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Salmon Labs Newsletter

Helping marketers move fast and make things.

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🍣 The anxiety of "not being interesting"

Hey – Rob here. There are two types of brand anxiety: having so many interesting parts that you're afraid of focusing on the wrong one, or feeling you don't have enough interestingness, and therefore not focusing on anything at all. The latter is often where B2B brands fall short. "We're in a boring category", they say. And then fear and anxiety kicks in. But this is a denial of every organisation's inherent sense of freedom and responsibility. Sarah Bakewell, channelling the existentialists'...

Hey – Rob here. Here are the smartest takes I spotted this week in the Salmon Crew: Innuendo wins. While everyone's obsessed with sophisticated and AI-powered ad tech, M&S wins your feeds through a phallic-shaped pickle with rosy cheeks. Crudeness can very often beat cleverness. AI projections. People panicking about Moltbook agents creating religions says more about our fear projections than AI's capabilities. Also: what if this is a prank, and it's just a bunch of coders chatting? Synthetic...

Modern skyscraper with glass facade against clear sky

Hey – Rob here. I've been in a writing funk. Not in terms of ideas, but format. Producing loads without discipline doesn't cut it for me. I'm not built for indulgence. So, here's a return to the roots. Based on an old topic. Just enough words. B2B. And how boring and bleh it all feels, most of the time. Except it doesn't have to, and there's a huge market opportunity for any of us who dare to find the unsexy stuff and attempt to make it sexy. Not a lot more sexy. Just 10% more. Given the bar...