16 years · Microsoft · ISB · Cambridge University Press
16 years · Microsoft · ISB · Cambridge University Press
Witty, slightly sarcastic takes on all things AI — from buzzwords to buyer’s guides, hallucinating chatbots to agentic assistants. If you’re a marketer wondering what LLMs have to do with ROI (and chai), you’re in the right place.
Anthropic’s Claude just declared war on ad-funded AI. As ChatGPT tests ads in conversations, this piece asks what “AI ad wars” mean for marketers, trust and ethics.
The AI Ad Wars Have Started. Marketers Need to Pick a Side. Read More »
OpenAI’s Codex and Prism campaigns quietly redefine AI marketing. They don’t sell bigger models; they sell a new doctrine of work, where agents reshape daily workflows, and “AI for everyone” gives way to AI for specific, messy realities like GST, UPI and WhatsApp support.
How OpenAI Just Raised the Bar for AI Marketing (Without Saying “AI‑Powered”) Read More »
Coca‑Cola has spent 50 years sponsoring football, yet its 2026 World Cup work proves it still confuses visibility with value. The smallest ad in its portfolio understands the game better than the billion‑dollar campaign built to own it.
Apple’s Glad I Met You Chinese New Year film is technically flawless, strategically calculated, and emotionally engineered—everything wrong with marketing in 2026. Beneath eleven minutes of stop-motion puppets and 4K slow motion lies a masterclass in manipulation: the “Shot on iPhone” campaign pretends technology democratises creativity whilst requiring multi-million-dollar budgets and professional crews. Slow motion manufactures emotion through neuroscience. Pet-focused narratives exploit market data. Stop-motion signals authenticity whilst remaining entirely beholden to corporate imperatives. The craft is real. The authenticity is not. As brand trust collapses and consumers hit peak exhaustion from overproduced sentiment, Apple’s film reveals the precise pathology killing modern marketing. This is what happens when brands perfect the art of engineering emotion whilst pretending they’re simply telling stories. In 2026, perfection is the problem.
Apple’s Heartwarming Chinese New Year Film Is Everything Wrong With Marketing Right Now Read More »
When Nike leads a major sportswear campaign with a K-pop entertainer instead of an athlete, it reveals a broken marketing playbook. Celebrity endorsements are collapsing—not because reach doesn’t matter, but because audiences can now instantly spot the gap between what brands signal and what they actually do. In 2026, authenticity is operationally verifiable, not rhetorically performed.
Why the NikeSKIMS Campaign Proves Celebrity Endorsements Are Broken Read More »
Google’s ₹270 crore cricket sponsorship includes a fan contest that should go viral. But hidden friction barriers make participation nearly impossible for casual users.
Google’s ₹270 Crore Cricket Bet Shows Why AI Brands Still Don’t Understand Friction Read More »
Two videos. Three minutes combined. A masterclass in what happens when aspiration replaces accuracy in B2B tech marketing. Microsoft’s January 2026 Copilot announcements—Agent Mode in Excel and Voice in Copilot—are slickly produced. Yet both systematically omit information enterprise buyers need. The engineering team knows the constraints. Support documents them. Marketing pretends they don’t exist. Meanwhile, 72% of organizations remain locked in pilot programs despite 94% reporting measurable benefits. The gap between what marketing promises and what implementation requires creates organizational whiplash. This isn’t about Microsoft being uniquely bad. It’s about an industry-wide credibility crisis quietly killing enterprise software adoption.
Microsoft Just Showed Us Exactly What’s Wrong With Enterprise AI Marketing Read More »
OpenAI’s Prism launch signals a seismic shift in how vertical software gets built. Rather than competing in commoditised general-purpose AI, OpenAI is embedding AI directly into industry-specific workflows—exactly where scientists, doctors, and engineers spend their time. This isn’t about being smarter than ChatGPT; it’s about owning the workflow layer. The free-tier pricing strategy targets institutional lock-in, not individual adoption. Within 18 months, every category leader in your vertical will face an AI-native competitor with OpenAI’s balance sheet strength and data advantage. The companies that survive are those realising that AI isn’t a feature to bolt on—it’s the foundation your business must be built on. Your competitive advantage is no longer “how do we use AI better” but “how do we build systems where AI drives our core value.”
OpenAI’s Prism Isn’t for You—And That’s Exactly Why You Should Care Read More »
Last week, Figma flew 15 designers to four global cities, plastered their work across billboards in Times Square and Paris, and filmed an 11-minute documentary about the whole thing. They also launched a game show where two employees design fictional hot sauce branding whilst spinning a chaos wheel. Combined production budget? Likely north of ₹2 crore. Measurable ROI? Absolutely impossible to calculate. And that’s precisely the point. Whilst CMOs everywhere are drowning in quarterly scrutiny with 84% now viewing ROI as their primary budget metric, Figma is doing something counterintuitive. They’re creating campaigns so deliberately multi-objective that they become measurement-proof. Not through obfuscation, but through strategic multiplicity. This isn’t sloppy marketing masquerading as creativity. It’s the most sophisticated response to 2026’s central marketing paradox: executives demand immediate ROI whilst simultaneously acknowledging that brand marketing outperforms performance marketing 80% of the time.
Figma Just Solved Marketing’s Measurement Crisis—And Your CMO Probably Didn’t Notice Read More »
Apple’s £2,600 Vision Pro headset is failing by traditional metrics—yet the company’s immersive content strategy reveals a radically different marketing playbook. When 53,761 YouTube views generate £195,000-£520,000 in qualified revenue, viral reach becomes irrelevant. This analysis examines why “Top Dogs,” Apple’s dog show documentary, signals the future of premium content marketing: narrower audiences, exclusive experiences, and conversion metrics that matter more than viral vanity metrics.
Apple’s £2,600 Dog Show Gamble Reveals the Future of Premium Content Marketing Read More »