Thinks 1888

SaaStr: “Here’s the counterintuitive insight that’s reshaping how the smartest AI founders think about unit economics: Your inference costs aren’t your gross margin problem. They’re your CAC replacement.  If … You Have a Product That Can Truly Deliver with AI. The companies growing fastest right now—Cursor crossing $1B ARR with ~300 employees and no traditional marketing, Lovable and Replit both hitting ~$300M ARR with zero paid acquisition, Harvey and Legora in legal, OpenEvidence in healthcare—aren’t sweating inference costs. They’re optimizing them for sure, but they are also leaning into them. They’re treating compute as their primary growth investment, not their primary margin drag.”

Andrej Karpathy: “It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the “progress as usual” way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since – the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.”

FT: “The internet made information global. Crypto is making a similar impact on money. While recent headlines might fixate on prices of bitcoin, a deeper and longer-lasting shift is under way in digital payments. This is the year that stablecoins, or cryptocurrencies pegged to assets such as the dollar, are becoming part of the mainstream for online and international payments. Call it money’s “WhatsApp moment”. Just as chat apps like WhatsApp collapsed the cost of international messaging from, say, 30 cents per text to zero, stablecoins are doing the same in financial transactions. The numbers bear this out: stablecoins moved over $12tn in value last year, after filtering out bots and other inorganic activity — volumes that are rising towards Visa’s $17tn of transactions last year but made at a fraction of the cost. In the process, stablecoins are bringing the internet’s original vision of openness and interoperability to finance. Given how blockchain technology allows stablecoins to be programmed, money is in effect becoming software.”

WSJ: “In past eras, the perfect weapon was one that would inflict maximum damage on an enemy. A bigger cannon, a more explosive shell, a better strategic bomber—a B-52 instead of a B-29—or a hydrogen bomb instead of an atomic one. In “The Warhead” Jeffrey Stern…traces the evolution of precision-guided munitions (PGMs) over the past half-century. By Mr. Stern’s account, the PGM represents a technological breakthrough that has changed history and the way wars are fought. It’s an absorbing tale of scientific and technological achievement, political and military hubris, and the story of ordinary people being caught up in other people’s bad decisions—and dying as a result.”

Stop Paying Twice: A CMO’s Guide to NeoMails and NeoNet (Part 3)

The Approach: Earn Attention First, Then Use It Well

What if you could reach your disengaged customers without hurting domain reputation, without significant cost, and without creating mountains of new content?

That’s the NEO approach: NeoMails first (earn attention), then NeoNet (borrow attention). A two-stage recovery system designed specifically for Rest and Test customers—the 80% your traditional marketing ignores.

What NEO Is NOT

Before we explain how it works, let’s clear some common misconceptions:

  • Not email ads. NeoMails aren’t promotional banners stuffed into inboxes. They’re interactive experiences that earn attention through value—quizzes, predictions, progress—before any brand message appears.
  • Not list swapping. NeoNet doesn’t share your email list with partners. It uses hashed identity matching with strict governance—no raw PII changes hands, ever.
  • Not loyalty points inflation. Mu isn’t a currency you redeem for discounts. It’s a visible progress system that gamifies engagement—streaks, status, accumulation—not a points-for-prizes programme.
  • Not another retargeting channel. NeoNet doesn’t bid in auctions or spray ads across the web. It places your message inside a partner’s engaged email—deterministic, consented, in-inbox.

Step 1: NeoMails—”Attractors” That Make Opens Worth It Again

NeoMails are not “better promos.” They’re a new object in the inbox.

Your disengaged customers have trained themselves to see your emails as ads. They’ve learned that every message is an ask: buy this, click here, limited time, shop now. So they ignore. Filter. Delete.

NeoMails invert the equation. Instead of emails that extract attention (demanding action), NeoMails create attractors that pull customers back. Instead of extraction, accumulation. Instead of campaigns, continuity. Instead of promotional blasts, 60-second habits.

