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A great, fictional man once declared: “I believe virtually everything I read.” David St. Hubbins, lead singer and guitarist of Spinal Tap, mocked the earnest confidence of rock stars in the same way AI futurists are now mocking critical thinking itself. Right now, most of the tech industry has adopted St. Hubbins’ line without the irony. Google is embedding AI into Chrome. Tech leaders are declaring the end of websites. Hundreds of links will collapse into single answers, traffic will disappear, the open web gets hollowed out. The future belongs to whoever wins inclusion in the AI’s response, not whoever builds the best site. Sigh. We spent the last decade learning that you can’t believe everything on Facebook. Now we’re about to make the same mistake with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Clean story. Wrong conclusion. It assumes people will stop thinking critically about information just because it arrives in a prettier package. Same Problem, New Wrapper The fake news crisis taught us something: Polished presentation doesn’t equal reliable information. Nice formatting, confident tone, and shareable graphics do not come with a guarantee of truth. We had to relearn basic media literacy. Check the source. Understand methodology. Look for bias. Read multiple perspectives. Think critically. Now answer engines arrive with a seductive promise: “Don’t worry about all that. Just trust what we tell you. This is fake news 2.0. The Work Slop Warning Harvard Business Review documented what happens when people stop interrogating AI outputs. They call it “workslop, content that looks professional but lacks substance. Polished slides, structured reports, articulate summaries that are incomplete, missing context, and often wrong. Employees now spend two hours on average cleaning up each instance. One described it as “creating a mentally lazy, slow-thinking society.” Another said: “I had to waste time checking it with my own research, then waste more time redoing the work myself.” This is what happens when we outsource critical thinking. The polish looks good. The substance isn’t there. Someone downstream pays the price. If AI can’t reliably produce good work internally, where context and accountability exist, why would we blindly trust it externally, where neither exists? High Stakes Require Verification Imagine your doctor uses an AI summary for your diagnosis. Your lawyer relies on ChatGPT for contract advice. Your financial advisor trusts Gemini’s recommendations without checking. You’d demand they verify, right? Check sources. Show methodology. Prove they’re not just accepting whatever the algorithm says. Medical decisions, legal issues, financial choices, and safety concerns all require source transparency. You need to see the work. You need context. You need to verify. A chat interface doesn’t change that fundamental need. It just makes it easier to skip those steps. The existence of these facts points to a clear, yet countercultural conclusion. Websites Aren’t Going Anywhere Yes, discovery patterns are changing. Yes, traffic shifts. Yes, AI surfaces some content while burying others. That doesn’t make websites obsolete. It makes them more important. The sites that die will deserve it: SEO farms gaming algorithms, content mills producing garbage. The sites that survive will offer what compressed answers can’t: verifiable sources, transparent methodologies, deep context that can’t be summarized without losing meaning. When fake news dominated social media, the solution wasn’t “stop using sources.” It was “get better at evaluating them.” Same thing here. Answer engines are a new entry point, not a replacement for verification. The smart response to an AI answer isn’t “thanks, I believe you.” It’s “interesting, now let me dig deeper.” We’re Not That Lazy The “websites are dead” thesis assumes something bleak: that humans will stop being curious, critical, and careful about information that matters. That we’ll just accept whatever Google tells us. People want to understand things deeply, not just know the answer. They want to form opinions, not inherit them from algorithms. They want to verify claims when stakes are high. That requires going to sources. Comparing perspectives. Thinking critically instead of letting technology think for you. You can’t do all of that in a chat window. The Bar Just Got Higher AI answer engines aren’t killing websites. They’re exposing which ones were never worth visiting. The question isn’t whether websites survive. It’s whether your website offers something an algorithm can’t: real expertise, transparent sources, and content valuable enough that people want the full story, not just the summary. We learned this with fake news. Now we’re learning it again with answer engines. Trust, but verify. Always verify.
