Insights on Growth, Marketing & Media

Deep analysis on the forces shaping modern marketing, streaming, and digital transformation.

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Growth Members

The Growth Quality Score: Why Some Businesses Survive and Others Don’t

I've spent 27 years in marketing, much of it as a relentless operator, learning that having an idea and building a sustainable business around it are two very different things. Hilton, HCA Healthcare, Party City and Getty Images offer four very different lessons in competitive advantage, growth economics and organizational maturity. Two continued thriving as public companies, one collapsed, and another is restructuring. What separates them isn't simply the strength of their brands or relationships, but how effectively their operating models convert those advantages into economic value. That got me thinking about the Growth Quality Score, a framework for understanding whether a business is becoming stronger as it scales or simply more expensive to operate.

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Artificial Intelligence Members

AI Insider Risk Isn’t One Thing. Why Are We Talking About It Like It Is?

Satya Nadella raises some legitimate concerns about AI and superintelligence, but I think we're getting ahead of ourselves. The data tells a different story about where most businesses actually are, and there's a more practical way to assess the risks. I'm going to troll Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella a little. 😄 On October 10, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, published an interesting piece, Models as Insider Risks in the Super Intelligence Era, arguing that increasingly capable AI models should be treated as potential insider risks. His concerns are legitimate, and I…

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AdvertisingMarketing

Who Owns Your Growth, if Meta Knows Your Prospect Better Than You Do?

CAPI, Enhanced Conversions and AI are making Meta and Google dramatically better at finding customers. That’s good for performance, but there’s a bigger risk: brands can improve acquisition while losing touch with how their prospects’ needs are changing. The next growth advantage won’t come from taking campaign control back. It’ll come from owning the customer intelligence that trains both the platforms and your own agents.

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Artificial Intelligence Members

NVIDIA Grew Up. Hugging Face May Tell Us What It Wants to Be Next.

NVIDIA is paying nearly $13B for Hugging Face, roughly 86x its reported annualized revenue. That looks obscene until you look at how NVIDIA has grown from gaming to data centers, AI infrastructure and increasingly the entire system around the chip. Hugging Face may be the next step, moving NVIDIA further upstream to where developers decide what gets built and what it runs on.

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social commerce

TikTok Shop Isn’t Just Another Channel. Here’s How to Operate It.

TikTok Shop is growing quickly, but that doesn’t mean every brand should jump in. After working with it for the last couple of years, I’ve found the better way to understand it is through an Amazon and e-tail lens: product economics, creators, CAC, margins, returns, subscriptions, attribution and incrementality all matter. The opportunity is real, but so is the need to understand the entire commercial system before scaling it.

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Analytics

Building on the Testing & Experimentation Framework: Platform Execution Guide

Experimentation isn't about a series of neat, linear A/B tests. It is a lie. Behind the scenes, modern signal decay is quietly quitting your testing stack, leaving teams to accumulate test debt. To survive a zero-signal reality, organizations must abandon flat-line testing processes. This operational guide details how to map your experimentation frameworks directly to your data infrastructure, segmenting your playbook into four strategic lanes and matching the stack to the gravity of the bet.

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Analytics

Apple Intelligent Tracking Prevention (ITP) Evolved: How Privacy Frameworks Warped Google & Meta Analytics

Apple's ITP has evolved from a third-party cookie blocker into an aggressive gatekeeper of first-party data storage. If your brand relies on default browser pixels, your analytics are likely battling inflated "New User" counts in GA4 and shrunken retargeting windows on Meta. This deep dive breaks down the exact mechanics of modern signal decay and the shift toward server-side architecture.

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