curiousmarketersclub

[curiousmarketersclub]

All advertising is unwanted, so if you’re going to crash the party, bring some champagne.

-Bob Thacker

[curiousmarketersclub]

Like IBM, Oracle, and Sun before it, Apple seems at risk of moving from innovator to infrastructure—a big player that no longer steers the market but plays a foundational role in enabling the players that do.

Apple Scraps Work on Mac-Connected Augmented Reality Glasses

Headset group struggles to find path forward after Vision Pro

Canceled device would have rivaled Meta’s future AR glasses

Confusing themselves for the market and losing track of trends until it’s too late to be an early mover.

The company has risen from the ashes before, can it do it again?

via Bloomberg

[curiousmarketersclub]

Is this the dawn of cheap AI?

DeepSeek was just the beginning 🤖

AI researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington were able to train an AI “reasoning” model for under $50 in cloud compute credits

Training methods appear to be proliferating with the number of models available:

The s1 paper suggests that reasoning models can be distilled with a relatively small dataset using a process called supervised fine-tuning (SFT), in which an AI model is explicitly instructed to mimic certain behaviors in a dataset.

A race to the bottom we can actually benefit from:

After training s1, which took less than 30 minutes using 16 Nvidia H100 GPUs, s1 achieved strong performance on certain AI benchmarks

& a lesson we can all learn from:

The researchers used a nifty trick to get s1 to double-check its work and extend its “thinking” time: They told it to wait. Adding the word “wait” during s1’s reasoning helped the model arrive at slightly more accurate answers

via TechCrunch

[curiousmarketersclub]

Chesterton’s Fence

There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”

Or, as Nudie says:

Not all change is progress

[curiousmarketersclub]

Amazon is ramping up to release its gen-AI powered Alexa (unless it gets delayed again).

Pricing model is up in the air at this point, but $5 to $10 month sounds pretty locked in.

This is the make or break moment for voice assistants.

[curiousmarketersclub]

You get personalities out of the shop and all that’s left is the retail experience.

You need the crust of the human.

Scale necessitates the removal of personality.

Which means personality becomes a differentiator.

How long until we’re asked to measure return on attention and return on personality? And how will we do it?

via the Weird Studies podcast

[curiousmarketersclub]

Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.

-Kevin Kelly

So do brands and customer experiences.

Everything is customer service.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Here is my summary of a 1-Minute summary of a massive social media trends study for 2025.

Instagram is more than stories & Reels, posts are making a comeback

LinkedIn is (still) having a moment

Pinterest is not for videos

Facebook Reels aren’t dead yet

[curiousmarketersclub]

How much of the resilient consumer spending trend is due to buying before Trump’s Trade War increases prices?

Buying before the promised / threatened tariffs hit.

If a meaningful %, purchase pull forward + lower purchasing power from higher prices could mean a rough year (or more) ahead.

[curiousmarketersclub]

This ad read (not ad, just read) is great.

You can hear the bit of a laugh after the reality TV line and tell the actor had fun with that part, or at least gives us the impression of enjoyment.

It’s filled with personality in a way that doesn’t overshadow the messaging, but makes it memorable.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Jan Swafford:

The ability of a machine to do or outdo something humans do is interesting once at most.

We humans need to see the human doing it

John Haugeland:

the most ordinary conversations are fraught with life and all its meanings

Austin Kleon wrote Show Your Work. Now you must also show your humanity.

The guiding principles for marketing content now are:

Personality + Behind the Scenes + What’s “Boring” to You

If this sounds like influencer style social content to you, you’re right.

via DC

[curiousmarketersclub]

Marketers are privileged indeed to make promises. Why make promises you know you can’t keep?

-Seth Godin

Marketing is a game of promises.

Conversion rates are promise delivery measurements.

Repeat customer rate is a trust barometer.

Puffery is over promising, repeatedly.

[curiousmarketersclub]

These definitions from Robin Sloan are helpful:

An accurate definition of “influencer” is: a virtuoso of a particular internet platform; someone who has learned to use its mechanisms to achieve their own objectives, rather than the other way around.

An accurate definition of an internet “creator” would have to be: someone whose income is determined by a platform’s algorithms.

Aligns with why platforms suddenly started talking about the “creator economy” instead of just influencers.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Give them pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare.

-Alfred Hitchcock

Isn’t this essentially the premise of painkiller based marketing?

[curiousmarketersclub]

Work can only be universal if it is rooted in a part of its creator which is most privately and particularly himself.

-Tyrone Guthrie

Brands typically try to smooth out the edges—polish everything to a uniform shine. In the post-AI world, it’s the idiosyncrasies that will make for truly winning brands.

Mission, vision, values are pieces of paper that can change with a board meeting.

Personality is actually having something to say and a unique way of saying it. Something that is core to the brand itself and not a committee’s reaction to societal trends.

See: Liquid Death

[curiousmarketersclub]

Does Meta have its long-desired hardware platform? Or at least the start of it?

It’s extended the contract with the Ray-Ban parent company for more years of smart glasses collaboration.

Now, according to Bloomberg, Oakley is joining the crew.

Plus…

Company resumes work on smartwatch and develops AirPods rival

First real AR glasses, dubbed ‘Artemis,’ are planned for 2027

The question used to be: what will replace the smartphone?

But the path now seems to be to replace the interface and turn the smartphone into a personal, portable server for ambient computing peripherals and AI features.

[curiousmarketersclub]

Doing business on the internet is about convincing people you don’t know that you have something they need or want. Think of a brand as the bridge between the two.

-Jack Butcher

Brands bridge the identity narrative between business and customer.

Brands are bat signals. Not logos.