the way people cross the English Channel: sideways, slowly, and without a press release. In August 1875, Captain Matthew Webb swam…
Ten phone calls will tell you what your position actually is. A dead radio fad from 1976 will tell you why. Your positioning is not a document. It is the sentence one distracted person says to another over dinner, somewhere between the entree and the check, when a name is needed and yours comes up.…
What all of Mad Men teaches marketers in 2026 – not just the guy with the cheekbones – stress-tested against zero-click search, generative engine optimization, and an audience that clicks 1.6 percent of the time. EVERYBODY STUDIES DRAPER. THAT IS THE FIRST MISTAKE. Twelve character studies sit behind this piece: Draper, Olson, Sterling, Pryce, Cooper,…
How the scoring rubric gets built eleven months before you see it, and what one published page could have done about it Two Words Beat Every Pitch in the Room In 1984, NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff scribbled a brainstorming note that read, in its entirety, “MTV cops.” Anthony Yerkovich turned it into a pilot.…