Hello · It's Danielle
THE JOURNAL
Essays on the unspoken work of being a person.
The Weekly Letter
A small, honest moment from each week. Delivered quietly on Sundays.
The Archive · Page 3
The Concentration Problem: What AI Is Actually Doing to Customer Experience
Somewhere tonight, a customer is on hold. Her card got declined at a hotel checkout in a country she doesn't usually visit, and the fraud...
The argument about junior jobs
Two credible studies point opposite ways on AI and entry-level work. What both of them mean for the students I teach, and the Canadian numbers nobody has.
On reading slowly
Some notes on deliberate reading, from someone who writes for a living and worries about her attention like everyone else.
The one-sentence test
A test I give teams and students: say what you do in one plain sentence a stranger would understand. Most can't at first, and the struggle usually shows where the strategy is still fuzzy.
The model decides before it searches
New research suggests ChatGPT often names the brands it recommends before it searches the web, which means your standing inside the model is built mostly on other people's pages, not your own.
Nobody Read the Book
In 2023, three McKinsey partners published a book called Power to the Middle, arguing that companies were about to make a serious mistake if they...
When the platform makes the call
Three examples from this week, OpenAI's ChatGPT ads, Reddit, and a study on AI replies, show marketing decisions moving from the marketer to the platform, and what that leaves for human judgment.
The Conversation Grid: Marketing's Four Conversations
For most of its history, marketing was one conversation. A person spoke, and a person listened and decided. We got very good at that conversation....
What's left after the machine does the execution
The marketing news this week kept circling the same shift: AI is absorbing the execution, and what's left for people is judgment and a voice that reads as human.
Answer Engine Optimization: Marketing's Second Audience
For most of marketing's history we wrote for one reader, a person. We still do. But sometime in the last two years a second reader...