Resources & blog
Perspectives on loyalty, personalization, AI, and data-driven marketing — no filler, no fluff.
For years, B2B marketing has operated on a predictable behavioral loop: create interest, drive a click to a website, capture an email via a PDF...
Read more →Expanding on something I touched on last week... for the past decade (longer?), the playbook for enterprise content marketing was simple: produce...
Read more →A few months ago, we spent some time with a home services business talking about optimizing their GBP and strategies for the new reality of search in...
Read more →Here is the thesis, stated plainly: loyalty programs across industries are being systematically managed as financial liabilities to be minimized...
Read more →Over and over, the marketing industry repeats the same well-intentioned mantras: Clean up your data. Own your tech stack. Transition from...
Read more →I’ve written extensively about the "upside" of personalization, and more specifically, why the ROI often fails to materialize (see here , here and...
Read more →Recently, I’ve posted things about McDonald's and Chipotle Mexican Grill and their rewards programs. I didn't set out to critique every QSR loyalty...
Read more →The recent relaunch of Michaels Stores Rewards signals a broader shift in how specialty retailers are, or should be, thinking about loyalty. By...
Read more →(And why focusing on enrollment won’t solve the problem) On April 13, Chipotle Mexican Grill announced the re-launch of it’s loyalty program with "...
Read more →Today I received an email from McDonald's promoting its “MyMcDonald’s Rewards update” starting 5/4. The body of the email promises a “more...
Read more →A recent analysis from Pacvue on discovery commerce highlights an important shift underway early in 2026: as AI reshapes how shoppers find and...
Read more →Recently I can across an old slide deck from a number of years ago that was prepared by a small group ideating around the idea of bringing together...
Read more →There is a narrative gaining traction in the retail world. You’ve likely seen the articles and the LinkedIn posts : loyalty is moving away from...
Read more →The marketing industry is currently performing a masterclass in semantic agility. If you are a CMO, you are facing two conflicting realities. The...
Read more →In our earlier posts ( here , here and here), we identified the precision paradox (paying more for wide nets) and the circular acquisition tax...
Read more →In a recent post , we looked at how Airbnb famously repealed their circular acquisition tax in 2021 by slashing performance spend and building a...
Read more →As we discussed in the previous post , companies like Wayfair are stuck paying a "precision premium" for a net that is actually quite wide. But the...
Read more →The promise of the last decade was simple: Data = Efficiency . We were told that as our models got smarter, our nets could get smaller. Especially in...
Read more →Over the last four days ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 and Part 4 ), we’ve stripped away the "McMiracle." We’ve seen that the 2.6x frequency lift due to...
Read more →In the previous posts in this series ( here , here and here ), we’ve looked at the selection bias that skews your starting data and the mathematical...
Read more →In the first two posts in this series ( here and here ), we considered the psychology of selection bias and the logic gap in McDonald's reporting and...
Read more →How do you validate your loyalty program when 5 million new members and 21 million active members can’t stop transaction counts from falling? In...
Read more →A few weeks ago, I challenged a metric that no one in the QSR loyalty industry seems to question: McDonald's claim that loyalty enrollment drives a...
Read more →I was reading a recent piece published by Kobie ( https://kobie.com/the-growing-gap-between-loyalty-promises-and-the-modern-travel-experience/ ) on...
Read more →Back in August 2025, during the 2Q 2025 earnings call, the McDonald's CEO made some incredible claims about the performance of the MyMcDonald's...
Read more →For decades, the subscription-based home services industry has operated with a single-minded philosophy: Acquisition at all costs. No surprise,...
Read more →Much of today’s conversation about first-party data feels urgent, even frantic. Brands and agencies, as Digiday recently reported (...
Read more →Why Agent-Focused Retention Will Be 2026’s Real Growth Story If you feel like the traditional marketing funnel is breaking, you’re right. Earlier...
Read more →This article ( https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/playable-brands-why-playfulness-points-save-customer-loyalty-bocska-txi1c/ ) from last week is an...
Read more →The classic paradox: what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? Here’s another: just because consumers love a brand, does that...
Read more →Stop letting your analytics outputs lead you astray. This week, I've discussed several aspects of the "AI ROI Mirage" – from mis-attribution and...
Read more →Your AI personas don’t make impulse decisions. Using AI agents as “synthetic” users to test marketing copy and predict campaign success is the latest...
Read more →The third in this week's series looking at how to avoid marketing analytics misfires and be successful in 2026. On Monday issues with AI-driven...
Read more →Is your AI finding new customers, or shining a light on purchase-ready consumers? Following up on this week's theme of ways to avoid marketing...
Read more →After spending some time catching up on reading some bookmarked articles over the break, I decided to post a four-part series this week with some...
Read more →The biggest barrier to more sophisticated segmentation and personalization is better data. If everyone can do the same thing, is there a path to...
Read more →If everyone is perfectly optimized, how can the entire market win? Here is a provocative question for every marketing strategist: In a mature,...