Category:
E-Commerce
For professionals looking to moodboard, but sick of juggling Instagram lists and Pinterest boards, Cosmos arrived in 2023 to woo millions of users in an otherwise crowded market. With a pared-back design, and an algorithm trained on a carefully seeded list of creatives, it topped the Design category in the App Store, and the company reports its now used by creative teams at companies including Nike, Apple, and Amazon, who snag over 10 million pieces of content a month from across the internet for their collections. This growth has been enough to raise a $15 million Series A from Matrix Partners, GV, Accel, and Squarespace CEO Anthony Casalena, as the company considers monetization strategies ranging from its premium subscriptions to an upcoming e-commerce play. The platform, despite launching much like Pinterest, will soon be a home for creative portfolios, more like how designers use Instagram and Behance. But as founder Andy McCune charts the companys future, hes openly wrestling with the right ways to employ the latest AI technologies to support the creative communityeven as a sizable chunk of the community says they don’t want it at all. [Image: Cosmos] When to use AI, and when not to Generative AI, of course, is still as controversial as it is inevitablewhile creatives I speak to are adopting it en masse as part of their own process, theres a most certain ick factor among the public to the current wave of AI marketing and the rise of the catchall word of 2025: AI slop. Its very morally and ethically important to me to create a platform that champions the artists and the creatives, says McCune. Now, does that mean that we’re going to be a company that says, AI-generated imagery does not have a place here? Thats not a line that I want to draw. Currently, Cosmos uses machine learning models to identify what it considers high-quality imagery that would appeal to its users tastes, airing that into their feeds. It also uses AI to track and automatically label image provenance. Whereas Instagram is so often a context-less smash-and-grab of other peoples work, Cosmos systems scour the web to figure out what film that compelling frame came from or who took that photo, and tag it appropriately. The company also offers a setting, much like Pinterest, allowing creatives to blur or block all AI content in their feeds. Cosmos shares that 10% of all users have actually opted to block AI contentwhich was higher than they originally anticipated. Very few people customize the settings in any app already, and Cosmos has done nothing to promote that the setting even exists. It was definitely surprising to me, says McCune. And now were having some conversations around like, should that [setting] actually be in the onboarding? At the same time, blocking AI is not a setting he wants to apply by default, even if it would be a way to distinguish Cosmos from its peers. When the setting first launched, it blurred peoples AI contentand that was enough to give its users whiplash. All of a sudden, they went back into their mood boards, and they saw a bunch of their images that they had saved in the past get blurred out. And they’re like, Wait, I didn’t know that I was saving AI images. And that was frustrating to them, McCune notes. They’re like, I feel like I’ve been tricked, right? I think for the end consumer, it’s really important that you have a decision in that process of being able to choose what you see. Why not just block AI? Andy McCune [Image: Cosmos] A big reason that McCune doesnt want to block AI-generated content is that he knows some users want it, and more generally speaking, the design industry at his core will be using more AI tools into the future. Especially as he pivots Cosmos away from mere moodboarding to become someones own creative portfolio, he realizes that blocking AI generated work would block their voicesand their potentially cutting-edge experimentation. I think [AI] will be one medium that people use to express themselves, just like you know, painting is one and digital photography is one, and graphic design is another, says McCune. I think it’s important for us if we really want to be a home for creatives to not pick and choose what mediums we think are holy or not. And yet, there are lines around AI that McCune wont cross because they feel off-mission, and somehow, at odds with his own creative community. I will say that there is a very easy path for us to take right now, which we have not taken, which is to bring Gen AI into the forefront of the product, says McCune. We could have very quickly and very easily built a multibillion-dollar company, if you could just right-click on any image on Cosmos right now and prompt on top of that thing. That’s something that we have not done, because that is not the company that we want to build.
