End-to-end operator-grade playbooks — the actual systems we run on our own brands and our clients'.
44 essays tagged playbook
BRAND Every brand voice now sounds the same because everyone uses the same AI to write it. Brands with actual personality — specific points of view, weird-but-consistent voice, named operators — stand out more in 2026 than at any time in the last decade.
CONTENT Most 'best content marketing examples' lists are nostalgia tours — Dollar Shave Club's 2012 video, Red Bull Stratos, Old Spice. Here are 8 campaigns from 2024-2026 that moved real numbers, what made them work, and what's portable to a smaller operator's budget.
PR · GEO Most PR advice is still teaching pitch templates from 2018. The 2026 reality: TechCrunch gets ~600 pitches a day, Forbes pays-to-play contributors are dominant on the surface but the staff-written stories that actually matter happen differently. Here's the framework we use to actually land them.
SEO SEO didn't die in 2024 — it absorbed GEO. This is the full 2026 playbook for ranking in Google AND getting cited in ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and Claude. No fluff, no theory.
VIDEO 70% of B2B buyers now use video in purchase decisions, and YouTube's December 2025 algorithm overhaul changed the game. Here's the Shorts-first discovery system, the four video types that drive pipeline, and how to measure ROI without living in vanity metrics.
BRAND Most eCommerce UX advice still optimizes for 2018 — slow product pages, blog-style category browsing, no thought to AI shopping agents. Here's what actually moves conversion AND ranking in 2026, including the new factor nobody's writing about: how AI shopping agents read your site.
SEO Programmatic SEO can build thousands of pages that rank — or thousands that get your whole site demoted as spam. The 2026 line between the two is sharper than ever now that AI makes mass page generation trivial. Here's how to scale on the right side of it.
BRAND Anticipatory design — interfaces that predict what users want before they ask — moved from concept to reality with AI in 2024-2026. The real question for builders now is when to predict for users vs. when to give them the dignity of choice.
BRAND Most web design discourse in 2026 is about Framer vs. Webflow vs. Astro. The actual brand-driven question is harder: how does the design choices on your site signal who you are? Here's the framework we use across 11 brands.