The Anatomy of a NeoMail

Every NeoMail combines five elements working together:

  • The Magnet is the reason to open—not your offer, something genuinely interesting. A Quiz about coffee origins. A WePredict card asking if NIFTY will close up or down. A Fork presenting two options to debate. These Magnets capture attention through entertainment and engagement, not promotional pressure. Three types (with a single email containing only one of them) work especially well:
    • Quiz: Quick trivia that teaches while entertaining
    • WePredict: Predictions about news, sports, or markets
    • Fork: This-or-that choices that invite opinion
  • Mu (Atomic Rewards) transforms attention into tangible progress. Each interaction—opening, answering, engaging—earns Mu points displayed in the subject line (“µ.3761 | Your Daily Brief + earn 20 µ”). Mu creates visible accumulation that gamifies inbox behaviour. Miss a day, break a streak. Customers open not just for information but for progress.
  • The Ledger shows customers exactly where they stand: total Mu balance, today’s earnings, streak bonuses, ranking among subscribers. The value exchange becomes explicit: your attention has worth, and we’re willing to compensate for it.
  • The Brand Block carries your message, offers, and product content. But it comes after the Magnet, not before. The customer has already chosen to engage. Now your brand content appears in a receptive context rather than competing for attention it hasn’t earned.
  • ActionAds are relevant, in-email action units—partner advertisements that fund the entire system while providing genuine value to the recipient.

In short:

  • Magnet = reason to open (Quiz, WePredict, Fork)
  • Mu + Ledger = reason to return (visible progress, streaks)
  • AMP = reason to complete actions without friction
  • ActionAds = funds the system (you pay nothing)

This is the APU (Attention Processing Unit) idea in practice: earn a minute of attention first, then use it well.

Zero Cost + Zero Effort: The Commercial Wedge

The pilot proposition is intentionally disruptive:

  • Zero CPM / zero per-send cost. No migration, no platform fee. The sending domain is yours. NeoMails fund themselves via in-email ActionAds. After delivery costs are recovered, revenue share applies on incremental monetisation—meaning these emails can actually generate revenue for you.
  • Zero content burden. We have a “factory”—AI-powered content generation that creates Magnets, Brand Blocks, and personalised elements at scale. You don’t need to produce hundreds of unique emails per year. The system generates them automatically, tailored to customer preferences and behaviour patterns.

Risk Controls: The Deliverability Objection, Handled

NEO only works if it respects inbox trust. So NeoMails ship with guardrails:

  • Limited frequency. NeoMails are sent across brands in a coordinated network—a maximum of 3 NeoMails per user per day across all participating brands. Your brand’s email might be sent once every 2-3 days, not daily. This is by design: we’re building inbox habits, not inbox fatigue.
  • Volume cap. NeoMails represent no more than 10% of your campaign volume—not enough to negatively impact your sender reputation, but enough to create incremental recovery opportunities.
  • Stop rule. If after 7 NeoMails there’s no open, we stop sending and escalate to NeoNet. No endless blasting to dead addresses.
  • AMP-powered. NeoMails are AMP emails—interactive experiences where all actions happen inside the email itself. No clickthrough friction. No 80-90% drop-off as customers navigate to external landing pages. Answer a quiz, fill a form, complete a purchase—all without leaving the inbox.

Practical Outcome Definition

A customer is “reactivated” when they open + engage with the NeoMail experience—not when they buy immediately. Purchases come later. Attention comes first.

Thinks 1887

NYTimes: ““The single strongest predictor of economic mobility across areas is the fraction of higher-income friends that low-income people have,” Chetty told me. “In communities where you have more cross-class interaction, kids do much better.””

Andrej Karpathy: “LLM agent capabilities (Claude & Codex especially) have crossed some kind of threshold of coherence around December 2025 and caused a phase shift in software engineering and closely related. The intelligence part suddenly feels quite a bit ahead of all the rest of it – integrations (tools, knowledge), the necessity for new organizational workflows, processes, diffusion more generally. 2026 is going to be a high energy year as the industry metabolizes the new capability.”

