Issue #159 Reader Every single week I get the call "We hired [branding guru du jour] who downloaded the latest branding algorithms from the cosmos via Starlink during a juice cleanse." It's painful to hear. It's why, this morning, I am publishing the field guide to telling the fakes from the real ones. Why? Because someone just dropped $50K on a branding guru who spent three months "aligning energies" and delivered zero strategy. While someone else dropped six figures on a firm that produced...
5 days ago • 1 min read
Issue #158 Reader One word kills more deals than any objection, any pricing complaint, any "we went another direction." That word? Digest. "Hey, I'm going to need a little time to digest what you just told me. Circle back in a couple of weeks?" John Barrows calls it the kiss of death. After 25+ years inside Salesforce, LinkedIn, Google, Amazon, and Okta, after 250+ podcast episodes and 1.2 million downloads, John's seen it happen more times than he can count. John had me on his podcast, Make...
12 days ago • 1 min read
Issue #157 Reader Picture this: You're known for selling the best, most satisfying coffee. Then a crazy idea hits you: Your customers love you for coffee. Your brand screams coffee. Your whole identity is built on it. My custom espresso made in my own kitchen And then one day, you decide to sell tea. What do you do? Most brands botch this. They water down everything that made them magnetic in the first place. They try to be "for everyone" and end up being for no one. But there's a way to pull...
19 days ago • 1 min read
Issue #156 Reader I got a phone call I wasn't expecting. A project called Voices of 250 was curating video messages for America's 250th birthday. The roster includes Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPmOrganChase, the presidents of the NYSE and NASDAQ, and leaders across nearly every industry. That's me, the kid from Brooklyn, who's generated over $9 billion for my clients I was shocked they wanted a kid from Brooklyn with no pedigree and no business training to record a video message too. I said yes. So...
26 days ago • 1 min read
Issue #155 Reader "The market is saturated." I've heard this excuse from 47 founders this year. Pick the industry. Doesn't matter.Same words. Same sigh. Same surrender. And every single time, I ask the same question: "Can I see your homepage?" Then I pull up their top three competitors. Strip the logos.Read the copy out loud.And watch their face change. Because they just realized something uncomfortable. They don't have a market problem.They have a "we-sound-just-like-them" problem. I just...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Reader The most expensive line item on your P&L isn't payroll. It isn't your agency retainer or your ad spend. It's the gap between what your brand could be and what it currently is. And the brutal part? You can't see it from the inside. I've spent four decades pulling brands out of the wall of beige. It's why CEOs call me: They realized they've burned so much cash on marketing that their spouses think they have a coke habit. It's not that they're bad at what they do. They are in fact smart,...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue #154 Reader Thomas Jefferson locked himself in a rented boarding house for 17 days. He rewrote the Declaration of Independence 17 times. Then Ben Franklin and John Adams made 47 more changes. Then Congress cut it by a fourth. Nearly 100 edits before "We hold these truths to be self-evident" saw the light of day. And here's the part nobody talks about. Jefferson's original line read: "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable." Franklin crossed it out and replaced it with...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Reader Here's your Monday Morning Bonus: Right now, every company in your industry has access to the same AI you do. The same prompts.The same data.The same "insights." The result? A mirror maze of polished, professional... identical messaging. Here's what most people miss: People don't make decisions based on facts. They make decisions based on how those facts are framed. When every other MP3 player advertised gigabytes and storage capacity, Apple simply said: "1,000 songs in your pocket."...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Issue #153 Reader 41 tourists outperformed billion-dollar campaigns. Without trying. Zero brief. Zero budget. Zero agencies. Zero approval chain. These Europeans arrived expecting rudeness. They left filming strangers who bought them beers and changed their minds about an entire country. I dropped the video I'd made last Sunday night. By this morning: • Over 264,000+ views. • 1,970+ comments. • People brought to tears. Nobody commissioned these videos.Nobody approved them. They did what a...
about 2 months ago • 1 min read