Digital Marketing Strategist helping companies connect with their most loyal customers to drive real business growth, all with a Southern accent.
Sweet Home Alabama
Joined March 2007
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In August I started using these same conversion tactics on my own publication. Since then, my conversion rate has increased by 90% & my revenue by 64%. Am a believer and good to see that the tactics Spotify is using work across platforms and publishers. Link in comments:
ALT The 4 tactics Spotify uses to achieve a 40% conversion rate & how to use each
It will only fall further from here.
Fans are tired of buying a jersey for a player in August, then watching him hold up his school for another 3 million in December, then leave for another conference.
College football is dead. Just haven’t had the funeral yet.
Mack Collier retweeted
McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion dollars to find out why families stopped coming.
I can save them the 8.5 billion.
They took out the playground.
The plan, announced Wednesday at investor day. Better food, faster service, new equipment, AI tools, hospitality training, and a bigger push into chicken and beverages. They call it Next. The goal, they say, is making customers feel more comfortable.
Wall Street loved it so much the stock fell 5 percent to its lowest since 2022.
Over five years McDonald's shares are down 3 percent. Burger King's parent is up 14. The owner of Taco Bell and KFC is up 13.
This is not a hamburger problem. This is a McDonald's problem.
So let us talk about who used to eat there.
Parents. That was the whole business. Parents at 5:40 on a Tuesday with three kids in the back and nothing thawed at home.
You did not go for the burger. You went because your kids could run screaming through a plastic tube for 40 minutes while you sat with a coffee and experienced silence.
That was the product. The food was the cover charge.
The first PlayPlace opened in 1971 in Birmingham, Alabama, and for fifty years it did one job. It made small children demand to go to McDonald's.
Then 2020 arrived, every play area in the country closed, and a great many never came back. The equipment came out during a remodeling program named Experience of the Future.
The Experience of the Future turned out to be a touchscreen.
Their own chief executive said he did not know if ball pits were in their future.
Sir, you were not selling ball pits. You were selling forty minutes.
So now there is no counter, no playground, and no reason for a seven year old to want to go. A screen, a window, and a bag.
And for that we pay prices that require a moment of reflection in the parking lot.
For thin, overcooked, oddly uniform pucks that taste like a memory of beef.
I did not love them because they were good. I loved them because I was eight and there was a slide.
And have you seen the new buildings.
The old ones were unmistakable. Red roof, yellow arches, legible from a highway at 70 to a child who could not yet read.
The new ones are a flat gray box with a small logo and a drive through wrapped around it. A regional claims office with a fryer.
They removed the color, the characters, the counter, and the playground, and then hired consultants to find out why it no longer feels like anywhere.
Which is why, when I have to eat fast food, I go to Chick-fil-A.
Not for the politics. For the competence.
They have led the customer satisfaction index for fast food eleven years running, and average 8.5 million dollars per location against McDonald's 4 million.
More than double, while closed on Sundays. Fifty two days a year with the lights off, and still double.
A seventeen year old hands you a bag and says my pleasure and means it about 70 percent, which is 70 percent more than a touchscreen has managed.
McDonald's is spending 8.5 billion on hospitality training.
Chick-fil-A earns 8.5 million per restaurant by just having some.
So here is my consulting proposal, free of charge, on behalf of mothers everywhere.
Put the playgrounds back.
Not a nostalgia campaign. Not a retro cup. The structure. Tubes, slides, a door the kids cannot open from the inside, and a bench where a tired woman can sit.
And understand what you are buying, because it is not lunch.
A six year old does not know your food is bad. He has no basis for comparison and no functioning palate. He thinks the burger is incredible because he is standing in a castle made of tubes.
That is the window. That is the only window you get.
You catch them before the taste buds arrive, and thirty years later they drive past your sign, feel something they cannot explain, and pull in anyway.
That is not a menu strategy. That is imprinting, and you shut it down in 2020 to save on cleaning.
Eight and a half billion dollars for AI tools and hospitality training.
Or a slide.
🦋
I have no idea what he is talking about and since he was 4 years old in 1980, I doubt he knows either.
Ryan Reynolds says ’80s nostalgia “paves over all the trauma” of the “tumultuous” decade:
“The 80s was a brutal, brutal time for people. It was a fucking mess and people forget that. It was a tremendous strife. Socio political tensions everywhere. We were still pretty fresh off a Cuban missile crisis, which was only 15-20 years before. It’s a tumultuous period, but you look back at it now and you’re like, ‘Oh, yeah. ‘Top Gun.’ Cocaine!’ Like, ‘No!’ It was really scary.”
In Apple TV’s “Mayday,” Reynolds stars as a U.S. Navy pilot who builds an unlikely friendship with an eccentric ex-KGB agent (Kenneth Branagh) obsessed with ’80s American culture.
wp.me/pc8uak-1lHH16
For reference, the cheapest @MeriwetherFarms charges for ground beef on its website is $169 for 15 lbs. and they are sold out.
Thanks James, I needed this today.
This always makes me shake my head. Most people here are in such a hurry to argue that half the time they try to pick a fight with someone who is agreeing with them.
Mack Collier retweeted
This week, we're celebrating 30 years since the release of our Unplugged album. Join us as we look back on one of the most memorable performances in our history.
Mack Collier retweeted
everything happens for a reason is not in the bible but "God promises to work all things to good for those who love him" is.
