Writing

Notes on what agentic AI actually changes for marketing leaders — the uncomfortable parts, not the exciting ones.

• Agentic AI makes brand falsifiable for the first timeAugust 2026  ·  When the buyer is an agent, every soft brand claim becomes a testable input with a pass or fail.
• LinkedIn isn't penalizing AI contentAugust 2026  ·  The platform demotes generic content. AI is incidental — it just made generic cheap enough to flood the feed.
• Your brand guidelines are not a brand codeJune 2026  ·  Brand guidelines tell humans how to decide. A brand code tells an agent what to do when no human is in the loop.
• Publicis bought the yardstickMay 2026  ·  LiveRamp's RampID was the neutral referee grading your agency bakeoffs. Switzerland just signed with one of the teams.
• Your agent is negotiating with a black box that gets paid when you spend moreMay 2026  ·  Every major ad platform now ships an MCP server. The bottleneck was never the clicking — it was the judgment.
• Scaling an agent is what invalidates the pilot that justified itMay 2026  ·  Train an agent on last year's data, deploy it, and its own decisions move the market it was trained for.
• Twenty years of conversion tactics don't work on AI shoppersMay 2026  ·  Countdown timers and scarcity cues were engineered for a brain that fears loss. Agents discount them.
• The 36% that's going to wreck a lot of 2027 budgetsMay 2026  ·  Automated tasks is a measure of breadth. Automated workflows is where the money is.
• The next moat isn't articulate language. It's proprietary observationMay 2026  ·  If you've spent 18 months optimizing for text-based AI, you may be polishing a layer that gets commoditized in 24.