Instagram Brings Reels To TV 📺 More And More Companies Are Looking For ‘Storytellers’ 📖 The Psychology Of Feedback Design 🧠

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Instagram Brings Reels To TV [3 min read]

Instagram is launching "IG for TV," a new app that lets users watch Reels on television screens, starting with Amazon Fire TV. The move is designed to help Instagram compete with YouTube and TikTok in the TV viewing market, where YouTube currently dominates. The app offers a personalized experience with Reels organized into topic-based channels like comedy, music, and lifestyle, featuring auto-play functionality and support for up to five Instagram accounts per household.

More And More Companies Are Looking For ‘Storytellers’ [3 min read]

Job listings for "storytellers" have surged dramatically, with LinkedIn postings doubling over the past year and mentions on corporate earnings calls jumping from 359 in 2024 to 469 in 2025. This trend is driven by the decline of traditional media and fewer journalists, leaving companies with less access to "earned media" to spread their message. As a result, brands are building their own content channels—social media, YouTube, newsletters—and actively recruiting journalists and content creators to craft narratives that reinforce company positioning, with some positions attracting over 500 applications.

The Psychology Of Feedback Design [9 min read]

The format in which performance ratings are presented—cumulative averages versus incremental individual scores—significantly influences how people perceive and judge products, services, or individuals. Cumulative formats soften the impact of negative ratings and help reduce customer churn, while incremental formats amplify each score's effect, making them more effective for promoting accountability and improvement. Managers can strategically choose formats based on their goals and audience, with novices benefiting from incremental feedback that shows progress and experts preferring cumulative scores that reflect long-term performance, though hybrid formats may backfire as users tend to fixate on the most extreme scores.

Stanford AI Experts Predict What Will Happen In 2026 [10 min read]

The era of AI evangelism is giving way to rigorous evaluation, with 2026 expected to focus on measuring AI's actual performance, costs, and benefits through standardized benchmarks and real-time economic dashboards rather than speculative promises. Experts emphasize the need for transparency and interpretability, particularly in science and medicine, where understanding how AI models reach their conclusions is as critical as the accuracy of their predictions. Finally, there's a growing call for human-centered AI development that prioritizes long-term benefits and capability augmentation over short-term engagement metrics, addressing concerns about deskilling and ensuring AI serves genuine human needs.

AI Agents Are Starting To Eat SaaS [8 min read]

AI coding agents are fundamentally disrupting the build vs. buy decision for SaaS, as engineers increasingly use tools like Claude Code to build custom internal solutions in minutes rather than purchasing third-party subscriptions, especially for simpler tools like dashboards and data processing. This shift poses a serious economic threat to SaaS companies whose business models depend on high net revenue retention from customers upgrading tiers and adding licenses, as organizations can now build custom alternatives instead of paying for expensive upgrades. However, not all SaaS is equally vulnerable—products with strong moats like high uptime requirements, network effects, proprietary datasets, or regulatory compliance needs will survive, while simple back-office tools and CRUD applications face the greatest existential risk from agent-powered custom development.

How To Calculate Cost Per Opportunity [5 min read]

The cost per opportunity metric depends on whether you're answering an efficiency question or a cost question—for overall marketing efficiency, use the marketing CAC ratio instead of average total cost per opportunity because it's more standardized and has better benchmarks. When forecasting the cost of generating additional opportunities, use incremental demand generation costs rather than average total marketing costs, since you don't need to proportionally increase all fixed expenses like salaries and infrastructure to get more results. Effective CMOs practice "agile marketing" by always knowing their incremental cost per opportunity (with a 25% uplift for the "low-hanging fruit problem") so they can instantly respond when asked to fill pipeline shortfalls or deploy surplus budget.

3 Reasons Your Paid Social Ads Aren’t Converting (And How To Fix Them) [7 min read]

Paid social ads fail when the creative doesn't immediately grab attention, requiring authentic, native content with strong hooks in the first few seconds to stop users from scrolling past. Poor targeting wastes budget on the wrong audiences, so focus on behavior-based signals like retargeting website visitors and building lookalike audiences from your best customers instead of guessing based on basic demographics. Even with good clicks, slow or confusing landing pages kill conversions—the page must match the ad's promise exactly, load quickly, and make it easy to take action with clear CTAs and minimal friction.

The New Economics Of Starting Up [15 min read]

Early-stage founders are surprisingly optimistic despite economic uncertainty, with 87% reporting improved confidence compared to 2024—though AI adopters show dramatically higher optimism (93%) than non-adopters (71%). Funding strategies are diversifying beyond traditional VC, as 66% of companies changed their capitalization approach in the past year, combining multiple capital sources while most raised under $5M in their last round. AI adoption is driving aggressive growth behaviors, with AI-forward companies 3x more likely to scale teams and 2x more likely to seek larger funding rounds, using the technology to expand rather than replace workers.

The Rise Of The Hypertail: How Custom Martech Is Rewriting GTM [5 min read]

The "hypertail" of custom martech—an expanding universe of internal apps, AI agents, and bespoke workflows built beneath the visible stack of 15,384+ martech tools—is emerging as the new competitive advantage that defines how modern GTM systems actually operate. The "buy vs. build" paradigm has collapsed as AI and low-code platforms make custom development cheaper and faster than buying off-the-shelf solutions, with differentiation now living in the proprietary workflows competitors can't replicate by simply purchasing the same tools. CMOs must evolve from managing tools to architecting growth systems, intentionally designing workflows with explicit ownership, orchestrating AI with governance, and periodically performing "clean-sheet" exercises to build faster, cleaner, and more differentiated growth engines.

The Four Creative Trends That Will Define Marketing In 2026 [5 min read]

As AI and technology become more sophisticated, audiences are gravitating toward content that feels tactile, real, and engages multiple senses rather than just visual content. With 70% of consumer decisions driven by emotion, successful marketing in 2026 will focus on creating content that resonates with audiences' lived experiences and builds authentic emotional connections. Whether through playful absurdity that Gen Z embraces or local, culturally-specific content that represents real communities, the goal is genuine connection over perfection—brands need to prioritize being relatable and real over being polished.

Target Audience: The specific group of consumers most likely to want your product or service. These are the people you aim your marketing efforts at, defined by characteristics like age, income, interests, and behaviors. Your target audience shapes every marketing decision you make.

Example: A luxury gym's target audience might be "health-conscious professionals aged 30-50 with high disposable income living in urban areas."

Customer Data Platform (CDP): A software system that collects and unifies customer data from multiple sources into a single database. CDPs help businesses create detailed customer profiles by combining data from websites, apps, emails, and other touchpoints, enabling more personalized marketing strategies.

Example: When Jane visits an online store, adds items to her cart, opens promotional emails, and finally makes a purchase, the CDP combines all these interactions to create one complete customer profile.

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