In the long-form episode for November 2025, Shel and Neville riff on a post by Robert Rose of the Content Marketing Institute, who identifies “idea inflation” as a growing problem on multiple levels. Idea inflation occurs when leaders prompt an AI model to generate 20 ideas for thought leadership posts, then send them to the…

For the second year in a row, Coca-Cola turned to artificial intelligence to produce its global holiday campaign. The new ad replaces people with snow scenes, animals, and those iconic red trucks, aiming for warmth through technology. The response? A mix of admiration for the technical feat and criticism for what some called a “soulless,”…

What happens when the AI conversation turns from a quiet side road into a crowded superhighway? Recently, Martin Waxman — digital strategist and LinkedIn Learning instructor — pressed pause on the churn to make room for curiosity, quality, and quiet. He’s not quitting; he’s recalibrating: publishing less often, thinking more deeply, and reminding us not…

Sentiment analysis has become a default metric for communicators. If sentiment is positive, trust must be high. But if your company’s words are diverging from its actions, trust could be eroding while sentiment remains constant. You won’t know until it’s too late. The new metric to consider is “trust velocity.” Neville and Shel unpack it…

Things change fast in the digital world. On the other hand, business tactics can be slow to adapt. Crafting content with the intent of “going viral” has been part of the communication playbook for more than a decade. There was never a guaranteed approach to catching this lightning in a bottle, but that didn’t stop…

Kenvue’s stock tumbled when U.S. President Donald Trump, with Health & Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., standing behind him, declared that its product, Tylenol, leads to autism in children when taken by mothers during pregnancy. As social channels were flooded with misinformation supporting the evidenceless claim, it’s easy to imagine the stock continuing…

We’ve all heard of AI slop by now. “Workslop” is the latest play on that term, referring to low-quality, AI-generated content in the workplace that looks professional but lacks real substance. This empty, AI-produced material often creates more work for colleagues, wasting time and hindering productivity. In the long-form FIR episode for September, Neville and…

In this short midweek episode, Neville and Shel dive into one of the hottest debates in communication today: what happens to tone and authenticity when artificial intelligence steps into the writing process? From the surprisingly heated arguments over the humble em-dash to fresh research on AI’s “stylometric fingerprints,” we explore whether polished AI-assisted prose risks…

Posts and videos featuring Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) hacks and formulas are flooding the web. We reported recently on one such hack focusing on press releases. But when you consider the kind of content on which the AI models rely for their answers, it may be more efficient to revert to good, old-fashioned PR and…

For a while, businesses were flexing their social responsibility muscles, weighing in on public policy matters that affected them or their stakeholders. These days, not so much, with leaders fearing reprisal for speaking out. But silence can have its own consequences. Also in this episode: The gap between AI expectations and reality; rent-a-mob services damage…