Consumer confidence—after being revised up for November (post-shutdown bump)—dipped (again) in December (aka this month).

Despite it being the most wonderful time of the year, people aren’t feeling good about the Present Situation, with the labor market playing the role of Ghost of Christmas Future.

Your logo is not your brand.

Making the rounds on work chat today, from Seth Godin’s archive:

Spend 10,000 times as much time and money on your brand as you spend on your logo.

Your logo is a referent, a symbol, a reminder of your brand.

But your brand is a story, a set of emotions and expectations and a stand-in for how we think and feel about what you do.

Building a brand is expensive today and cheap tomorrow.

I find this to be a very helpful way to think about AI

Venkatesh Rao proposes that Artificial Intelligence is actually Artificial Time, that it compresses decades, centuries of learning in hours and minutes and makes it available to us as augmentation

I have long taken issue with the “intelligence” part of the term “AI”. It pre-loads our thinking with ego since humans have a hard time conceiving of any type of intelligence that isn’t human intelligence.

What interesting things might we miss because the system isn’t imitating a human?

Don’t replace. Accelerate.

via Sentiers

Hire an indie agency in 2026

Indie agencies — more nimble, experimental and closer to challenger brands — are often the ones ushering clients into audio first.

Maybe this one?

via The Current