Harvard Business Review (January / February 2024) –

The Right Way to Build Your Brand

The best ad campaigns make a memorable, valuable, and deliverable promise to customers. 

More than a century ago the merchant John Wanamaker wryly complained, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted. The trouble is, I don’t know which half.” Because the proponents of advertising have always struggled to prove that the money is well spent, that indictment has long helped financial executives justify cutting ad budgets. As no less an authority than Jim Stengel, a former chief marketing officer at Procter & Gamble, has noted, the struggle continues, although huge resources go toward testing advertising copy and measuring effectiveness.

Leading in a World Where AI Wields Power of Its Own

New systems can learn autonomously and make complex judgments. Leaders need to understand these “autosapient” agents and how to work with them. 

The wheel, the steam engine, the personal computer: Throughout history, technologies have been our tools. Whether used to create or destroy, they have always been under human control, behaving in predictable and rule-based ways. As we write, this assumption is unraveling. A new generation of AI systems are no longer merely our tools—they are becoming actors in and of themselves, participants in our lives, behaving autonomously, making consequential decisions, and shaping social and economic outcomes.