I have always been fascinated by persuasion and manipulation. After all, there is only a thin line dividing persuading you to vote for someone, for example, and manipulating you into being a brainless acolyte.

Gregg Renfrew, the founder and chief executive of Beautycounter, helped popularize the idea of “clean beauty” — skin-care products made without chemical additives. Credit...Philip Cheung for The New York Times

Chief marketing officer. Chief brand officer. Chief operating and marketing officer. Chief commercial and strategy officer. None of these job titles are the same, yet various companies assign them to the same person: their top marketer.

In this edition of Today in Science, conceptual differences, even of the simplest words, show up everywhere, and most people have no idea that others think differently than they do.

A lot of people say they are "in marketing". Some say they are "in marketing" because they somehow feel inferior than, say, being "in advertising" and want to feel more important. Others are totally clueless. Here's an easy guide to what's what: In general, marketing is the series of disciplines that take a product --you guessed it-- to market. Advertising is the series of disciplines that create selling messages and takes them to customers. When you're hiring a CMO you are hiring someone who understands every one of those buckets and can help your company grow in a strong, measured, way.

Creatives are facing a perfect storm going into 2024, including economic uncertainty, political turmoil, international conflicts and shifting workplace models. 

Taylor Swift’s affinity for Le Creuset is real. What is not real: Ms. Swift’s endorsement of the company’s products, which have appeared in recent weeks in ads on Facebook and elsewhere featuring her face and voice. The ads are among the many celebrity-focused scams made far more convincing by artificial intelligence.

Conventional wisdom says that investors and VCs don’t have the “bandwidth” (attention span) needed to read or understand a pitch deck that is over something around 10 pages.

This is a poor statement: “We are seeing an increased focus on planning and buying for attention, over pure reach, as more brands seek to maximize their return on investment and capitalize on the attention economy tools available to them.”

There are 20 ads singled out in this AdWeek article as being "The Best of 2023".