Dec 16, 2025 3 min read Daily Rundown

🎯 New Marketing Channel

Plus: Lenovo Bets on Agents, Early Growth Is a Contact Sport

Good Morning, Marketers!

Marketing is quietly acquiring a new distribution channel, and it doesn’t look like a channel at all.

RETAIL

BNPL Makes Debt the New Marketing Channel

👀 What’s happening: This holiday season, buy-now-pay-later platforms like Afterpay, Affirm, and Klarna quietly rewired consumer marketing. No longer just a checkout plugin, BNPL became the campaign itself—front-loaded in Apple Pay, Cash App, and retailer takeovers, complete with “0% interest” ads and brand-financed promos. Cyber Monday alone saw $1 billion flow through these plans, turning deferred payment into prime-time persuasion.

🔥 How this hits reality: For marketers, BNPL has morphed from a finance tool into a behavioral lever. Payment choice now is the offer. Instead of coupons, brands sell time—six-month interest-free “experiences” that convert faster than 25%-off codes. Traditional media buying looks clumsy next to co-funded fintech placements that live inside wallets and checkouts. The marketing funnel just collapsed into a single click labeled “Pay Later.”

🎯 Our take: When easy credit becomes the pitch, marketers aren’t just selling products anymore; they’re selling the feeling of being able to afford anything.

AGENTS

Lenovo Bets on Marketing to Agents

👀 What’s happening: Lenovo CMO Emily Ketchen is treating the AI agent boom as a marketing revolution before it even fully arrives. Her team is retooling campaigns so that machines, not humans, can find and interpret them—training marketers on large models, building prompt libraries, and designing content legible to AI discovery systems. It’s a bet that when agents start picking products, Lenovo will already speak their language.

🔥 How this hits reality: It’s a bold, maybe premature, pivot. The infrastructure for agentic discovery isn’t mainstream yet, and most buying decisions still flow through human intent. Yet Ketchen’s model—engineering marketing for algorithms instead of audiences—shows where the discipline is headed. Traditional marketers who still optimize for clicks may soon find their work invisible to the very systems filtering the market.

🎯 Our take: Lenovo’s marketing might be ahead of its time. But in the AI era, waiting for mass adoption is the slowest move you can make.

STARTUPS

Early Growth Is a Contact Sport

👀 What’s happening: At Web Summit Lisbon 2025, Tally co-founder Marie Martens and Spinnable founder Vasco Pedro skipped the usual “growth hack” talk. They shared how real traction begins long before automation, through cold DMs, small WhatsApp groups, and one-on-one recovery after things break. Both founders insisted that the first hundred users are not metrics but mirrors that show whether your product truly fits real people.

🔥 How this hits reality: Early growth is not a funnel but fieldwork. Marketers who hide behind dashboards miss the friction that defines what deserves to scale. AI tools may help you move faster, yet they cannot replace the empathy that comes from listening, apologizing, and improving in public. Before automation, intimacy becomes the moat and the data worth scaling later.

🎯 Our take: Before you automate, get close. Real early growth starts with people, not playbooks.

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