This list of trajectories for future festivals includes some good potential trajectories for brands too.

• Lightning Rods for Weak Signals
• Enablers of Serendipitous Discovery
• Fostering Connections and Communities Beyond the Filter Bubble

Amplify. Delight. Connect.

I work with a lot of real estate clients at Blue Ion, so I think a lot about how the market may change and how we can do real estate marketing better (I think the bar is low).

These quotes from Seth Godin related to AI agents have the gears turning.

Real estate (both buying and renting) has been slightly changed by the internet. They’ve made markets a bit more efficient and given buyers more insight. But the choices people make are based on intuition, and data sets are incomplete and have more “I know it when I see it” than we’d expect from such a large and regular transaction.

What happens when the right person finds the right place to live, and the connections have value far beyond building awareness?

…

Creating connections between and among buyers and sellers in dramatically more productive ways is (possibly) around the corner.

Aim to be effective, but unpredictable. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you irreplaceable.

6 seconds is the magic number for all kinds of content these days.

The average site visitor surveyed said they would wait up to eight seconds for a website to load. However, the second most common threshold reported by nearly one-third of respondents dropped down to just three to six seconds.

A good place to find new customers is by looking for already established things that you are similar to.

Easy. Expected. A good starting place.

There’s a strange thing that happens sometimes where instead of reaching to your right and left for new customers, it can work to reach across to the other side of the table. Connections that are so out there they just might be true.

Unusual. Novel. And more impactful in the long run.

New toy alert

Generative AI search engine Perplexity said it will launch ads in Q4

Perplexity’s new ads will be video ads and sponsored questions

the platform is emphasizing its capacity to reach educated, high-income professionals who may be in senior leadership at their companies.

“newstalgia”—a desire for familiarity combined with novelty

Top Gun: Maverick. Twisters. This is driving force of pop culture right now.

Or, said another way:

“take something that feels familiar and put it into a modern context.”

It’s not the 90s that are back. It’s the 90s as reimagined today that’s in.

Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.

Every interaction your customers have with you accumulates to your brand experience. How does each one fit together to make the whole you want?

As Tom Asacker says, the goal is to “to create an experience that resonates deeply.”

And so, Swift has put up something of a door: access to her costs fans at least $12.99. Here’s the thing about doors though: while they keep people out, they also keep them in.

Does your brand have a door?

Citing continued inflation and high interest rates, 33% of consumers say they will spend less this year on holiday shopping than in 2023, per a new report from Bankrate.

Almost half of all those surveyed by Bankrate said they would start shopping for the holidays by Halloween.

I understand the vibe, but I would not be surprised if this completely changes post-election.