FT: “The global economic order is spiralling out of control: tariffs are increasing, nationalism intensifying, co-operation flagging, institutions decaying. If this were not troubling enough, these same forces are feeding off one another, according to economist Eswar Prasad, creating a vicious doom loop that is accelerating the descent into disorder. Nationalist economic policies, for instance, are weakening international financial institutions, making co-operation less attractive and thereby reinforcing nationalism. Prasad explores this perverse logic in The Doom Loop, explaining why the postwar order is disintegrating and offering a sobering portrait of a world on the brink.”

NYTimes: “For decades crushing debt has spread misery in the world’s poor and lower-income nations. But the menace of unsupportable borrowing that now hangs over the global economy emanates from some of the richest countries. Record or near-record debt in the United States, Britain, France, Italy and Japan threatens to hamstring growth and sow financial instability around the globe. At home, it means countries must make interest payments with money that otherwise could have paid for health care, roads, public housing, technological advances or education. The hunger for more and more loans has also pushed up borrowing costs, gobbling up a bigger share of taxpayer money. It can also push up rates on business, consumer and car loans, as well as mortgages and credit cards; and drive up inflation.”

Rama Bijapurkar: “India’s growth is powered by hard-working people and a rising ‘Middle India’. This aspirational group needs financial enablement and infrastructure support to accelerate mobility and sustain growth.”

Stop Paying Twice: A CMO’s Guide to NeoMails and NeoNet (Part 2)

The Story Behind the Numbers: How Rest/Test Become the Reacquisition Bill

What happens to customers who drift away?

They don’t vanish from your database. They vanish from their habit of responding to you. And then the cycle begins:

  • You label them “inactive”
  • Your owned channels underperform on them
  • The business needs growth
  • You go to Google/Meta
  • You pay to reach people you already have

The Reacquisition Tax

This is the Reacquisition Tax. It’s AdWaste in its most painful form: spending to rent back attention you once had permission to access.

Think about the economics. Brands spend $50-100 to acquire each customer. They engage them successfully for 60-90 days. Then 80% disengage. Within six months, most will need to be reacquired via expensive adtech campaigns—effectively paying twice for the same customer.

Across most brands, 60-70% of acquisition budgets go to reacquiring customers they already owned but lost through attention decay. In India alone, this runs to $10 billion annually. Globally, it’s $500 billion.

The absurdity is profound. You have their email address. You have their purchase history. You have their preferences. Yet the only path back is bidding against competitors for their attention on platforms that profit from your failure to retain it.

Why Email Isn’t Solving the Problem Today

So why don’t brands fix it inside owned channels? Because “fixing” today usually means:

  • More promos—which accelerates fatigue. If your regular offers aren’t working, sending more of them doesn’t rebuild interest; it trains customers to ignore you faster.
  • More content work—which most teams can’t sustain. Creating genuinely different content for disengaged users requires creative resources that are already stretched thin.
  • Deliverability risk—the real killer. Gmail and Yahoo now penalise senders whose engagement rates drop below certain thresholds. Send too many emails to people who don’t open, and your emails stop reaching even the people who do. Most brands suppress their Rest and Test segments to protect deliverability—abandoning 80% of their base to preserve access to the 20%.

The path of least resistance becomes: retarget them where they still scroll.

The Untapped Power of Email

Here’s what many marketers miss: 130 million Indians click on at least one email every month. That’s essentially the entire transacting population of the country. Email isn’t dead. Irrelevant email is dead.

Customers haven’t abandoned email. They’ve abandoned dull, transactional broadcasts that treat their attention as disposable. They’ve become selective—opening emails that offer value, ignoring emails that demand action.

