Jay Mandel’s strategic insights
Explore 100 candid articles organized around the same ten core themes that run through Jay’s work. Every headline connects to its original publication.
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100 articles across all themes
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A Roblox creator shows how personal narrative becomes relationship, and why parents and marketers need to take that relationship seriously.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I wanted to go fishing for one day.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Listerine turned bad breath into halitosis. Marketing has done the same, turning ordinary uncertainty into urgent and curable problems. Learn how to respond to the funk.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I Followed TopDog’s Disclaimers to Measure the Distance Between the Law Firm Being Advertised and the Legal network operating behind it.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A service failure shows why recovery systems must account for the customer’s real situation—and how clearer ownership can turn a frustrating moment into restored trust.
Read on Substack · External site ↗From Marvin Gaye to fake followers, ad fraud, bots, and manufactured consensus: what happens when the grapevine becomes the marketplace, and nobody knows what’s real?
Read on Substack · External site ↗I’ve been listening to Howard Stern for most of my life.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Last weekend, my car engine started steaming and smoking in Tuckahoe, New York.
Read on Substack · External site ↗When evaluating retail concepts from a brand accountability and financial efficiency perspective, few founders possess the trend-spotting instinct, artistic execution, and operational grit of Abby Taylor
Read on Substack · External site ↗Ever wonder why companies seem comfortable charging more while giving you less? It's the shift in how businesses compete and why predictable customers have become more valuable than satisfied ones.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Customer service is deteriorating not because AI is inherently evil, but because corporate executives are using AI to turbocharge an obsolete, extractive financial model.
Read on Substack · External site ↗What Stacey Duguid's job search, Andrew Bowins' pivot, and the Marketing Accountability Council reveal about marketing's real accountability problem
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why does everything online feel either painfully generic or outrageously over-the-top? This article explores why every original idea eventually becomes reheated nachos.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Last weekend at Fanatics Fest, I was handed a drink that looked less like coffee and more like the New York Knicks had been melted inside a clear plastic cup.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why “Fanaticism” is the Ultimate Marketing Accountability Framework
Read on Substack · External site ↗On July 9, 2026, TIME and Statista dropped their annual ranking of America’s Best Companies. It’s a list measuring exactly what Wall Street and job hunters care about: financial muscle, employee satisfaction, and ESG disclosures.
Read on Substack · External site ↗New York City doesn’t just pass local laws; it establishes the default standards for the entire nation.
Read on Substack · External site ↗When we dropped our pieces on the ticketing and travel monopolies, a clear psychological profile emerged.
Read on Substack · External site ↗The Mirage of the Open Web:
Read on Substack · External site ↗We talked about this the other day—how the concept of corporate “extraction” is quietly ruining everything we love. Doug Stephens was talking about his book, The Future of Competitive Advantage? He made the powerful point that for the last 45 years, corporations have been trapped in a cycle of constant extraction—squeezing workers, exploiting the environment, and draining the capitalist system itself until there is “not a hell of a lot left to extract”.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Business futurist and author Doug Stephens stops by the MAC to talk about his new book, explain why saving democracy is good business, and explore how marketers can help.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Most marketers think being strategic means connecting their work to revenue and learning the language. But that advice often keeps marketers trapped in execution mode.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Walking to the public-facing order pickup Lowe’s retail location in Yonkers, NY, one is greeted by a brightly decorated internal dashboard celebrating the store’s “Service & Sales Leaders.” Adorned with cheerful beach-themed cutouts and smiling employee photos, the board tracks localized key performance indicators (KPIs).
Read on Substack · External site ↗Modern platforms like Uber Eats prioritize instant gratification, delivering items swiftly, boosting metrics like conversion rates and reducing costs.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why my personal life, my professional career, and my creative output aren’t three separate compartments—and why lazy assumptions miss the mark.
Read on Substack · External site ↗It’s time to build for the reality of who people actually are.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I am currently raising capital, building a brand, and scaling a new venture.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A familiar marketing ideal can become more useful when teams replace impossible precision with sound audience judgment, respectful relevance, and continuous learning.
Read on Substack · External site ↗During a Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, bluntly titled “Reforming the U.S.