Read more →A closer look at McDonald's earnings commentary and what it reveals about rewards program economics.
Read more →Previously (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/can-we-get-better-benchmark-loyalty-program-impact-than-keenan-fe7ze/), I pro...
Read more →Recently, I’ve been looking into industry rules of thumb and expert proclamations around the impact of marketing initiat...
Read more →I recently dove into the sourcing for several loyalty metrics that are commonly cited (see here: https://www.linkedin.co...
Read more →If you’ve relied on industry rules of thumb to help in your loyalty planning processes, some of the below might come as ...
Read more →The other day comes news that Shake Shack has launched a loyalty program: According to PYMNTS (https://www.pymnts.com/...
Read more →𝗣𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗼𝗻𝗮𝗹𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗻𝘂𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗯𝗲 𝘀𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗮 𝗵𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗼𝗽𝗶𝗰. 𝗔𝗿𝗲 𝗺𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗽𝘂𝘁𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗺𝘂𝗰𝗵 𝗲𝗺𝗽𝗵𝗮𝘀𝗶𝘀 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗼𝗹? Consi...
Read more →I hate to keep coming back to McDonald’s, but MyMcDonald’s Rewards is such a large program and people are really paying ...
Read more →Most analytics roadmaps end up gathering dust. Here's the framework we use to make sure yours doesn't.
Read more →Part 4 of our series on quantifying the impact of personalization — examining both near-term gains and long-term value.
Read more →In the previous entry in this series (Part 3a here, with Part 1 here and Part 2 here), we explored some general thought...
Read more →In the previous two entries in this series (Part 1 here and Part 2 here), we explored the source of many of the commonl...
Read more →In a sales-led B2B organization, attribution models face challenges that make them less effective compared to other mea...
Read more →I always enjoy reading Steve Bocska's take on loyalty programs, and learn a lot from his perspective. His recent analys...
Read more →Picking up where we left off with the first piece in this series (here), we were exploring the potential upside of AI-d...
Read more →AI-driven personalization (I’m primarily going to use “personalization” going forward) is dominating online and offline...
Read more →Reading trade press articles convinces one that Artificial intelligence (AI) is going to revolutionize loyalty marketin...
Read more →Not long ago I wondered if a loyalty program could solve for a troubled business model (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/c...
Read more →This headline grabbed my attention the other day: Is There a ‘Death of Loyalty’ in Fast Food? (https://retailwire.com/di...
Read more →Several recent articles have caught my attention, and while covering seemingly disparate topics, actually served as cat...
Read more →I saw the headline for this article from early November (https://www.marketingdive.com/news/taco-bell-kfc-yum-brands-Q3-...
Read more →I was recently doing some product research and came across a company promising “AI-powered RFM analysis”. After reading carefully through a pretty...
Read more →Recently, a friend related a story over coffee, about how a colleague had made it a mission to post something on LinkedIn every day for 30 days, and...
Read more →I read with interest Steve Bocska 's recent "cautionary tale" take on My Coke Rewards published in The Wise Marketer And with not a little surprise,...
Read more →From 1983 to 1994, ready-to-eat cereal manufacturers raised list prices 90%, double the rate of overall inflation. Why? ...
Read more →I’m often asked why our website and email domains are “nventiv.ai” and not “nventiv.com”. Is our business somehow assoc...
Read more →Before getting to AI and implications for attribution, I wanted to take a bit of a detour to talk about a real challenge...
Read more →I was on a call with a group of CMOs recently, primarily B2B focused, and the topic of attribution came up. Not in any p...
Read more →In the previous two posts in this series, we talked a lot about the “digital experience” which is definitely more impact...
Read more →In Part 1 of this three-part series, we discussed certain factors that may make consumer decisions about restaurant choi...
Read more →Trying to keep up on what’s happening in loyalty marketing can be daunting. There are a couple of constants: a lot of ar...
Read more →Interesting writeup on comments from Travis Freeman, the Chief Media Officer of Inspire Brands at Advertising Week New Y...
Read more →After a lot of recent thinking about AI/ML and marketing analytics, I took a recent detour back to the loyalty marketing...
Read more →When a company revamps a loyalty program, is it really in order to "make it easier to reward our customers and give them...
Read more →I had an email from a former colleague a couple of weeks ago, in which he shared some thoughts on what he and his firm ...
Read more →Marketing analytics has always served two different masters: efficiency and effectiveness. For most of its history, the ...
Read more →In the 2002 movie Minority Report, which was itself based on a 1956 novella, the police apprehend criminals "by use of ...
Read more →In an earlier post (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/fair-claim-regression-ai-john-c-keenan/), I opined on AI-driven analy...
Read more →Is "AI" as it relates to marketing analytics really something new, or are people merely applying a new spin to an old co...
Read more →Artificial Intelligence. AI. Machine Learning. Generative AI. It's all over the trade press, the mainstream press, e...
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