Why the Urgency is Real

  • Inboxes are stricter (Gmail/Yahoo engagement thresholds)
  • Attention half-life is shorter (customers drift faster)
  • Auctions are pricier (CPCs up 15-20% YoY)

Suppression has become the norm. That’s why reacquisition bills keep rising.

NEO’s claim: there is a third path—recovery without auctions—but it requires changing what an email is for.

In a sentence: NEO funds reactivation emails with in-inbox micro-experiences, so you can win back Rest/Test customers without risking deliverability or paying auction fees.

Thinks 1886

Richard Fain: “Every organization has its own culture. The first thing to understand is what you have. That means listening to people. It is important to recognize how important culture is. Everyone says, “Yes, our culture is terrific. This is built into our DNA. This is who we are.” That’s nonsense: You develop a culture with intentionality. You say to yourself, “This really matters. I have to work on it,” not, “I have to take it for granted,” or “I have to make sure it’s there.” I’m working on it every day; I’m measuring the progress. I’m deciding what characteristics I want our people to have, whether I want people to operate a business cheaply or I want to operate a business for total excellence. Whatever the goal, identify it and make sure people understand what you’re trying to achieve.”

NYTimes: “New York City has scads of very large buildings, but not many are as big as the glass-and-steel structure nearing completion on the south side of Kennedy International Airport. The airport’s huge new Terminal One will encompass 2.6 million square feet of passenger check-in zones, security checkpoints, baggage-claim areas, restaurants, duty-free shops and boarding gates. That will make it nearly as big as the Empire State Building, bigger than JPMorgan Chase’s new headquarters on Park Avenue and more than triple the size of the new train hub beneath Grand Central Terminal. It’s so massive that it is supplanting three of the eight terminals that once made up Kennedy: the existing Terminal 1 and the demolished Terminals 2 and 3.”

SaaStr: “I don’t want to be sold to anymore. I want to be enabled. I want to click a link, connect my data, and see value in minutes — not days or weeks. And if you’re asking me to leave something that already works, you better be making my life easier, not harder. If your product can’t do that? You’re not losing to a competitor. You’re losing to a founder with Claude and a free afternoon.”

FT: “Bots are learning how to shop. Sales driven by AI platforms will account for about 1.5 per cent of US retail ecommerce this year, according to a forecast by research company Emarketer, but the potential impact of the technology was the dominant topic of conference conversation. “For years, online shopping has been about keywords, filters, drop-down menus. And scrolling through multiple pages [of search results] until you find what you want,” Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, who was joined on stage by Walmart’s incoming boss John Furner, told his audience at the show. “Now . . . AI can do the hard work.” Its promoters say that so-called agentic AI could be a step forward similar in significance to the start of online shopping in the 1990s, or the advent of smartphones in the 2000s, as autonomous agents cut out the tedium of searching and comparing.”

Stop Paying Twice: A CMO’s Guide to NeoMails and NeoNet (Part 1)

Make Them See: The Two Numbers Your Dashboard Hides

Most “reactivation” programmes fail for one reason: they start too late. Customers don’t churn loudly—they fade quietly. By the time your win-back journey kicks in, you’ve already lost the one asset that matters: attention.

NEO is a different recovery path for Rest and Test customers—one that tries owned channels properly first (NeoMails), then uses a cooperative network (NeoNet) before you default to expensive adtech reacquisition. The doctrine is simple: Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice. NEO is how you operationalise it.

If you’re a CMO, you already track opens, clicks, conversions, ROAS. But those are campaign metrics—snapshots of individual sends.

To see relationship decay, you need cohort metrics. Two numbers most CMOs have never calculated—numbers that reveal the silent haemorrhage draining their marketing budgets.

The First Number: Click Retention Rate (CRR)—Your Attention Heartbeat

Take everyone who clicked on your emails in Q1. Now ask: what percentage of them clicked again in Q2?

Across 250 brands we’ve analysed at Netcore, the median answer is brutal: around 20%.

