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The Messy Middle #040: Temperature Check
Derek swears by Claude. Jordan is a GPT loyalist. Priya discovered Gemini. Three weeks of model comparison later, the brief is still...
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The Messy Middle #039: Three Consultants, Zero Positioning
Maya hires three consultants. Gets three contradictory positioning strategies. Spends $38,000. Meanwhile, Priya quietly asks one question and gets a framework that...
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The Messy Middle #038: Audio Is the Easy Part
Maya says 'audio's the easy part.' Derek discovers Thai has a tonal correction process that takes six rounds. The entire royalty-free library...
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The Messy Middle #037: Quick Video
Maya says 'just use AI — should take an afternoon.' Derek discovers he's not making a video, he's managing a coalition of...
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Messy Middle #036: The Approval That Outlived the Campaign
Every piece of content goes through 6 people before it sees daylight. By the time it's approved, the trend is dead, the...
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Messy Middle #035: The Beautiful Campaign Nobody Cared About
You built a beautifully AI-designed, emotionally resonant brand campaign. Then the research came in: 40% of consumers are broke. Your marketing direct...
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Messy Middle #034: The Subscription Avalanche Comic
Finance sends an email asking to itemize the team's AI tool subscriptions for Q2 audit. What starts as a simple task turns...
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Messy Middle #033: The Standard Six
The same piece of content needs to exist in 6 different formats: blog post, LinkedIn carousel, email newsletter, Instagram caption, internal brief,...
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Messy Middle #032: Content Only Ceiling
47 blog posts this month. 0.3% CTR. Content calendar full. Pipeline empty. The illusion that more content equals more results when there's...
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Messy Middle #031: The AI Strategy Deck
Maya needs to present the team's 'AI strategy' to the board. The strategy is: 'we use AI.' That's it. But it needs...
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Messy Middle #030: The AI Tool Graveyard: Agency Edition
Welcome to the agency AI tool graveyard. You bought 12 subscriptions. None of them share context. And now your clients are asking...
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Messy Middle #029: The Terms of Enlightenment
IT discovers marketing has been pasting client data into 4 different free AI tools. Nobody encrypted anything. The team's response? 'Everyone does...