Same Moment, Different Feeds
In the second column of a series that began with The Great Unwalling, Paul Pfanner looks at how people born this century find news and culture, and why a handful of young publishers are choosing paper on purpose.
The Great Un-walling
Paul Pfanner spent more than four decades building media franchises the old way. Now the walls are coming down, and he’s asking the question most of the industry would rather skip. Who needs whom?
Tesla's Absolute Ambition
Paul Pfanner, whose OnCars team helped introduce the Model S in 2009, looks past Tesla's flying Roadster at the robots now being built where that car was made, and at an ambition with no apparent ceiling.
The Power of Now
We can bring nearly anything to a screen, yet people keep paying more to be there in person. Paul Pfanner looks at what that tells us about racing and live entertainment, and why the present moment carries so much value.
Inside the Beast
Every so often the rules change overnight, in racing and well beyond it. Paul Pfanner on the choice that follows, and which way he's always gone.
Last Man Standing
Paul Pfanner spent a career in motorsport and media and never made music. Then a fake AI “artist” got under his skin, and he answered it by building a 16-song album with his own lyrics, and a 4-minute, 33-scene music video in under a month. What a machine can make, and the one thing it can't fake.
State of the Art Branding Case Studies
In the final post of his series on branding in the age of AI, Bill Sparks asks the practical question the first seven built toward: who's actually doing this well? From Nike to a neighborhood bakery, the answer looks surprisingly consistent.
Marque Down
The car brands you grew up with are being repriced all at once, and the sport that depends on them hasn't gotten the invoice yet. Paul Pfanner on Porsche, the yen, China, and a pattern he has watched form before.
How the Ad Industry Is Reinventing Itself
The agency-of-record era that ran for a century is coming apart. In part seven of his branding series, Bill Sparks tracks what the industry's biggest players are doing as the ground shifts, and what it means for anyone trying to keep a brand's story straight.
AI and the Personalization of Brand Narrative
Part six of Bill Sparks' series on the evolution of branding. Can a machine tell your brand's story? Bill separates the AI that is quietly making marketing better from the AI that keeps embarrassing the companies that trust it in the open.
Real to Me, Synthetic in the Making
Last week Paul Pfanner argued the barrier to making anything had fallen away. So he wrote and produced an album in a week to test it, and came back with the harder question waiting on the other side: what part of the work, and what part of him, is still real.
You Are Out of Excuses
Paul Pfanner spent a weekend testing whether he believed his own argument. He set out to write and produce a twelve-song blues album with no musical training and no idea how to begin, and finished with more than he planned.
Building Brand Loyalty Through Community
Bill Sparks on why handing your story to your customers is the hardest brand strategy to pull off, and the loyalty it earns that no ad budget can buy.
Independent Creators as Brand Storytellers
Bill Sparks looks at how creator partnerships became a $44 billion channel, and the tradeoff every brand faces: the authenticity that makes a creator worth hiring is the same thing you can't fully control.
Brands as Publishers: The Rise of Owned Media
Bill Sparks on how a handful of brands became publishers, why owning an audience beats renting one, and where most companies go wrong.
The Trust Problem: From Threat to Opportunity
Companies have never had more ways to reach us, or been trusted less. Bill Sparks on how brands lost the public's trust, and what the smart ones are doing to earn it back.
Why the Old Branding Playbook Stopped Working
Bill Sparks opens a new series on how the old branding playbook broke — and what's replacing it.
The Trillion Dollar Question
Bill Sparks asks whether the AI boom is a bubble waiting to pop — and lays out what the hyperscalers pouring hundreds of billions into infrastructure still have to prove before the checks stop clearing.
Why CAA Is Cloning Its Own Clients
Bill Sparks steps inside the CAA Vault where Hollywood's most powerful agency scans its own clients down to the smallest change of expression.
Zanardi’s Choice
Alex Zanardi chose to live fully when circumstance took everything. Four stories about truth and learning. One question. Paul Pfanner asks what are you doing with more learning power than any point in human in history?