The inverse—the Attention Churn Rate—is 80%. Four out of five “engaged” customers vanish every quarter. Not from your database. Not from your email list. They vanish from your relationship.

They haven’t unsubscribed. They haven’t complained. They’ve simply gone silent—drifting from engaged to disengaged while your dashboards show everything is fine. A 2.5% click rate looks healthy until you discover that 80% of last quarter’s clickers have disappeared.

Click Retention Rate = (Clickers in both Q1 AND Q2) / (Clickers in Q1) × 100

This is a cohort-based metric, not a rolling average. If 100 users clicked in Q1, and your CRR is 20%, you’ve lost 80 engaged customers by Q2. Attention churn precedes customer churn by 30-90 days. By the time revenue churn appears in your P&L, it’s too late to intervene cost-effectively.

The Second Number: Real Reach—Your “Owned Audience” Reality Check

What percentage of your email list actually opened an email or WhatsApp message in the last 90 days?

For most brands, the answer is also sub-20%.

The asset you think you own—your “audience,” your “CRM base,” your “first-party data advantage”—is often a museum: large, impressive, and mostly silent. You’re maintaining a list of a million email addresses while effectively reaching barely 200,000.

This is exactly why reacquisition becomes inevitable once drift crosses a threshold.

The Reframe for CMOs

You don’t have a CAC problem first. You have an attention leak. CAC is just how the invoice shows up later.

Calculate Your Own Numbers

Here’s how to calculate CRR for your brand:

  1. Export: Customer IDs who clicked 2 quarters ago
  2. Export: Customer IDs who clicked in the previous quarter
  3. Count the overlap
  4. Formula: Overlap / Earlier quarter’s clickers × 100

Most brands find their CRR between 15-25%. That means 75-85% attention churn. That’s not a marketing problem hiding in the data. That’s $500 billion of global AdWaste explained in one metric.

Thinks 1885

SaaStr: “Forward Deployed Engineers Are the New CS. Every major AI company has figured this out. Palantir essentially invented the model. Now everyone’s copying it. What Forward Deployed Engineers actually do: work directly with customers to understand their specific processes, build end-to-end workflows and take them to production, handle model training and iteration until it works, solve real-world implementation problems daily. They’re engineers + consultants + AI trainers rolled into one.”

Clay Shirky: “As an academic administrator, I’m paid to worry about students’ use of A.I. to do their critical thinking. Universities have whole frameworks and apparatuses for academic integrity. A.I. has been a meteor strike on those frameworks, for obvious reasons. But as educators, we have to do more than ensure that students learn things; we have to help them become new people, too. From that perspective, emotional offloading worries me more than the cognitive kind, because farming out your social intuitions could hurt young people more than opting out of writing their own history papers. Just as overreliance on calculators can weaken our arithmetic abilities and overreliance on GPS can weaken our sense of direction, overreliance on A.I. may weaken our ability to deal with the give and take of ordinary human interaction.”

NYTimes on how to make friends as an adult: “Tune in to intuition. “When you encounter someone you’ve never met before but feel like you’ve known all your life, you need to act on it,” says Sewell. She looks for an “instant feeling of trust, which is rare.” The New York-based photographer and artist Joshua Woods, 39, a friendly face to many on the fashion and culture circuits, is on the lookout for people whose overall tastes align with his own: “It’s how someone lives their life and the things they’re engaged with,” he says, like a shared interest in a certain writer. Aminatou Sow, 40, the interviewer and co-author of the 2020 book “Big Friendship: How We Keep Each Other Close,” who lives in Brooklyn, agrees. When joining a new group — a running club, for example — “pay attention to who those [like-minded] people are and what you want to know about them.” Even in professional contexts, where there are power dynamics to contend with, it helps to “develop a sensitivity for who sees you as a human,” says Sehgal, noting that those people often make for good friend material.”

