Last week I wrote that LLM ads were in their CPM era — crude inventory, crude targeting, and outsized returns for operators who show up before the sophistication does. I compared it to Meta standing up its ads platform, and guessed the maturation arc would take a tenth of the time.
Twenty years ago, search marketing organized itself into two disciplines: SEO for the results you earn, SEM for the results you buy. Teams, budgets, careers, and agency org charts all formed around that split. It’s easy to forget that it wasn’t a strategy anyone chose — it was an
Nikesh Arora said something recently that most companies will nod at and then ignore: what kills them is adding AI to their existing workflow instead of rebuilding the workflow around AI. Everyone agrees. Then they keep the org chart. In creative work, the org chart is the workflow. The structure
One of Stellar's top salespeople rang me up yesterday about an inbound opportunity — high-impact AEO/GEO work for a small but mighty brand we'd be excited to take on. The catch was the price point: too small for it to make economic sense for us.
Andy Jassy said something this week worth sitting with: "If you look at one of our services, we swapped out the engine of the service while we were also running the service full tilt. Normally, that would have taken 40 or 50 people about a year to do. We
We acquire agencies and transform them. Most people read the word transformation and picture a private-equity playbook — a fixed set of plays, executed in sequence, finished in eighteen months. That's not what this is. We sit inside a fast-moving technology company. New models, new agents, new
Today, we were previewing something internally a few days before sharing it with a large auto client. The team had built an automotive-trained image-generation agent — the kind that handles reflections, brand guidelines, and integrated copy without the usual uncanny-valley artifacts that make most AI car ads unusable.
I keep finding myself saying the same thing to my team: we need to do more, better work. I've said it in Slack threads, on calls, in all-hands meetings. And every time I say it, I hear it — that's not exactly a sentence my kids&
