How influencer-shaped expectations are creating a perception gap in Las Vegas tourism The 2025 LVCVA Visitor Profile Study surfaces a meaningful shift in visitor behaviorfor guests who plan their trips using influencers. This “influencer-led” visitor arrives with a highly curated, high-expectation version of the destination already in mind. What stands out is a wide gap…
Nearly 30 years later, this ad for Impulse Body Spray remains one of the most effective spots I’ve ever seen. I came across an old (2010!) post on here this week and realized the video link was broken. Fixing it sent me back to the ad I’d written about. It’s even better than I remembered….
There’s no shortage of “AI is revolutionizing [insert industry here]” takes.The problem with AI adoption is something nearly all of them ignore: capability doesn’t equal behavioral change. I’ve seen this pattern play out. Everything looks aligned on paper, leadership supports the tech, and teams agree it should make work more efficient. And yet. New capability…
Vinyl records. Craft spirits. Hand-knit clothing. Memorable meals. As tech becomes more powerful and pervasive, the appeal of things that feel human, tangible, and personal tends to rise alongside it. Futurist John Naisbitt gave this pattern a name in Megatrends: “high tech / high touch.” In The Experience Economy, Pine and Gilmore argue that as…
A look at the hidden system behind social media nostalgia trends and how everyday posts can become valuable training data for AI models.
There’s been much chatter lately about the “tells” of AI writing. The cliché words and phrases. The tidy triads. The “it’s not this, it’s that” and the staccato single-sentence paragraphs. They’re ubiquitous now. But they’re symptoms of the real problem: letting AI replace your voice. When you know how someone writes, you develop a subconscious…
As organizations increasingly adopt AI, leadership teams optimizing for productivity today may discover a decade from now that they’ve weakened the succession and leadership pipeline they once took for granted. An Anthropic study published March 5 analyzing Claude usage, along with related labor-market analysis cited by Sakeeb Rahman, highlights an emerging shift: hiring into highly…
The partnership Cosm and the NHL just announced standardizes ultra high-resolution, multi-angle capture in all 32 NHL arenas. Today, that supports replay, player safety, officiating, and digital content. Put another way: it embeds immersive-native production infrastructure league-wide. For Cosm, the significance goes beyond any single use case. Their ecosystem spans arena-based capture systems, cloud production…
Leading with data requires judgment. This April, I’ll be speaking at the 2026 Women in Hospitality Leadership Conference at Wynn Las Vegas about what leading with data really means. In my experience, analytics are rarely the constraint. Interpretation is. Strong leaders don’t react to persuasive metrics at face value. They examine context, surface assumptions, understand…
When Alignment Masks Risk Some of the most expensive strategic mistakes aren’t made in chaos. They happen in rooms that feel aligned. When an executive team reaches agreement quickly, it feels like certainty and momentum. Speed and unanimity create energy. They can also create blind spots. Strong internal consensus is often where risk takes root….
The Rise of AI Visibility Metrics In recent months, AI visibility metrics have become a focal point in marketing discussions. As AI-generated responses reshape how people discover brands, it’s natural to ask how often your brand appears and whether that visibility is rising or falling. That leads quickly to practical questions: What should we measure?…
As it becomes more embedded in executive workflows, I’m doing a lot of thinking about AI decision-making in governance. As part of that, I’ve been experimenting with a new tool called Critical Thinking Bot. What caught my attention about it wasn’t speed or output quality. It was the premise: it’s explicitly designed to s l…
New research on AI-generated brand recommendations is a canary in the coal mine for how AI is reshaping marketing measurement in real time. Rand Fishkin of Sparktoro just published an analysis showing that AI tools, including LLM-based systems, are wildly inconsistent when generating AI-generated brand recommendations. Identical prompts, run repeatedly through the same model, produce…
Sphere Entertainment has made clear that its ambition isn’t a single icon venue, but a network of Spheres across multiple markets and capacity tiers. Its significance is economic, not architectural. The Real Cost of Sphere Content Producing content for Sphere is capital-intensive. Whether it’s musical artists developing custom visuals and spatial audio, Sphere originals like…
The biggest barrier to enterprise AI adoption isn’t model quality. It’s a fundamental conflict between computational utility and enterprise governance. To be reliably useful, LLMs require context, memory, and continuity. To be secure, enterprise systems are often designed to be stateless, sandboxed environments that wipe the slate clean the moment a session ends. This creates a “Clean Slate”…
How a rapid shift in appetite is reshaping food, hospitality, fitness, and lifestyle demand GLPs aren’t just a weight-loss story. They’re a consumption-reduction story, with downstream effects well beyond food and drink. For people using them – recent Gallup data reported by NPR says 12.4% of U.S. adults today, more than double the rate from…
At SW14 Group, we pay close attention to shifts that affect travel, tourism, hospitality, and major events. A newly proposed CBP rule has surfaced with the potential to reshape inbound travel to the United States. The rule would require nearly all foreign tourists, including those from visa-waiver countries like the UK, to submit five years…
The reasons people travel to Las Vegas today are more intentional, more varied, and more specific than you might think. Traditional leisure is still here, of course, but tens of thousands of visitors now choose Las Vegas for reasons that didn’t exist a decade ago. And while Las Vegas is the most visible example of…
Over the past few weeks, three disparate news items caught my attention. These stories come from different industries, with different budgets and instincts. To me, they point in the same direction. Brand building isn’t suddenly becoming important again. It’s always been a competitive advantage. What changed was the industry’s focus. As digital channels became more…
Parmigiano Reggiano has signed with UTA for film and TV placement. Yes, cheese now has an agent. At first glance it feels like a quirky headline, but it points to a bigger shift that’s been underway for years. Many Americans call it Parmesan, plenty think of the green can, and even when the real thing…
Yesterday Apple pushed us a step closer to something that not so long ago felt like science fiction: a post wallet world. It began rolling out US passport support in Apple Wallet, joining the digital drivers’ licenses already supported in more than a dozen states. We’re at the inflection point where for many, a physical…
Chief Hedonist invited me to contribute a guest column on Las Vegas’s food and drink landscape. While I’ve written about the Vegas restaurant scene before, I took a different spin this time: organizing three dozen of the city’s best spots by appetite, mood, and personality. Read the post here: Vegas Eats: Choose Your Own Adventure.
A LinkedIn post by Carolene Meli this week imagined helping Celine Dumont, the impeccably ruthless executive from The Morning Show, reshape her public image. Carolene’s idea was elegant and powerful: help a leader tell her story through consistent writing and speaking that reveals her dimension and credibility. Done well, it benefits both the leader and…
Earlier this month I attended the Las Vegas Women’s Marketing Collective quarterly meetup, which featured a panel discussion titled “Hard Truths & Honest Wins: Navigating Advice That Stuck.” During the audience Q&A one of the speakers, LVCVA’s VP of PR and Communications Molly Castano, responded to a question from a UNLV student with a line…