When the Customer Is a Machine
In the third installment of his series on AI as the new middleman, Bill Sparks follows the shopper who asks a chatbot what to buy, and asks what it takes for a brand to make the machine’s shortlist and still win the person who makes the final call.
Should You Allow AI Bots to Crawl Your Site?
Millions of websites had their AI crawling policy set for them overnight in September, and most never noticed. In Part 2 of his series on AI as the new middleman, Bill Sparks makes the case that this choice belongs with you, and that the right answer starts with what your content is for.
How AI Is Getting Between Brands and Customers
Bill Sparks opens a series on AI as the new middleman between brands and their customers. Part 1 looks at why being cited inside the AI's answer now counts for more than ranking in search.
America Is Building Cars the World Has Stopped Buying
In Part 3 of his Great Divergence series, Bill Sparks looks at the gap between the cars the world is buying and the cars America is building.
What 1979 Tells Detroit About 2026
In Part 2 of his Cold Read series on the oil price crisis, Bill Sparks goes back to 1979, when gas lines opened the door for Japanese automakers and the quotas meant to stop them built a stronger competitor instead.
Why Aren't Americans Buying EVs?
Bill Sparks digs into why North American EV sales fell 33% in August even as gas hit $4.47 a gallon. The answer isn't the one you've been hearing.
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.
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.
RACER, I Will Miss You
Paul Pfanner on reading the news posted to X by RACER Editor David Malsher-Lopez, and other news outlets that issue 341 will be the magazine's last in print, and on the people, readers, and advertisers who built it.
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.
How Young Athletes Are Building Personal Brands
Bill Sparks on how Name, Image, and Likeness management has become another skill young athletes need to master on their way to the big leagues.
Who's Winning the World Cup Marketing Game?
Bill Sparks on what the 2026 World Cup's early engagement numbers reveal about the gap between sponsorship rights and actual relevance.