Category:
E-Commerce
A self-described rat pack of five food-loving journalists just bought the trademark to the defunct food magazine Gourmet, updated it for the modern reader, and brought it back as an online newsletterall without consulting the magazines former publisher, Condé Nast. And if you didn’t know that already, you might’ve been able to guess it from the publication’s new wordmark. The logo looks nothing like what you’d expect from the magazine that shuttered in 2009. Instead of a crisp, delicate script, this wordmark is unapologetically blocky, chunky, and weird. It’s more reminiscent of forgotten sheet pan drippings: certainly not pretty too look at, but more delicious than you’d expect. Introducing the modern Gourmet: Its pithy, recipe-obsessed, and designed for the home chef whos sick of brightly lit photos of one-pan dinners. Gourmet on the newstand, ca. 2009. [Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images] A new, Substack-era food mag with no interest in being a crowd-pleaser The idea to bring back the magazine began when former Los Angeles Times writer and Gourmet cofounder Sam Dean noticed something strange. He called me and was like, Dude, I think I just figured something out,'” says graphic designer Alex Tatusian, another of the brands cofounders. “‘I’m on the U.S. Trademark Office site, and I’m pretty sure that Condé forgot to renew the trademark for Gourmet. Tatusian and Dean found three other collaborators, formed an LLC, and bought the trademark for a few thousand dollars. The creatives behind Gourmet follow in the footsteps of several other journalists and writers who have recently departed the endlessly beleaguered realm of traditional media in favor of their own self-published ventures. These include worker-owned shops like Hell Gate, Defector, and 404 Media, as well as food-based titles like Vittles and Best Food Blog, and even individual food creators like Molly Baz and Claire Saffitz. In the Gourmet founders’ opening salvo to readers, they propose that legacy brands largely botched the transition from print to digital, and diluted their missions in the process. I think what Ive seen in food media are these dual forces: The recipes have become more relatable or lowest common denominator, but its being put in these very shiny packages,” says cofounder Nozlee Samadzadeh. [Image: Gourmet] So in lieu of clicky 10 minute recipes with flash photography, Gourmets founders want to make work for an audience that really, really enjoys food: long, reported features on Gavin Newsoms Napa wine empire; odes to baked rice pudding; and manifestos for people who are sick of easy dinners. (And it wont appeal to everyone.) Tatusian calls todays Gourmet, which is available on the open source platform Ghost with a $7 monthly subscription, a transmogrified version of the original. Given its limited resources, its embracing an unapologetically craft-focused, funky, punk-rock approach designed for the modern newsletter resurgence. In short, its a wholesale rejection of the highly produced, SEO-optimized content thats come to dominate the modern food media space. Gourmet’s ‘shit-stirring energy’ takes aim at expected design taste Looking through Gourmets new site feels a bit like being bombarded with a series of ingredients that dont entirely go together. And for the publication’s general premise, that makes an odd kind of sense: Its a group of young people, reviving a magazine that was once mainly for the wealthy elite, in an accessible format and on a shoestring budget. You look at old Gourmet and there’s black letter Gothic text, and script, and cursive, and, God, they want you to be rich, you know what I mean? Tatusian says. It has such a classist energy. I think there’s something about that that we both want to celebrate, because it is beautiful and it is the history of this publication going way back, but we also need to lightly lampoon. With the whole crew, theres a bit of a shit-stirring energy. [Image: Gourmet] That spirit is embodied by the new em>Gourmet logo, which is perhaps the furthest image one could image from the publications buttoned-up, cursive font. The design was created by trombonist Zekkereya El-magharbel, who Tatusian discovered after noticing his charmingly off-kilter posters for jazz events in L.A. Each letterform looks almost like it was cut haphazardly from a piece of cardstock, with unexpected bumps, sharp angles, and wonky curves throughout. The process, Tatusian says, was a mix of El-magharbel responding to the prompt and picking up on “the energy of the magazine that we were going formaking something punk and unusual. [Image: Gourmet] The publication’s illustration style, which mimics 19th century motifs, also pokes some lighthearted fun at what Tatusian calls the “hilarious formality of older cooking and food magazines. In one key image at the top of the page, a real vintage line drawing is paired with a slapdash digital rendering of a red soda can. And, as a cheeky so what? to the broader food media landscape, the entire Gourmet site is rendered in what would traditionally be considered an off-putting brown. Its a little bit of a visual joke, in that people in food media are often telling you to put color in a dish when youre styling something or in a photoshoot or on the page, because brown food is unappetizing, its disgusting, blah, blah, blah, Tatusian says. Actually, its not! We eat so much good brown and beige food. [Image: Gourmet] Samadzadeh and Tatusian say they plan on running some image-centric stories in the future, but they dont have a specific aesthetic vision in mind for the publications photographyinstead, theyd rather let contributors bring their own styles to the work. For now, they’re more focused on creating the kind of food content that they’d like to read. We do want them to be beautiful, Tatusian says. It’s not that we want them to be disgusting, but I also think that we’re also interested in how people spend time together around food, and not as much about making an Instagramable product out of all the art that we produce.
