In a year of tone‑deaf AI advertising, Apple’s handmade puppet film “A Critter Carol” quietly reframes what good marketing looks like: humans on stage, tech in the background, and visible craft as the new premium signal of trust.
Apple Brought Puppets to a Robot Fight — And It’s the Smartest Marketing Move of 2025 Read More »
Amazon’s “Five Star Theater” campaign represents a seismic shift in modern advertising. Rather than selling aspirations, the brand performs real customer reviews with theatrical intensity—transforming messy authenticity into marketing gold. This campaign works because audiences are exhausted by polished corporate messaging. They want to be seen, not sold to. The data backs this up: 90% of Gen Z prioritizes authenticity, 88% of consumers trust peer reviews over brand claims, and funny ads deliver 6x more brand lift than traditional spots. Amazon didn’t invent new content; it simply elevated what already existed—unfiltered testimonials from the reviews section—into strategic art. The result? A campaign that mocks influencer fakery, celebrates internet culture, and critiques advertising excess simultaneously. This signals the end of aspiration-based marketing and the beginning of recognition-based authenticity. The brands winning in 2025 aren’t trying harder. They’re trying differently.
Two smartphone ads dropped on the same day. Apple’s 65-second spot for the iPhone 17 Pro features men in dinner jackets performing surreal feats to an operatic crescendo, never once showing the phone in use. Google’s “It’s Pixel, Actually” reunites Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Martine McCutcheon from Love Actually to demonstrate the Pixel 10 Pro’s 100x zoom. These aren’t merely advertisements—they’re philosophical declarations answering a question every marketer confronts: Should you acknowledge your competitors, or pretend they don’t exist? The surprising truth? Both strategies are working. Apple advertises from overwhelming market power. Google advertises from rapid growth against a dominant incumbent. This article breaks down why opposite approaches both succeed, and what your brand should do about it.
Apple Doesn’t Know You Exist. Google Wants You to Know It Knows. Read More »
Perplexity AI’s new slides, sheets, and docs feature promises integrated productivity—but in a workplace already drowning in tool sprawl, is this innovation or just more noise? A critical analysis of feature bloat, the productivity paradox, and why more tools don’t equal more output.
On 20 November 2025, Anthropic released an 86-second video that doesn’t behave like marketing. There’s no parade of features, no
Perplexity’s Comet launch video demonstrates how outcome-based product storytelling replaces feature-focused marketing. In a zero-click world, category marketing is the only strategy that works at scale.
Here we are in late November 2025, wrapping up a year where every marketing trend deck promised us that short-form
Why WhatsApp’s 9-Minute Film Is the Counter-Trend That Matters as 2025 Ends Read More »
Between November 14-20, 2025, Google launched three contradictory AI Mode campaigns while partners like Figma independently announced Gemini integrations—creating five different value propositions targeting five separate audiences in seven days. First came an emotional tearjerker about accessibility. Then quirky cat memes. Then enterprise technical jargon. Meanwhile, Antigravity launched as a complete AI-native IDE, and partners announced integrations on their own schedules with their own messaging. This isn’t creative diversity—it’s distributed positioning chaos where Google doesn’t even control the narrative. Yet here’s the uncomfortable truth: when you own Chrome, Search, Android, and Workspace, this messy strategy might actually work. Distribution can beat positioning when you already own the defaults. But there’s a limit: encounter doesn’t equal trust for professional work. Google’s betting that defaults matter more than excellence. History suggests that works until it suddenly doesn’t.
Google India launched three completely opposite AI Mode campaigns in five days. First came “What Colors Feel Like?”—an emotional tearjerker about explaining colours to a blind child. Three days later, “Honest Cat Interview” dropped—quirky meme humor about a snarky cat. Twenty-four hours after that, Google announced Gemini 3 with technical jargon targeting premium subscribers. Same product. Same market. Three fundamentally incompatible value propositions. This isn’t creative variety—it’s strategic paralysis at scale. When a company as sophisticated as Google can’t commit to a single positioning, it reveals what every marketer needs to understand: nobody knows how to position AI products yet. The lesson? Testing is good. Testing instead of deciding is catastrophic. Successful brands pick one job their product does brilliantly, one audience it serves best, and one tonality that fits both. Then they commit. Clarity beats resources. Every time.
When Google Runs Two Opposite Campaigns at Once, It’s Not Creativity—It’s Panic Read More »
Google’s “What Colors Feel Like?” ad showcases stunning craft and emotional storytelling—but it’s also a masterclass in what’s broken about disability representation in Indian advertising. With less than 1% of Indian ads featuring disabled people despite 2.2-8 crore disabled Indians controlling ₹3-4 lakh crore in spending power, brands are bleeding market share through neglect, not malice. This isn’t about charity—it’s about business. As 86% of Indians now prioritise DEI in brand choices, the conversation has shifted from “should we include disabled voices?” to “can we afford not to?” Google’s AI Mode campaign, while technically brilliant, positions the blind child as inspiration rather than agent—falling into the “inspiration porn” trap that disability advocates have long critiqued. For Indian marketers, the wake-up call is clear: authentic inclusion requires disabled talent behind the camera, not just in front of it.