WSJ: “In “How Great Ideas Happen,” [George Newman] draws on scientific studies, historical examples and behavioral research to argue that what we call inspiration is better understood as a set of habits and mental practices available to anyone willing to cultivate them. Creativity, in his telling, is more method than miracle. The first myth Mr. Newman challenges is the romantic notion that isolation breeds originality. Retreating to a personal Walden, he suggests, may smother creativity rather than fuel it. Isolating ourselves from colleagues, acquaintances and the wider world severs what sociologists call our weak ties, the people outside of our circle of close family and friends who tend to be the conduits of fresh ideas. As important, Mr. Newman argues, is what happens once those ideas surface: submitting them to the scrutiny of others, whose feedback often sharpens what solitary effort cannot. Mr. Newman also dispels the belief that great ideas are entirely new. In practice, he argues, many innovations grow out of existing ones, often by borrowing or transplanting concepts from one field to another.”

Marketing’s NEVER Moment (Part 5)

The Urgency of Now

Movements need infrastructure. Until recently, the NEVER doctrine was aspirational. Two barriers stood in the way: awareness (nobody named the problem) and technology (nobody could solve it at scale). Both are now falling.

Start with awareness. Rising CAC is no longer a marketing complaint; it’s a boardroom topic. Platform dependency is recognised as strategic risk. Privacy shifts and the slow death of third-party cookies have pushed attention back toward owned channels. The conditions for the NEVER Moment already exist. Brands just need the diagnostic lens to see what’s been happening all along.

Now the technology — and the business model that makes NEVER operational.

NeoMarketing is the system that brings the three NEVERs to life. It’s not a feature set. It’s not a rebrand of existing martech. It’s a complete architecture designed around a single premise: martech should only profit when brands profit.

NeoMarketing operates through two complementary engines, matched to customer value:

Meridian for Best customers — MAX the LTV.

These are your highest-value relationships, where deep intelligence is economically justified. Meridian deploys BrandTwins — AI-powered digital twins that maintain memory of each customer relationship — and Context Graphs that store not just what happened but why decisions were made. The intelligence compounds. Every interaction teaches the system. Every intervention’s outcome feeds back into the model.

For Best customers, every touchpoint matters. Getting it wrong is expensive. Getting it right compounds. Meridian ensures you never lose your most valuable relationships through drift or neglect.

NEO for Rest and Test customers — ZERO the CAC.

Rest customers are the quietly disengaging middle. Test customers have already gone dark. For these segments, the goal isn’t deep intelligence — it’s systematic recovery at scale.

NEO operates through two components:

  • NeoMails — daily emails built on Attention Processing Units (APUs). Not promotional blasts, but 60-second rituals: interactive SmartBlocks (quizzes, polls, games), Mu micro-rewards that compensate customers for attention, and useful content that earns the right to be opened. The goal is habit formation: customers open not because they want to buy, but because they want the value. The brand earns presence by providing it.
  • NeoNet — the cooperative advertising network for deterministic recovery. When a customer goes dark on your channels, NeoNet reaches them through partner brands’ engaged inboxes — authenticated identity, no auctions, a fraction of adtech cost. A coffee brand reaches lapsed customers through breakfast cereal emails. A streaming service offers trials in smart TV newsletters. Reacquisition without the Reacquisition Tax.

The Two Paths

This is where the industry is splitting. Two paths now exist, and most organisations will use both.

Path One: Agentic Marketing — capability for CMOs.

For organisations that want control over their marketing operations, Agentic Marketing provides AI-powered tools: M-Agents for insights, segmentation, content, and orchestration. The proposition: “We give your team better tools. You execute. You own the outcome.”

This is the right path for organisations that want to build internal capability. They want ownership of strategy, execution, and learning. Their success depends on how well they use the tools.

Path Two: NeoMarketing — outcomes for CEOs and CFOs.

For organisations that want results without building internal capability, NeoMarketing provides accountability. The proposition: “We take accountability for retention and profit uplift. You measure the delta. You pay only when we deliver.”