Category:
E-Commerce
The most qualified marketing candidates already know how to spot a bad ad. They scroll past headlines that dont resonate, tune out vague language, and ghost messages that feel robotic. And when your job post reads like a corporate compliance document instead of an invitation to do meaningful work, they wont even click. More than 80% of job seekers check company reviews and ratings before applying, according to Glassdoor. And its not just about perks: Edelmans Trust Barometer found that nearly 6 in 10 employees choose where to work based on shared values. These arent surface-level preferences; they signal a deeper shift in expectations. Candidates want a reason to believe, not just a list of requirements. The shift is clear: Candidates now behave like consumers. They compare, research, and screen opportunities with the same discernment they apply to products. That makes your job post more than just a filter. Its a first impression, a trust signal, and, if done well, a conversion tool. Its time to start treating your recruitment process like a campaign. The tactics marketers use to capture attention, communicate value, and compel action are the same tactics that now determine whether you attract the right people or lose them to someone else. 1. START WITH SEGMENTATION, NOT GENERIC MESSAGING Too many job ads aim for the widest possible audience and miss the best-fit candidates in the process. Effective marketers learned this lesson long ago: The more precisely you define your audience, the more persuasive your message becomes. Segment your recruitment messaging by level, background, industry fluency, or even likely motivators. Speak differently to a mid-level paid media strategist than to a head of brand. When you identify what specific candidates care abouttheir career arc, their need for impact, their desire to work with modern tech stacksyou can write job ads that feel like they were written for one person, not one hundred. 2. EMOTIONAL STORYTELLING WINS OVER LOGICAL LISTS Marketers know how to sell ideas with stories, not specs. And they expect that same level of narrative craft when reading about a potential job. Instead of leading with company history, start with the roles emotional hook. What will this person get to own, change, or build? What kind of team are they walking into? How will their work shape the customer experience? One small shift, from We were founded in 2012 to Youll define how thousands of users discover their next step, can transform how your post lands. The strongest applicants dont apply for tasks. They apply for purpose. 3. TREAT JOB ADS LIKE LANDING PAGES Once your message is targeted and your story resonates, structure becomes the next make-or-break factor. A job post is essentially a landing page: It must be skimmable, structured, and compelling enough to inspire action. Use clear subheads. Prioritize the candidates perspective: what theyll learn, lead, or influence. Include compensation early if possible. And always, always include a strong CTA. Would you ever run a marketing campaign without one? Formatting is part of your employer brand. If your job post is cluttered, hard to read, or missing details, the assumption is that your hiring process will feel the same way. 4. USE A/B TESTING TO MOVE FROM GUESSING TO GROWTH Most marketers live in testing platforms. Recruiters should, too. You can A/B test job titles (is Paid Social Lead more effective than Growth Marketing Strategist?), intros, compensation placement, or even whether adding team quotes improves apply rates. Youll start to see trends. Youll learn what tone resonates with passive candidates, what format converts better, and where drop-off happens. When you approach hiring with the mindset of growth marketing, you move from static job listings to evolving, performance-based messaging. Recruiting becomes less about gut instinct and more about insight. 5. BUILD EMPLOYER BRAND INTO EVERY TOUCHPOINT Every element of your hiring funneljob descriptions, outreach messages, Glassdoor responsesspeaks volumes about your company. The question is whether they all speak the same language. Strong employer branding isnt about polished taglines; its about consistent, honest communication. Candidates should feel the same tone and clarity across the careers page, the interview emails, and the job post itself. When branding is aligned, candidates trust the experience. When it isnt, they disengage. Even review sites matter. Candidates read them before applying. If your companys response strategy looks defensive or silent, it will undercut even the best-crafted post. Think of these channels as the retargeting ads of recruiting; they reinforce or unravel the brand story youve worked to build. A job post is no longer a static announcement. Its a performance asset. It carries weight, signals quality, and affects the caliber of people willing to bet on your company. The teams that understand this and build hiring processes that reflect it wont merely fill seats. Theyll attract the kind of marketers who know how to move an audience and recognize when someone else knows how to do the same.
