Amazon is ramping up to release its gen-AI powered Alexa (unless it gets delayed again).
Pricing model is up in the air at this point, but $5 to $10 month sounds pretty locked in.
This is the make or break moment for voice assistants.
You get personalities out of the shop and all that’s left is the retail experience.
You need the crust of the human.
Scale necessitates the removal of personality.
Which means personality becomes a differentiator.
How long until we’re asked to measure return on attention and return on personality? And how will we do it?
via the Weird Studies podcast
Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.
-Kevin Kelly
So do brands and customer experiences.
Everything is customer service.
Here is my summary of a 1-Minute summary of a massive social media trends study for 2025.
- Instagram is more than stories & Reels, posts are making a comeback
- LinkedIn is (still) having a moment
- Pinterest is not for videos
- Facebook Reels aren’t dead yet
How much of the resilient consumer spending trend is due to buying before Trump’s Trade War increases prices?
Buying before the promised / threatened tariffs hit.
If a meaningful %, purchase pull forward + lower purchasing power from higher prices could mean a rough year (or more) ahead.
This ad read (not ad, just read) is great.
You can hear the bit of a laugh after the reality TV line and tell the actor had fun with that part, or at least gives us the impression of enjoyment.
It’s filled with personality in a way that doesn’t overshadow the messaging, but makes it memorable.
Jan Swafford:
The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most.
We humans need to see the human doing it
John Haugeland:
the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings
Austin Kleon wrote Show Your Work. Now you must also show your humanity.
The guiding principles for marketing content now are:
Personality + Behind the Scenes + What’s “Boring” to You
If this sounds like influencer style social content to you, you’re right.
via DC
Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?
-Seth Godin
Marketing is a game of promises.
Conversion rates are promise delivery measurements.
Repeat customer rate is a trust barometer.
Puffery is over promising, repeatedly.
These definitions from Robin Sloan are helpful:
An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.
An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.
Aligns with why platforms suddenly started talking about the “creator economy” instead of just influencers.
Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.
-Alfred Hitchcock
Isn’t this essentially the premise of painkiller based marketing?