Same underlying infrastructure. Same Context Graphs, same agent capabilities, same channel orchestration. But a different accountability model. A different buyer. A different pricing structure — Alpha pricing, where fixed cost is zero and payment depends on verified improvement.

The question isn’t which approach is correct. Both are correct for different situations. The question is: who do you want to be accountable?

Capability was everywhere now. Accountability was still rare. And rarity was where value lived.

The Destination: From Profitless to Profipoly

When you stop paying the Reacquisition Tax, profits don’t merely improve — they compound. Marketing transforms from cost centre to profit engine. The Rule of 40 stops being a stretch goal and becomes a by-product of not leaking value.

For genuinely new customers — the Next segment — NEVER becomes the ultimate aspiration: OONA — Only Once, Never Again. Acquire once. Retain forever. Pay to bring them in, but never pay again because you never let the relationship go dark.

The marketing technology category is splitting into two worlds. The first is utilities: platforms priced on inputs, capability commoditised, success depending entirely on perfect execution by the buyer. The second is outcomes engines: intelligence priced on verified uplift, success depending on results rather than activity.

NeoMarketing is a bet on which world wins.

Never Lose Customers. Never Pay Twice. Never Pay Fixed.

That’s not a slogan. It’s the line marketing will eventually be judged by.

If you remember only one thing: Everything required to stop paying twice now exists. What’s missing isn’t capability. It’s the decision to demand accountability.

Thinks 1884

FT: “Universal Commerce Protocol [is] a technology standard to help retailers build their own shopping agents and interact with others, this is part of a growing base of technology that could start to replace human attention — the lifeblood of online advertising — with a growing degree of machine-to-machine interaction. UCP joins a list of other protocols designed to automate online activity. This started a little over a year ago with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, which enables AI assistants and agents to tap into data held on other companies’ servers, and has since grown to include standards for agents to interact with other agents (A2A) and to make payments on behalf of users (AP2). If internet users find the services made possible by these technologies a more convenient way to get things done, old forms of online engagement are likely to wither. Advertising is still likely to play an important part, even as machine-to-machine interaction becomes more prevalent. At some level, purchases reflect customer preferences, and influencing that preference will always have value. But how and where that influence happens will change.”

Kate Murphy: “You know it when you feel it, with a co-worker, friend or stranger. The science of interpersonal synchrony explains how ‘clicking’ can be a fast track to intimacy—or drama…Synchrony researcher and psychotherapist Dr. Richard Palumbo advises imagining there is a MUTE button during particularly fraught interactions so you focus less on the words used and more on the other person’s level of arousal and how you might be matching that energy. ”It’s your natural human tendency to sync with someone else,” he says. “What’s not so natural is being aware of it.” Sometimes we need to disconnect to recalibrate and reclaim ourselves. The relationships that endure, however, are the ones where you are in sync more than you are not. Grace is learning to ride the tide.”

Yann LeCunn: “There is a sense in which they have not been overhyped, which is that they are extremely useful to a lot of people, particularly if you write text, do research, or write code. LLMs manipulate language really well. But people have had this illusion, or delusion, that it is a matter of time until we can scale them up to having human-level intelligence, and that is simply false. The truly difficult part is understanding the real world. This is the Moravec Paradox (a phenomenon observed by the computer scientist Hans Moravec in 1988): What’s easy for us, like perception and navigation, is hard for computers, and vice versa. LLMs are limited to the discrete world of text. They can’t truly reason or plan, because they lack a model of the world. They can’t predict the consequences of their actions. This is why we don’t have a domestic robot that is as agile as a house cat, or a truly autonomous car. We are going to have AI systems that have humanlike and human-level intelligence, but they’re not going to be built on LLMs.”

