Five Things: September 17, 2026

NOTE: I’m not making this a weekly thing, but my schedule continues to be completely out of whack, and this is one of the few routines I can still (somewhat) control right now! “Kick that style, wicked, wild…”

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_ONE

If Marketing Reports to Sales, Who Owns the Future Market? | David LaCombe, M.S.

Not everything valuable can survive a quarterly attribution test. And not everything easily attributed is strategically valuable.

The first half of my career in B2B media was spent in marketing, and I watched the path to Publisher flow through sales, which created a broad range of predictable problems, mostly driven by a focus on short-term gains and last-touch attribution. When I eventually became a Publisher (after begrudgingly moving into sales for a few years), my broader range of experience — particularly with data and measuring performance over varied periods of time — made managing the sales side of the business relatively easy compared to the other responsibilities that came with the job.

I couldn’t sell ice to polar bears, but I understood what it took to evaluate opportunities and close deals, and how easy it is to game pipeline metrics, long before automated emails and voicemails made “dialing for dollars for dummies” scalable to an infinite degree.

Few traditional sales executives in any industry have the range to manage the diverse scope of marketing responsibilities that drive short and long-term growth for most businesses, so any organization that puts marketing under sales is not only limiting the potential of both groups, they’re jeopardizing the long-term health of the underlying business itself.

__TWO

What Your B2B Sales Team Wishes You Knew | Mike Carrozzo

Marketers don’t participate in many of the moments where deals are won or lost. Marketing isn’t usually involved when a customer encounters an unexpected problem, when stakeholders disagree internally, or when a buyer begins questioning a decision.

Articles like this are a reminder that marketing still isn’t treated as a strategic investment in many B2B organizations, because there’s no other excuse for Carrozzo’s statement to ever be true, nor for his takeaways to be anything but obvious coming from the Content Marketing Institute of all places.

In my experience, marketers have plenty of opportunities to be MORE engaged in the full buyer’s journey than the average sales executive — including after a sale is won or lost — but siloed org charts, short-term KPIs, and last-touch attribution metrics obstruct the flow of information and insights between them.

(“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” William Bruce Cameron, 1963)

Unfortunately, the future has been underwhelming on so many levels, so Carrozzo’s insights are clearly still necessary. They should have tweaked the title, though, aligning marketing and sales on the same side, while identifying the real culprit(s): “What your B2B Sales Team Wishes their CEO, CFO, and CRO Knew”.

___THREE

Beyond the deal: why publishers need an AI strategy before an AI license | Sajeeda Merali

The publishers best positioned for the AI era will not necessarily be those that sign the most agreements. They will be those who understand what makes their content valuable, protect it accordingly and build sustainable commercial strategies around those strengths.

Merali offers an insightful overview of the challenges publishers are facing with “AI” on the content side of the business, particularly noting the differences in business models that make some decisions better or worse. “Undervaluing content” has been a problem for many B2B and B2C publishers for ages (I wrote a whole series about it back in 2009), and even book publishers have been guilty of it at times.

FOMO is driving a lot of bad decisions related to “AI” right now, and undervaluing content is also related to the aforementioned path to Publisher going through sales. It’s a little different for books, but in many cases, the people in charge there don’t actually value the content their companies publish, either — unless they become bestsellers.

____FOUR

Operations: The rail sector must appreciate the limits of AI in the control centre | Dr Mareike Massow and Prof Dr Birgit Milius

In discussions, AI and mathematical optimisation are often plotted against each other, but they both have their areas of usefulness. The two are related but distinct — and understanding which method solves which problem best matters for setting realistic expectations.

Railroads are one of the sectors where the potential for automation is actually intriguing, and the authors do something few journalists or advocates ever bother with, clarifying the differences between the various things being marketed under an “AI” umbrella. The common threads: data structure, data quality, and a respect for human expertise, particularly when handling novel events.

The more you understand what “AI” is and isn’t, the more you understand its limited potential in book publishing, where the lack of standardized data across the supply chain — even with “accepted” standards like ONIX — remains a systemic obstacle to so many more realistic and important initiatives.

But sure, let’s keep pretending “AI” is inevitable and the most important thing for publishers to dedicate their limited resources to.

_____FIVE

The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI | Joanna Nelius-Free

It can be a jarring experience seeing multiple reflections of the world you’re living in texts that were written 10, 30, or even 100 years ago. So, I needed to find at least one story that did the opposite—a story that took our fears of the future and reflected them back to us as hope.

With the huge exception of Shadowrun, I’ve never been a fan of cyberpunk — despite digging its core premise — although I could never quite put my finger on it. None of the seminal novels have intrigued me enough to read them; I thought (and still think) the original Blade Runner was boring and overrated; and Cyberpunk 2077 was somehow even more boring despite its immersive potential.

Nevertheless, the dystopian premise remains appealing, partly because it’s always felt like the most realistic sci-fi future we have to look forward to, and that feeling has only increased in recent years.

Nelius-Free is up to the challenge, though, and her insights have added a handful of books and stories I’d never heard of to my TBR, which really doesn’t need to grow any bigger right now!

(NOTE: While cyberpunk never did it for me, I had a good run with steampunk, and still consider it my favorite punk genre. Evergreen shoutout to Cherie Priest’s Clockwork Century!)

______BONUS