Word on the Street

If your brand talks to Gen Z, the rules of the room just changed, and we think they changed for the better. In late August, Meta reached a settlement with a coalition of 29 state attorneys general over teen safety claims on Facebook and Instagram, with reports putting the potential value as high as $18 billion. The product changes are what matter for marketers. Users aged 13 to 17 get a default two-hour daily limit across both apps, followed by a lockout unless a parent appro

For years the phone has been the channel marketing forgot about. Everyone moved to DMs, chatbots and online booking. Now the phone is coming back, and the caller might not be human. Google is testing a Gemini feature called Call for Me that phones businesses for you. It can check if something is in stock, book a table, reschedule an appointment or ask a store to hold an item. It introduces itself, works through phone menus, waits on hold and then talks to whoever picks up, wh

Picture a shopper who never sees your homepage, never scrolls your Instagram and never reads your clever product description out loud. They just tell an AI what they want, and the AI goes and buys it. That shopper is a lot closer than it sounds. In late September, Meta announced a partnership with Shopify that lets its new Muse AI agents shop on a user's behalf. Shopify's CEO said the deal covers agentic checkout with Shop Pay across all Shopify stores, and the agents can sea

Every marketing team has had the creator conversation at some point. Someone pulls up a channel, points at the subscriber count and asks "can we work with them?" YouTube just changed the math behind that question. In August, YouTube announced it's doubling the bar for new channels joining its Partner Program. Starting February 1, 2027, a new creator will need 1,000 subscribers plus either 8,000 qualified watch hours in the past year or 20 million Shorts views in 90 days to ea

We'll admit it, we've spent more time than we'd like to count agonizing over email subject lines. The clever one, the curious one, the one with the emoji. Turns out a growing number of those emails might never get opened at all, because the inbox is starting to answer for itself. In September, Google expanded AI Overviews in Gmail search to paid users around the world with Gmail set to English, after launching it in the US first. Instead of scrolling through a list of results

If you opened Instagram recently and felt like something was slightly off at the top of your feed, you weren't imagining it. Instagram redrew its wordmark for the first time in ten years, and it's still rolling out. The change is small on purpose. The new version is bolder and a little more condensed, a mix of script and print instead of pure cursive, with the old curves kept on the "s," "r" and "g." Meta's design team says it explored hundreds of directions, from all caps to

We'll say the unpopular part first. Most people don't actually want to be in an office five days a week. Gallup's 2026 numbers found about six in ten remote-capable workers want hybrid, around a third want fully remote and fewer than one in ten prefer being fully on-site. We're proudly in-office anyway, so we figured we owed everyone an honest explanation instead of a slogan. The push back to the office isn't slowing down. A ResumeBuilder survey of nearly 1,000 business leade

It's October 1, which means somewhere a marketing team is in a conference room right now saying "okay, what else can we launch before the end of the year?" We know because we've been that team. Q4 has a way of turning into a panic buffet. The budget has to get spent, the holiday calendar is already crowded, somebody saw a competitor try something on LinkedIn and suddenly there are nine new initiatives on a whiteboard. Every one of them sounds reasonable on its own. Together t

Every year we tell ourselves we're going to be reasonable at the Fair. And every year a menu item with the word "deep fried" in front of something that should not be fried wins that argument in about four seconds. The 2026 State Fair of Texas is running at Fair Park through October 18, themed "Stars, Stripes, and Howdies" for America's 250th. This year brought more than 40 new foods, including Deep Fried Ranch and a Pho Burger, and the Big Tex Choice Awards pulled in a record

There's a specific kind of annoyed you feel when a friend is giving you a restaurant recommendation and halfway through you realize they're getting paid for it. That feeling is about to become a real marketing problem, because ads are officially moving into AI chats. The numbers are moving fast. ChatGPT Ads expanded to 31 European markets after the August rollout, OpenAI is testing a click objective next to its original reach objective, and ads per user per hour on the US mob

We spent a good chunk of September reading platform update emails that all said some version of the same thing: no action is required on your part. Which is exactly the sentence that should make you take action. Here's what happened in roughly four weeks. Starting September 1, Google began automatically moving eligible Broad Match and older auto-created asset campaigns into AI Max, and it had already stopped letting advertisers build new ones back in August. Microsoft turned

Today's the real first day of fall. The autumnal equinox lands on September 22 this year, which means as of today the days officially start getting shorter than the nights until spring. It doesn't feel like much of a shift yet in North Texas, where "fall weather" is more of a suggestion than a guarantee until sometime in October. But the calendar says it's here, and honestly, we'll take any excuse to talk about something other than layoffs and algorithm changes for a day.

We built this company on the idea that great brands don't need to perform, they just need to mean it: no bloated presentations, no buzzword soup, no smoke and mirrors. We think that same instinct applies directly to how anyone on our team, or any of the brands we work with, should be showing up on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn quietly made a pretty significant change to how comments get ranked, and we think it deserves more attention than it's gotten. Replies now get surfaced based on relevance to the individual viewer instead of just posting in chronological order. Buried in the reasoning behind the update was a number that stopped us: LinkedIn found that 30% of comments posted between April and June were entirely AI-generated.

Here's what we actually believe: the real, thoughtful idea is becoming a competitive advantage again. A brand that does the work, says something specific instead of something safe and shows up like it means it, is standing out more now than it would have five years ago, simply because so much of what people see daily is automated. Scarcity makes the real thing more valuable. That's true of authentic creative right now the same way it's true of anything else in short supply.

We've noticed we don't click the AI summary at the top of search results anymore. We just scroll past it to find an actual source. Turns out that's not a personal quirk, it's basically the norm now.

A business can be cutting a support function while simultaneously scrambling to hire for a role that didn't exist eighteen months ago. That's not a contradiction. That's just what a fast transition looks like from the inside.

We spend most of our time helping brands figure out how to say true things well, which means we've sat in plenty of rooms where leadership is deciding how to talk about change internally. And the thing that actually determines whether a restructuring lands well with the people who stay isn't whether AI gets mentioned. It's whether the explanation is honest.

Some members of the POW team are in New York City this week, coincidentally during the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Late last night, once everything wrapped, a few of them walked over to the 9/11 Memorial while it was still being prepared for today's ceremony. No crowds yet, just the reflecting pools lit up in the dark and a crew quietly getting the site ready for what would happen a few hours later.

When we started building POW's comic universe, the whole idea was "everyday superheroes," normal people doing exceptional work, drawn like they belonged in an actual comic. We didn't have a budget for a full-time illustrator to hand-draw every panel of every series, and honestly, the appeal was never really about production value in the first place. It was closer to the impulse behind ElfYourself back in the day, that same "let's see what this looks like" energy.