Category:
E-Commerce
Protein is everywhere these days. The cultural obsession with the macronutrient has become unavoidable; from constant protein-adjacent Instagram ads to protein-focused recipes and protein-filled Chipotle bowls, Starbucks drinks, and Pepsi products. All of these products are starting to sound like part of some big, loud, fitness influencer chorus. But theres one brand thats managed to break through the noiseoften, by saying nothing at all. Early this month, the protein bar company David debuted a print campaign in the New York City subway system featuring plain images of its bars, with no text or embellishments, surrounded by a sea of blank white space. Its the encapsulation of a marketing strategy thats catapulted the brand into the cultural zeitgeist and the protein bar big leagues. Where other protein bars sport colorful, energetic packaging with bold fonts and crisp product imagery, David bars come in sleek gold packages with a serif wordmark and a few simple macronutrient descriptors. Instead of vying for consumer attention with eye-catching graphics and silly ads, David shows up online and in the real world with a distinctly minimalist aesthetic and serious, no-frills brand voice. Its an approach that founder Peter Rahal describes as anti-marketingbut, counterintuitively, is actually a highly effective marketing tactic. [Photo: courtesy David] Rion Harmon, executive creative director of the creative agency behind the David brand, Day Job, says an atypical ethos has guided the creative from the start: [The brand] should not be your best friend. Every brand was trying so hard to win you over, to be just like you, Harmon says. David didnt care. David was here to be effective. To design solutions. To create a superior product, with a superior brand. How David built a protein-obsessed following Since it debuted last September, David has amassed an almost cult-like following of customers who patiently await its next protein innovation. David was founded by Rahal, a serial entrepreneur who also cofounded the brand RXbar; and Zach Ranen, who previously founded the better-for-you cookie brand Raize. After launching, the company managed to sell more than $1 million worth of bars in a week. By the following May, it had raised $75 million in Series A funding, at a $725 valuationand, according to a report from The New York Times in September, it was on track to hit $180 million in retail sales this year. (David declined to share updated financial information with Fast Company.) This month, David announced that it would appear on shelves at Walmart and Target. [Photo: David] Fitness gurus and casual protein-seekers alike are attracted to the David bar by its impressive macros (28 grams of protein for 150 calories and zero grams of sugar; a ratio thats almost unbeatable in the bar category). But a large part of Davids meteoric success is also owed to its branding and marketing strategies. As a student of the protein bar category, Rahal says, hes noticed that natural food players like Lärabar and his own RXBar kicked off a trend from around 2000 to 2015, wherein protein bar companies stopped using their packaging to signal a certain brand, but to instead convey flavor. What happened is when you would look at the category, you would see confusion, Rahal says. Rather than identifying brands, it was organized by flavor. So you’d see purple, blue, green, red, yellow. That was innovative in the 2010s, he adds, but it quickly turned the protein aisle into a colorful kaleidoscope of sameness. David returned to an earlier era of brandingthink ’80s and ’90s candy bars, for examplewhen the primary goal of the packaging was to communicate brand, and the secondary goal was to communicate flavor. One thing we did is make gold the primary focus,” Rahal says. “This is ironic because it’s actually really differentiated. I find it interesting how history repeats. Davids brand guidelines are fairly straightforward: It stands out by embracing simplicity. Instead of adding more product descriptors or colors on its packaging, it subtracts them. Its loud by being quiet, Harmon says. ‘Restraint can cut through when chaos is the norm’ Nowhere is that less is more philosophy more clear than in Davids latest print campaign in the NYC subway. The campaign comes directly on the heels of several other headline-grabbing subway brand stunts. Those include a controversial September campaign from the AI companion company Friend, which inspired intense vandalism, and, just over a month later, a campaign from the embryo screening company Nucleus Genomics that incited widespread backlash online. Both of these campaigns were intentionally designed with provocative copy and imagery to spark conversation. Compare that to Davids designwhich is quite literally just a David bar on a blank canvas, with zero copy in sightand the difference is almot visceral. [Photo: David] When everyone is doing one thing, theres often an advantage in doing the opposite, Harmon says. A lot of shock-driven work depends on escalation. It has to keep pushing harder to stay visible. Restraint can cut through when chaos is the norm. This campaign isnt trying to provoke a reaction so much as invite your own. Rahal says he doesnt like marketing, and prefers a non-traditional, anti-marketing approach whenever possible. It would be wrong to characterize David as a buttoned-up brand, thoughin fact, its pulled several audacious marketing stunts in the last few months. Earlier this year, the brand introduced a real line of frozen boiled cod to its portfolio as a nod to its protein bars similar macronutrient profile (David declined to share sales data on the cod, though Rahal says it was not that convenient and expensive. You can still buy it online for $69.) And, this month, David sent out PR packages that included both a protein bar and a vibrator, alongside copy like, Finish twice, and Pick your pleasure; seemingly insinuating that its bars are orgasmic. Harmon and Rahal argue its still ultimately in line with the brands anti-marketing ethos. David usually keeps things pretty straightforward, he says. This one seems like an outlier, but honestly it still fits the same principle. No fluff, no over-explaining, just the product in a context that feels true to the brand. If anything, it’s just a different take on the same idea. Rahal adds, The thinking is still anti-marketing: one clear message rooted in the product truth, delivered in a novel way.”
Category:
E-Commerce
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