Dear Brands: Stop Faking It

Trauma doesn't just live in memory. It lives in the body, and because it lives in the body, it quietly runs parts of your life without asking your permission. A review of van der Kolk's landmark book.

We password our bank accounts, but not our calendars. Money gets guarded; time gets spent. Because time has no visible “balance,” we say yes too easily, until it hits: you can earn more money, but you can never earn more time.

What happens to marketing when the audience is a machine? AI agents are already negotiating with AI agents. This isn't a channel shift. It's a participant shift. And the window to prepare is measured in months, not decades.

Most marketing strategies in Saudi Arabia fail before they launch. Not because the people are incompetent, but because the thinking is flat. One brief. One KPI. One dimension. The market moves in five directions at once. The question is whether the marketer has kept up.