Kevin Hillstrom: MineThatData

You won't find a single Lemonhead in this entire 17 minute documentary about Dads who take their daughters to a Taylor Swift concert in Los Angeles. As YouTube user @lnsyderloser said "This might be the most wholesome doc I've ever seen".

Extra credit to the Dads who didn't go to the concert and sat in their car for several hours.

        

Been posting this image for nearly twenty years ... no need to change, right? Wait, I'm always asking people to evolve. Oh oh.

That was my young corgi at the time (his name was Bert, and he was 14/10 on the Dog Rates scale). He had a problem with crows.

        

And by everybody, I mean every incumbent who is about to be sent directly into orbit by new technology.

Do you remember the Lemonheaded comments from catalog leaders back in the 2000-2006 timeframe? I do. They were inescapable. "Ecommerce and Catalogs are the same thing ... the website IS your catalog!!!" Nope. Wrong. Papertarians are still arguing to this day. By 2009 (if I remember correctly) the Catalog Conference ended in New Orleans. Catalog Age went away. DMNews executed the classic "we are hip and modern" gambit with "The Big Fat Marketing Blog" (remember that one?), then they went away. Everything went away. Because ecommerce was not cataloging, even if the same foundational strategies applied to both. Old-school skills were not valued.

• Note: Look at what I do for project work as we end 2025 and compare it to the work I performed in 2016 or in 2007 when I started my consulting work. It's barely recognizable. Times change. You can't bolt the future onto the past, though we all want to because it helps us feel like we still have purpose.

The people who disrupted classic catalog marketing are the ones who are about to be disrupted. Every generation is disrupted.

P.S.: I spoke with a 62 year old person who lost his job ... his job (leading one department) was replaced with a position that led four departments. The person hired to replace him was a person with no experience in his industry. Yes, this broke the heart of the 62 year old who spent an entire career doing credible work only to be thrown away and replaced by an inexpensive person with no experience. The 62 year old looked at me and said, "will the young people who did this to me ever get their comeuppance"? Oh yes, they're going to get it. They most certainly will get their comeuppance. The same Search guru who told people that catalog markers were Luddites not deserving of good things doesn't see it yet ... but AI is coming for them, and they'll make the same mistakes the catalog professional did as they are being disrupted.

        

This is the 5,602nd post I've written ... about 280 per year for twenty years. More in the early years, fewer in the past decade.

There isn't a single entity who's done what I've done the way I've done it ... writing about what I've written about ... for the past twenty years.

There's nothing about what I've done that would be considered a "Best Practice" by the experts.

And yet, I persist.

Might there be a lesson here for your business?

P.S.: At the time I wrote this, I received a newsletter via Substack (#coincidence). The author told readers that their efforts had to be, to paraphrase, "spectacular", in order to get anybody to notice their content. This is empty thought leader advice. Nobody is going to create anything spectacular. Nobody. You aren't Apple inventing the iPhone. You sell widgets, and nobody cares about widgets. Your job isn't to be "spectacular". Your job is to be interesting to your limited audience of prospects who care about widgets.

• "Interesting" is achievable.
• "Spectacular" is not going to happen.

        

Did you pay any attention to the NASCAR trial a week ago? Probably not, because it does not impact 994 out of 1,000 of you. But for the six that did pay attention, watching The Teardown on DirtyMo Media (click here), it was as riveting as "content" can get. Michael Jordon suing NASCAR, claiming they are a monopoly, squeezing their own racing teams out of money while generating nine figures of revenue for themselves?

Oh my God, the testimony. The text messages. The emails from team owners to NASCAR. The email from Bass Pro Shops to NASCAR. The Judge begging the parties to settle because he knows that if Michael Jordon wins, it means NASCAR is a monopoly that will be broken up and it will cease to exist as it exists today ... and he knows if Michael Jordon loses, it's the end of his teams, they're done.

I mean, NASCAR thought a hokey twelve-car made-for-tv summer racing series was their "competition". They can't even see that FloRacing is their competition ... Flo essentially has their own sprint car series, they just bought their own late model series, they are aggregating regional series and dirt tracks. On a Saturday night in July, a Flo subscriber can watch a dozen or two dozen main events across the country, each race taking about a half-hour of time. NASCAR Executives have to be asleep at the wheel to not see the threat.

Eventually the testimony was so overwhelmingly against NASCAR that NASCAR elected to settle. The terms of the settlement mean that ALL NASCAR racing teams benefit ... would you do that if you went out on a limb even though the teams you compete against were too cowardly to put their necks out there? Would your terms of settlement help teams that wouldn't help you? That's what Michael Jordon did. He helped all the racing teams with his settlement terms.

In the late stages of a business model, those within the business model become so disconnected from modern realities that they miss the "easy things". I see this in my world ... catalog boutique agencies and #papertarians who are so utterly disconnected from modern commerce that they actually believe Gen-Z loves paper. They'll say absurd things like "74% of marketers believe print has the highest ROI of any marketing discipline." Really? If that was true, what would stop marketers from taking advantage of the highest ROI of any marketing discipline? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. They'd employ the discipline immediately.

Of course, they don't have a Judge helping them understand their shortcomings, they're instead subject to the raw realities of capitalism. Saks comes to mind ... suing Nordstrom because a Chief Merchant is leaving to go to Nordstrom. How utterly clueless do you have to be to believe THAT is your problem? You're nearly bankrupt and that's where you'll spend your remaining $$$ ... on lawyers?

As you get older, this stuff gets exhausting. You've seen the patterns repeat for four decades. You realize there isn't anything that can be done to stop the patterns. You simply hope your readers aren't Lemonheads.