BIG QUESTIONS
Are you bullshitting your customers about how easy it is to get started?
Getting started is as easy as 1, 2, 3. It just takes a few seconds! Except that #2 is four steps and #3 is three steps and it really takes seven minutes. Traditional marketing banks on the illusion of ease because it fears that honesty about the real friction will cause people to, well, not get started. Perhaps it would. But short-term mollifying also contributes to long-term distrust. When reality hits, customers feel misled and resentful.
Our advice: Don’t hide the friction; frame it. Instead of promising “quick and easy,” promise evolution and a specific time commitment. Tell customers, “It takes seven minutes to start [insert brand promise].” By normalizing friction as a feature of the transformation you’re selling, your brand earns credibility, deepens loyalty, and creates more resilient customers. The marketer’s art isn’t to erase, ignore, or lie about difficulty; it’s to give it purpose and make the process feel safe, communal, and necessary. The message shifts from “trust us, it’s easy” to “trust us, it’s worth it.”
TOOL JOY
A remedy for the common earworm
Picture it: You sit down to work, but a song, jingle, or some other musical phrase is caught on repeat in your head. It can be tough to focus or relax when earworms slither into your brain and refuse to leave. Enter Noisli, a background noise generator that lets you create your own soothing soundscapes via app or browser. Multiple studies show the positive effects of ambient noise on productivity and creativity, making Noisli a must whether you need to mask loud noises, reduce stress, improve focus, or simply create a relaxing environment.
DESIGN WE ❤️
The Scope Creep game
Disclaimer: If you’re a project manager who spent time at an agency, proceed with caution, as this game may trigger flashbacks.
That said, we enjoyed navigating through The Scope Creep game, a choose-your-own-adventure experience that plays through the myriad decisions that arise when managing a client project, and how often projects slide into various levels of scope creep, a perennial topic of discussion in countless post-mortem meetings, and the Achilles’ heel of many a project. We encourage you to spin through it, if for no other reason than to increase your empathy for those intrepid project managers, who seldom get the credit they deserve.
BEEP BOOP
Sweet dreams are made of this. TikTok’s algorithm was designed and optimized to be hyper-addictive – like info-crack. So the fact that they’re offering badges to teenagers for avoiding the scroll at bedtime is… quaint.
Your content has the shelf life of an avocado. LLMs choose freshness over all else, favoring posts with visible updates, new backlinks, updated schema, new examples, and current data over aging pieces.
Tune in, but don’t drop out. College radio is thriving, with 1,000+ student-run stations still blasting their awesomeness. Pinwheel’s proofreader, Irene Harris, is on the mic at KUPS in Tacoma (founder Todd Anthony had his own show on that very station when he was a pup). People, it seems, crave that authenticity.
Party of one (hundred trillion). Did you know that our bodies contain more nonhuman cells than human ones? That’s right, our microbiome is made up of third-party cells (microorganisms, bacteria, etc.) that outnumber native human ones. A human is just a watershed in a skin suit.
AI crashed the holiday party. This past Black Friday, traffic from AI tools to U.S. retail websites jumped a wild 805% compared to the same time frame in 2024. Meanwhile, humans pulled back: Online orders dipped 1% YOY, and shoppers bought fewer items per cart. Blame inflation.
WORD TO THE WISE
“The logic of algorithms tends to repeat what ‘works,’ but art opens up what is possible. Not everything has to be immediate or predictable. Defend slowness when it serves a purpose, silence when it speaks, and difference when evocative. Beauty is not just a means of escape; it is, above all, an invocation.”
– Pope Leo XIV
BECAUSE WE CARE
Those cheap, fast, good videos you’ve been waiting for
Pinwheel and Experian have been hard at work this year creating dozens of SEO-friendly videos. We created a graphics package, have video kits sent to our credit-expert talent, and are converting popular articles into short, two- to three-minute videos one by one. We partnered closely with Experian to try out every viable opportunity to reduce the costs without sacrificing quality. So the system we’ve created together is solidly affordable for any brand relying on leads from organic search.
Watch our webinar to see how we do it OR (even better) just reach out to Melissa@pinwheelagency.com to talk.
ICEBREAKER
What’s the highest-value Thanksgiving leftover in your home?
Todd: The second half of my wife’s raspberry crisp did a disappearing act by breakfast the next morning (I, of course, got one single bite). My mashed potatoes were a distant second. Sigh.
Laura: Not surprising: Thomas Keller’s Leek Bread Pudding. Somewhat surprising: how much I craved the cranberry sauce the next day.
Melissa: The pecan pie is often eaten for breakfast the next day… but if you ask my kids, it’s the pumpkin pie.
Kevin: The Pennsylvania Dutch baked corn soufflé everyone feigns disdain for in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, but then down first.
Kim: My mom’s sweet potato casserole, which is a recipe that’s been handed down for several generations. We use a pecan topping, not marshmallows. Yum!
Sarah: I’m a total sucker for the post-Thanksgiving sandwich like Ross from Friends.
John: My wife transformed the leftover turkey and stuffing into delicious, crispy croquettes via some kind of magical alchemy.
Jason: My wife makes the best pumpkin cheesecake. It’s unbelievable in the morning with a cup of coffee, so good.
FALLACIES, PARADOXES & THEORIES…OH MY
The Horn Effect
Imagine you walk into a café, the barista scowls at you, and now you’re suddenly convinced the coffee’s stale, the place is dirty, and the staff are unhelpful (despite zero proof). This is the corollary to the Halo Effect. The Horn Effect is where a single negative experience taints the whole experience in the observer’s mind. For brands, it means one glitch, one bad tweet, one rude customer-chat can cascade and damage their entire perception. Bottom line: Everything matters, so fix the small stuff before it wrecks the perception of the big stuff.
