The most important shift in marketing right now is not the rise of creators, the decline of followers, or even the dominance of TikTok. It is the collapse of the idea that we are still operating inside a genuinely social media environment at all.

Every few years, someone discovers a marketing channel that works unusually well. They write about it. Other people copy it. The channel gets crowded. The platform that hosts the channel notices the activity and starts charging for access. The channel’s effectiveness declines. Everyone moves on to the next channel. This cycle has been running since... See more

spent two hours this week discussing the intracacies of a brand’s ‘funnel’.

And it was two hours utterly wasted.

Marketers love frameworks almost as much as they love jargon. None has endured longer than AIDA, that neat little ladder from Awareness to Interest to Desire to Action. It was written in 1898 by Elias St. Elmo Lewis, a copywriter trying... See more