∞

A website without a CTA is an art project.

∞

If you’re bored with your core brand message and feel like you’ve been saying it over and over…

Good

Keep going.
Say it again.

It’s probably just starting to take hold outside your brand’s walls.

∞

What story is your industry based on?

The most fascinating part of the study on 400 books is that almost every popular diet follows the same narrative formula. The scientist calls it a modern “Fall of Man” story.

It goes like this:
Step 1: Once, humans were healthy.

Step 2: Then something corrupted us — modern food, processed ingredients, industrial agriculture, seed oils, something.

Step 3: But if you follow these rules, you can return to that pure, uncorrupted state.

Should your story go with or against the grain?

Bottled water = plastic
Fiji ✅
Liquid Death ❎

via The Pump Club

∞

Indicator Bingo

Planet Money is watching 3 indicators this year:

  • Fed rate (splintering opinion on rate changes + a new (“yes man”) chair incoming)
  • Electric rates (as affordability signal, rates up 7% compared to ~3% general inflation)
  • Consumer spending (actions over words, we’re in a perma-vibecession + K-shaped economy)

The indicator of the year for 2025 was tariffs.

A.k.a. The economic soap opera of 2025.

Runners up:

  • Consumer sentiment (see “vibecession”)
  • CAPE ratio (cyclically adjusted price-to-earnings ratio): stocks are the most expensive they’ve ever been (compared to actual earnings) since just before the dotcom crash

The economy is standing in a hallway filled with closed doors. The movement of these indicators will determine which door it opens and walks through.

∞

Meta clearly wants to own the new hardware platform: glasses.

Really, really badly.

But what if Snap’s Spectacles make more sense?

Whereas Snap, which has really begun leaning into its identity as a messaging platform more than a social network, is really going to, I think put communication and sharing of communication between users at the heart of Spectacles and that is going to, I think, give it a purchase in a way that the Meta’s Ray-Bans have not.

Meta’s apps are much more about consumption these days, how do glasses integrate with that paradigm?

via EMARKETER

∞

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.

∞

Welcome to dead week planning week!

Reddit and mobile apps (Applovin’) are hot like Hansel with advertisers right now. There’s probably plenty of runway left for ad growth (unlike Meta), but the question remains:

Should you zig or should you zag?

via EMARKETER

∞

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