Romans 8:28
1st time Publix shopper? Publix is all about the BOGOs. You buy the staples when they go on BOGO, it leaves you enough to get the rest you need still pay around the same as Walmart. As a bonus, the employees are actually nice and happy to see you.
Mack Collier retweeted
Everyone wants to fight about the smartest president, but honestly the best answer got handed down by another president. In 1962 John F. Kennedy hosted a room full of Nobel Prize winners at the White House and told them, "I think this is the most extraordinary collection of talent, of human knowledge, that has ever been gathered together at the White House, with the possible exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone." The whole room laughed because they knew he was barely joking.
Because Jefferson was a genuine freak of nature. He wrote the Declaration of Independence at 33, in about two weeks, and it still reads like scripture. He taught himself to read in something like half a dozen languages. He designed his own home at Monticello and then designed an entire university, buildings, curriculum, and layout, from scratch. He obsessed over science, farming, wine, food, and gadgets, and JFK described him that night as a man who could "calculate an eclipse, survey an estate, tie an artery, plan an edifice, try a cause, break a horse, and dance the minuet."
And here is the part people forget. When the British burned Washington in 1814 and torched the Library of Congress, Jefferson sold the country his personal library to rebuild it, close to 6,500 books covering basically every subject a human being can study. His private collection literally became the foundation of the national library. Who owns 6,500 books in 1815? A maniac. A brilliant one.
Purely on raw wattage, the man was operating on a different frequency than the rest of the list. Two hundred years later we are still living inside sentences he wrote alone at a desk.
Everyone loves to argue about the dumbest president, but the funniest part is that Warren Harding already ended the debate himself. He literally said "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." Most politicians would rather walk into the sea than admit that. Harding just said it out loud and went back to his card game.
And the record backs him up hard. He stuffed his cabinet with his poker buddies, the so called Ohio Gang, and then let them treat the federal government like their personal piggy bank. His Interior Secretary took cash and cattle to secretly hand off government oil reserves to rich friends. That is the Teapot Dome scandal, and the man actually went to prison for it. His Veterans Bureau chief looted money meant for wounded WWI soldiers. Two of his associates killed themselves as the investigators closed in.
The kicker is that Harding saw it coming. He said his enemies never kept him up at night, it was his friends, because he could not say no to anyone. He even joked it was a good thing he wasn't a woman, because he'd never be able to say no and would always be pregnant. Self awareness was somehow the one thing he had plenty of.
Even his big talent was fake. He gave these grand flowery speeches, and the critic H.L. Mencken said Harding's writing "reminds me of a string of wet sponges, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it." That might be the meanest and most accurate review any president has ever received.
He died in office in 1923 with the scandals still coming apart at the seams, and decades later a DNA test confirmed what people whispered for years, that he'd fathered a child with a much younger woman while he was in the White House.
Historians have parked him at the bottom of the rankings for a hundred straight years. And the wild part is, Harding would probably just shrug and agree with them.
Chick fil A has legendary drive thru service.
But…
Last week I went to a location that had two lines out to the main road. I pulled in anyway cause I knew the lines would move fast.
30 mins later I am at the menu and the speaker says ‘has anyone taken your order yet?’
In Georgia I entered a Chick-fil-A drive-thru line of forty cars.
I turned off my engine. I prepared to wait the way my ancestors waited out a siege.
Six minutes later I was holding chicken.
I do not know what happened to the other thirty-nine cars. The line moved like water that had somewhere to be.
A young woman walked between the cars taking orders on a small tablet, on foot, in the sun, smiling like the sun was her idea.
I said thank you.
She said, "My pleasure."
I did not think about it then. I should have.
At the window I thanked the young man for the food.
"My pleasure."
I thanked him for the sauce.
"My pleasure."
I thanked him for thanking me—
"My pleasure."
I want to be clear about what was happening.
This was a duel.
In Japan I trained in courtesy for forty years. Bowing angles. Seasonal greetings. The correct depth of apology for seventeen distinct situations.
I was a white belt in that drive-thru.
I escalated. I used my most formal English. I thanked him on behalf of my entire family line.
He said, "My pleasure," and gave me extra sauce.
Extra sauce. Unprovoked. A counterattack.
I returned the next day to reclaim my honor.
It was Sunday. The restaurant was closed.
All of them were closed. In the entire country. They close every Sunday, and they have closed every Sunday since the beginning, because the founder made a promise, and the promise did not expire when he did.
I stood in the empty parking lot and understood I had lost twice.
Once to a teenager with sauce.
Once to a man I will never meet, who kept his word so long it became a building.
In my country we say a samurai's word is his life.
I had never seen a restaurant say it back.
I returned Monday. I ordered. And this time I said it first, before she could.
"My pleasure."
She smiled and said, "It sure is."
America, I surrender.
It was my pleasure.
I remember around 2008 or so, Twitter removed the ability to see replies that people we follow leave to people they follow. Everyone howled, because it exposed us to new people so our networks expanded organically.
Now, it seems most people want the exact opposite experience
So Big 12 sold out and didn’t get paid?
The Big 12 announced a multiyear "entitlement partnership" with Monster Energy worth a reported $20 million annually that will brand its sports as “Monster Energy Big 12 Football” and “Monster Energy Big 12 Basketball.” It will include patches on jerseys and playing surfaces.