Read on Substack · External site ↗According to TV’s ultimate agent of chaos, being a comedian is 10% creative genius, 40% corporate warfare, and 50% getting your foot run over by a car.
Read on Substack · External site ↗The value exchange that built modern B2B marketing is collapsing. What replaces it will require a different kind of marketer entirely.
Read on Substack · External site ↗More customer data once looked like an advantage. AI is exposing the risk of data built on inference, opacity and extraction.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗The Marketing Accountability Council rejects rapid, casino-style metrics to champion long-term strategy and ethical consumer trust.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why Our Odd Obsession With Odds Isn’t Optimal
Read on Substack · External site ↗My alma mater, Syracuse University, simultaneously purged 93 academic programs, hiked total annual student costs to a staggering $95,676, and then admitted to faculty and staff that it had missed its enrollment targets and entered a formal budget deficit.
Read on Substack · External site ↗For decades, executives relied on marketing to understand customers and markets. So how did it become the department responsible for defending pipeline, and proving its existence every quarter?
Read on Substack · External site ↗And Marketers Must Adapt
Read on Substack · External site ↗Kurtis Blow and the Lost Art of Passing Culture Down
Read on Substack · External site ↗While legacy news crews gave up, one creator, my son, Gavin, captured the pulse of the 40th anniversary of the Puerto Rican Day Parade on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx
Read on Substack · External site ↗I'm sharing this now because systems meant to serve us no longer uphold human dignity.
Read on Substack · External site ↗This article breaks down how demand gen evolved from a useful operating system into the center of modern B2B marketing and why so many companies now confuse pipeline motion with market understanding.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I was Ghosted by the Recruiter then Spammed by Udacity's Desparate Marketing Machine
Read on Substack · External site ↗Don't Trust the Brand, Trust the Data
Read on Substack · External site ↗Happy Memorial Day! It’s the unofficial start of summer.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A grocery receipt became the catalyst for a data analysis that reveals the hidden tax of geography on consumer spending.
Read on Substack · External site ↗An essay on how leaders can recognize ethical drift, realign incentives, and give teams the judgment and support to choose responsible marketing practices.
Read on Substack · External site ↗We didn’t end up with dashboards, funnels, and MQL obsession by accident. The metrics marketing is measured by was decided by a series of decisions that slowly reshaped what marketing is allowed to be
Read on Substack · External site ↗How CEO Ryan Cohen Got Banned From the Company He is Trying to Buy
Read on Substack · External site ↗Marketing didn’t get reduced to a pipeline machine by accident. It happened because, at a critical moment, marketing couldn’t explain its value and what replaced it reshaped the entire function.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Lashay Lewis on bridging the "Trust Gap" by grounding LLMs in your proprietary Product Truth.
Read on Substack · External site ↗And Marketers Must Stop Trying to Feed Off It
Read on Substack · External site ↗Burnout Isn’t a Workload Problem. It’s a System That Stopped Seeing People
Read on Substack · External site ↗This article breaks down why personas suck, what they’re hiding, and what you actually need to understand if you want your marketing to stop blending in and start working.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Marketing’s drift toward optics and internal validation disconnects teams from revenue and the fundamentals that create growth.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗Does a company that has to buy or steal every new idea it deploys actually deserve to lead the next era of human connection?
Read on Substack · External site ↗Marketing is trapped in a system that demands proof before it allows anything to work, then punishes it when it doesn’t.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A New Mexico jury just determined that Meta knowingly harmed children’s mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms.
Read on Substack · External site ↗We’ve been asking BDRs to turn clicks into conversations, then blaming them when it doesn’t work. This piece breaks down how marketing quietly set them up to fail.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Afroman and the Moment Surveillance Became Accountability
Read on Substack · External site ↗Many B2B campaigns rely on the same underlying template. This article explores how teams can move beyond default practices and build strategy around their customers, strengths, and evidence.
Read on Substack · External site ↗This article unpacks how modern, hyper-targeted marketing made B2B marketing departments feel invisible, why this frustrates marketers and confuses leadership, and what it takes to fix it.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Marketing has been made "simple", so everyone thinks they know how to do marketing. That has lead to a complete lack of understanding and disrespect of the function.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A conversation with Omar Oakes on fraud, trust, and what the industry keeps getting wrong.
