The 5 Big Trends that Will Dominate Marketing in 2026
I find most end-of-year prediction and crystal ball-gazing listicles to be trash. They don’t prove their assertions, use anecdotes rather than data at scale…
Never Ask an AI Tool How It Came Up with That Answer
This post on LinkedIn by Britney Muller is, IMHO, the most important short piece on AI you’ll read this year. It’s so critical to…
The 7 Marketing Problems Pinball-Shaped Buyer Journeys Create
Last week, I showed you how Internet buyer journeys have transformed from the cleaner, more predictable funnel model of the 2000-2015 web into something…
The Pinball Customer Journey Has Replaced the Marketing Funnel
I like the marketing funnel. It’s a great analogy, and has served me well for years. I *STILL* think it works reasonably well as…
Welcoming Kristy Morrison as Chief of Staff
Story time—late last year, I developed a painful, still-undiagnosed condition in my hands, likely from repetitive stress. Blah blah chronic pain, it’s hard to…
NEW: Upload your agency’s logo and customize your audience research graphs
It’s new feature month over here at SparkToro (given we’ve just launched Take Action and the enhanced usage-graph visuals), and we’re continuing the streak…
NEW: AI Tool & Social Network Usage Graphs are in SparkToro
SparkToro’s data visualization just got a major upgrade, but rather than tell you about it, I’ll show you: BOOM. Rather than the previous visualization…
NEW in SparkToro: Take Action combines real audience data with LLM magic to give you actionable marketing takeaways
Let me lay out the biggest challenges folks tell us they have with SparkToro in 2025: The audience data y’all provide is interesting, but…
We’ve Learned More About How to Appear in AI Answers
Thanks to some recent experiments and research in the marketing world (and an unfortunate, manipulative attack by a Reddit mod), we’ve learned a lot…
Make Something People Want to Talk About
In my formative years as a tech entrepreneur, Paul Graham (cofounder of YCombinator), wrote a seminal essay entitled: Be Good. Most tech folks have…