Ethan Mollick: “Software developers write Product Requirements Documents. Film directors hand off shot lists. Architects create design intent documents. The Marines use Five Paragraph Orders (situation, mission, execution, administration, command). Consultants scope engagements with detailed deliverable specs. All of these documents work remarkably well as AI prompts for this new world of agentic work (and the AI can handle many pages of instructions at a time). The reason you can use so many formats to instruct AI is that all of these are really the same thing: attempts to get what’s in one person’s head into someone else’s actions.” Adds Arnold Kling: “His point is that using AI effectively requires the management skill of being able to articulate clearly a project’s goals, context, and constraints. He mentions the skill of knowing what an AI can do. I think this could use more emphasis. Sometimes a simple prompt will work, sometimes a more complex prompt is needed, and sometimes a task is beyond the (current) capability of an AI. Knowing the difference is important.”

Marketing’s NEVER Moment (Part 4)

The Movement

A doctrine isn’t a movement. Movements require shared language, measurable proof, and participatory mechanics.

If you study the big shifts in marketing and enterprise, a pattern repeats: category changes don’t happen because someone adds features. They happen because someone names an enemy and offers a new operating model.

Salesforce didn’t win by listing CRM capabilities. It declared “No Software.” The enemy was on-premise friction — slow IT cycles, heavy installs, the tax of owning infrastructure. HubSpot didn’t win by describing tools. It framed a moral and strategic opposition: Inbound vs Outbound. The enemy was interruption — renting attention rather than earning permission. In both cases, the movement was bigger than the product. The product became the easiest way to join the movement.

NEVER follows the same logic. The enemy is the Reacquisition Tax: paying twice for customers you already own. The operating model is retention-first compounding: build attention and relationships so paid spend becomes an exception, not a dependency.

Movements beat features for one reason: they create identity plus inevitability. Once people adopt the lens, they can’t go back to the old language. And the Reacquisition Tax is the rare enemy that is precise, measurable, and un-co-optable. Platforms cannot lead a movement whose end-state is “pay platforms less.” Legacy martech cannot lead a movement that demands outcome-based accountability. The movement belongs, structurally, to brands — and to partners willing to bet on results.

But movements don’t spread through agreement. They spread through proof.

That’s why NEVER needs practical mechanics — light, repeatable, and designed to create NEVER Moments at scale.

The Reacquisition Tax Calculator. Every brand calculates its number: what portion of last quarter’s “new customers” existed in the historical file? What portion of paid conversions came from customers who could have been reached through owned channels? The point isn’t perfect precision. The point is irreversibility: once leadership sees the estimate, they stop arguing about symptoms and start addressing cause.

The NEVER Slide. Four numbers on one page, every quarter: Click Retention Rate (and Attention Churn), Real Reach, Adtech-to-Martech spend ratio, and the Profit What-If. This becomes the board artefact. It reframes marketing from “campaigns and creativity” to “assets and leakage.” It gives CFOs a language to fund retention as profit protection, not brand vanity.

The 90-Day NEVER Sprint. The sprint is the conversion engine of the movement. The goal isn’t perfection. It’s a visible delta: raise CRR and Real Reach, reduce reacquisition dependence, show the profit impact. A simple rallying target: “Double the Best, Halve the Waste.” Not poetry — a measurable plan: expand the engaged base while cutting the portion of spend used for recovery.

The Pledge (after proof). Only once brands have proof should the public signalling begin: “We refuse to pay twice. We commit to never losing customers.” Public commitments create accountability and pull others in — not through virtue, but through competitive pressure.

And that’s how movements spread: the first converts don’t just talk. They point.

“Our profits rose because we stopped paying twice.”

The goal isn’t one vendor’s adoption. It’s industry transformation: a world where CMOs demand accountability, CFOs fund retention as margin expansion, and CEOs stop mistaking paid recovery for growth.

You don’t join NEVER by buying a product. You buy a product because you’ve already joined NEVER.

If you remember only one thing: Movements don’t spread through agreement. They spread through proof. Calculate your number. Run the sprint. Show the delta.