Read on Substack · External site ↗How the Savannah Bananas Perfected Spectacle and What Their Success Reveals About Our Dopamine-Driven Culture
Read on Substack · External site ↗A reflection on separating professional self-worth from dashboard results so marketers can learn more honestly, make better decisions, and build work that matters.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why There’s ROI in Listening to Our Better Angels
Read on Substack · External site ↗There is a version of winning that should make you embarrassed.
Read on Substack · External site ↗As I’ve mentioned in several essays this month, it’s been two years on Substack.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Research shows that emotionally charged content, especially outrage, spreads faster and farther on social platforms.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I walked into Sky Zone and immediately thought, "This building used to sell shower curtains and offered 20%-off coupons that expired but somehow didn’t." Now it sells trampoline time, tiered memberships, and $6 socks.
Read on Substack · External site ↗I wasn’t ready. The market wasn’t ready. Now both are starting to be.
Read on Substack · External site ↗When the Only Lever Left Is the Market
Read on Substack · External site ↗Two years ago, I started the Marketing Accountability Council because I couldn’t ignore the widening distance between what institutions claimed to stand for and how they actually operated.
Read on Substack · External site ↗B2B SaaS spent years chasing “efficiency” by cutting humans out of the equation. Now AI is doing to software what software once did to everything else.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Bad Bunny isn’t some performative diversity booking. He’s the most-streamed artist in the world for multiple years in a row. He’s already mainstream. The Super Bowl is just catching up.
Read on Substack · External site ↗This month marks two years of the Marketing Accountability Council, and over the next few weeks, I’ll be writing reflections on where we started, where we’re headed, and what’s breaking (and changing) across marketing and business.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why modern marketing’s obsession with control is making us worse at the very thing we’re trying to improve.
Read on Substack · External site ↗When Government Gets Cornered and Everyone Else Gets Petty
Read on Substack · External site ↗Silence is a signal, and ignoring it damages trust.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗Buyers aren’t avoiding sales conversations. They’re avoiding the pressure, harassment, and desperation we’ve normalized and the systems that reward it.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Why the right traits matter more than titles, tools, or resumes.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Demand generation is anti-marketing.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Surprise credit card holds are more than just an inconvenience; they’re a silent, systemic way of shifting power away from consumers.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A $19 EZ-Pass charge shows what happens when agencies optimize for enforcement instead of ownership and force people to absorb the friction they created.
Read on Substack · External site ↗When the System Breaks, You Build Your Own.
Read on Substack · External site ↗This article breaks down what executives really mean when they say they want to see marketing's revenue contribution and how marketers can finally replace revenue with much more effective metrics.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Clean metrics stop masking the gap between engagement and real commitment.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗No half-stepping shows up over time
Read on Substack · External site ↗But Not for the Reason You Think
Read on Substack · External site ↗How Personalization, Influence, and Assumed Trust Power Modern Scams
Read on Substack · External site ↗Tony Dokoupil’s Debut Didn’t Fail. The CBS News Model Did.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Clean data restores context, consent and meaning.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗Clean data offers a route back to trust.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗Candor becomes useful when leaders reward thoughtful challenge, respond with curiosity, and turn honest feedback into better decisions and stronger trust.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗Digital marketing too often rewards performance over principle.
Read on MarTech · External site ↗A consistent and repeatable approach to content marketing connects audience, story, strategy and results.
Read on LinkedIn · External site ↗The backlash against AI is a mirror, reflecting how far marketing has drifted from storytelling, empathy, and serving real human needs and why audiences are finally pushing back.
Read on Substack · External site ↗A candid look at the CES marketing pilgrimage—and how marketers and technologists can move past performance to have more useful conversations about innovation, brand, and customer value.
Read on Substack · External site ↗You can’t market to stupid and you shouldn’t have to.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Behind the scenes, they mapped forgotten statutes and buried authority. If it holds, New York could become a model for rapid, people-first governance.
Read on Substack · External site ↗Across the internet
Interviews, profiles, podcasts and contributed expertise—each linked directly to the original publisher and included in the same aggregate click measurement.