It’s Monday.
You know that first sip of cold water after a brutal workout? The one that hits every cell at once?
That’s what it feels like when a campaign you sweated over finally clicks. The open rates climb. The replies roll in. Pure, refreshing relief.
Savor it, but then get back to the grind. The next thirst is already building.
The creator playbook: go vertical, stand out, skip the slop
What’s this? Every platform is suddenly becoming a film studio.
Now Reddit is entering its vertical era: The platform is testing TikTok-style video and audio playback for viral posts.
This means short-form vertical content is essential, even on a text-first platform. Or, what was once one.
You might want to start thinking about how your written wins could become watchable ones.
Speaking of social content, it’s still dominated by the shy majority: On Instagram, viewers outnumber creators roughly 2:1. The creator pool is growing, but most users still lurk.
That means there’s real room to stand out, simply by actually posting.
And it matters what content you create: Snapchat just declared war on AI slop in Spotlight.
Low-effort AI content is fast becoming a liability, and not just here. LinkedIn made similar noises recently, so this is a pattern, not a one-off.
The lesson? Create more, but create well. Volume gets you in the room. Quality keeps you there.
AI is rewriting search, and your marketing has to keep up
Remember when ads just sat there? ChatGPT has other plans.
Your next sale may happen outside of your website: OpenAI appears to be building chatbot-native ads that don’t just display, they launch AI agents to act for the user.
That’s a big shift. Rather than nudging users to click, these ads could kick off tasks like booking, buying, or comparing right inside the chat. Your website traffic will matter even less.
You’d be paying for actions taken on your behalf, not impressions. That’s new.
Meanwhile, visibility is getting democratic: One study counted the sources in Google’s AI answers and found 168 citations, with no single domain dominating.
If this is a frequent occurrence, it means that being #1 matters less. However, being one of many credible voices will matter more. So even smaller domains can now have their moment.
But you can still not appear. Google’s AI Mode shows roughly 95% fewer product listings than standard search for identical commercial queries.
That’s a major discovery channel quietly shrinking. If shopping traffic is your bread and butter, AI-first search could be leaving you hungry.
What we think: AI is changing both where ads live and changing how search works. Try to adapt early and you might reap the benefits, even as a small business.
What if doing nothing beat 90% of professional fund managers?
The investment industry sells complexity. Research. Timing. Alpha.
The data tells a different story. Over any 20-year period, a simple world index fund has outperformed more than 90% of professionals. Most investors who try to beat the market end up paying more in fees to underperform it.
The edge isn’t intelligence. It’s patience.
But patience is hard when your portfolio feels abstract. A passive fund is just a ticker on a screen. The thousands of companies inside it, the businesses you actually co-own, stay invisible.
90 Percent fixes that. Every week, it pulls one company at random from the world equity index and tells you what it actually does.
- The Brazilian company that makes the electric motors inside almost everything that spins.
- The Florida company that sells your airline its spare parts at half the price.
- The Japanese hardware company hiding inside every factory.
One company. Every week. Yours to discover.
Search is turning into a creator platform and your rankings won’t save you
Mikael Arajuo lays out something uncomfortable over on Moz: your rankings can look perfectly healthy while you quietly lose the user somewhere between the query and the click.
Here’s why.
The old rules of search are quietly retiring. For years we optimized on three assumptions:
- The user knows what they want,
- The answer lives in one document, and
- A click means satisfaction.
All three are cracking. SparkToro found 68% of US Google searches now end without a click at all.
So Google is copying TikTok’s homework. Creator platforms win by keeping users inside.
That’s exactly what AI Mode does, right? It turns a query into a session, suggesting follow-ups and deepening the topic until you never leave.
Follow-up queries are reportedly climbing 40%+ month over month.
The infrastructure is already live. Google Creator Profiles are real, followable, and indexable. Barry Schwartz already has 670k+ followers on his.
Authority is migrating from the domain to the individual. Your LinkedIn and YouTube presence now feeds what Google cites.
Domain Rating isn’t dead, but it’s no longer as important. A low-DR site with a coherent creator presence can out-cite a bigger domain.
There are two layers to play now.
- The Authority Layer (Instagram logic): who you are, built across platforms.
- The Relevance Layer (TikTok logic): whether your specific answer beats everyone else’s at the exact moment the query gets synthesized.
But don’t torch your whole strategy. Transactional searches still send clicks to websites. AI Overviews don’t appear everywhere. Treat this as a compass, not a map.
The Crew’s take: Stop treating Domain Rating as a proxy for AI visibility. Start producing dense, attributable, verifiable content with a real author’s name on it.
When everyone’s using the same marketing playbook, psychology gives you an edge
Most marketers pull ideas from the same formulas, frameworks, and templates.
There’s no harm in using what works—but it also means your offer risks blending in.
But marketers who understand how people actually make decisions know how to package powerful offers and stand out—even when they’re selling similar things as their competitors.
Want to receive one psychological principle each week so you sharpen your instincts for positioning and persuasion?
Your videos are also your company’s vibe check
As far as attention is concerned, video takes the cake.
And when consumers are checking out local businesses, they aren’t looking for Hollywood production. Instead, they want your authentic content.
You are the premium creator, as 36% of consumers watch videos posted by businesses about products/services to gather info. Also:
- 31% rely on videos from everyday people on social media, highlighting the massive weight of authentic user-generated content.
- And 27% value behind-the-scenes content, so showing your team’s faces actually builds trust during the consideration phase. Everyone likes a peak behind the curtain.
Consumers use video to vibe check your business. They want to see the product in action and the people behind it.
Pricey commercials are out; transparency and social proof are in.
What you can do: Create a brand video series like “meet the team” or a look into the process. Showing the real people builds a level of trust that static images can’t touch.
AI TACTICS: Struggling to find a practical use for AI in your marketing work? No worries. Every Saturday, we will send you a free newsletter to sharpen your marketing skills and get more wins for yourself and your clients, including the latest AI use cases with actual examples and prompts you can just swipe. Subscribe for free.*
YOUTUBE: Google just published its first standalone help page for audio ads across YouTube and YouTube Music. No new stuff—the specs and setup existed, only scattered across docs. This shows Google is pushing audio inventory harder and beyond traditional video placements.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS: A new diagnostic flags URLs where aggregate identifiers like GBRAID and gad_ have gone missing, and helps you fix it. Privacy changes made those parameters load-bearing for attribution, so broken tagging quietly skews your campaign reporting.
WHATSAPP: Meta is testing a folder that sweeps messages from big companies out of the main timeline within hours. Only select WhatsApp Business Platform partners are in the test so far; smaller accounts stay exempt. Your discount codes may soon live in a side pocket.
MICROSOFT ADS: Help doc notes show that Predictive Matching is folding into Search term matching under AI Max, with Microsoft promising better intent understanding and more transparency. No action needed yet, and no timeline, but another targeting lever is becoming an AI setting.
*This is a sponsored post.
What has roots nobody sees,
Is taller than trees,
Up, up, up it goes,
And yet it never grows?
You can find the answer here.
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