Mason Pelt

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I’m Mason Pelt, I write about the intersection of marketing and culture. If you want to hire me to write words for your publication contact mason [at] masonpelt dot com.

I also work for Push ROI, please direct inquiries for advertising, production and UX work accordingly.

My full bio is here. If you want to follow my work or connect on social media see below.

Articles As Audio (Podcasts)

Apple podcasts – Podchaser – Spotify – Iheartradio – Pocketcasts – Google podcasts – Stitcher – Pandora – Amazon Music – RadioPublic – Playerfm – Deezer – RSS (Audio feed)

Other Social Networks & Such

Goodreads – Tealfeed – Facebook (page) – Medium – Substack – Twitter (in limbo) – Mastodon (feed)

Bio & Wiki Pages

Crunchbase (wiki) – Push ROI (company bio) – MuckRack (curated profile)

Cool People

Uncool Companies

Recent Notes

Recent Articles

  • Calling For A Moratorium On Calling For A Moratorium On AI

    The AI industry is heavily capitalized, and reliant on smoke and mirrors. Calls for regulation and open letters asking for a pause in AI research from leaders of AI companies make headlines every few months. These are not circulating out of genuine fear, they are self aggrandizing, and honestly monopolistic. In under a year, artificial […]

  • The AI Anti-Utopia, And Other Stories

    Software is replacing artists and writers who enjoy their work while warehouse staffers pee in bottles to make quota. AI is turning into a shitty anti-utopia. As I write this, the Writers Guild of America (WGA) has been on strike for 28 days. In a negotiation with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers […]

  • AI Enabled Greed And Stupidity

    The content units mindset makes AI replacing human writers inevitable. This AI future won’t just replace writers, when the goal is churning out more content units, ever cheaper, every creative is on the chopping block. The sword that will cut their jobs is being forged with their work.

  • The Advertising Pyramid Scheme

    The advertising economy is starting to resemble a collection of interconnected multi-level marketing schemes. Some kind of intermediary firm sits atop each pyramid brokering the serving of ads to eyeballs. Under that are ad agencies, and tech firms that work on sales and bid management. The bottom are ad buyers, perhaps too few to sustain […]

  • The Business of Helping Build Businesses

    This goes out to freelancers and those who run professional service companies. Are you building a business or helping others build theirs? It can be both. But that requires awareness, caution, and focus. 

  • Ad Fed Brains, And Other Stories

    People absorb information passively. Humans can, of course, intently study; but few can fully switch off passive learning. This gives advertising incredible power over people they do not recognize. I vividly remember a multi-month period in my childhood when headlines about Tylenol overdoses dominated the nightly news. I also remember Aleve’s commercial saying, “Just two […]

  • BuzzFeed News And Twitter Blues

    To greatly paraphrase Tolstoy, you can explain anything to a complete ding dong if they know nothing about the topic, but you’ll fail to explain it to the greatest minds if they start with any preconceptions. Cognitive bias is powerful. People will pay more for a worse product if they think the brand is better. […]

  • Advertising Demon, And Other Stories

    People like getting services at no direct cost, advertisers like selling to those people. While most want services at no cost to them, they don’t like being tracked. Modern ad tech puts people into a kind of human terrarium. Large tech platforms from Alphabet (once Google) and Meta (once Facebook) down the line gather and […]

  • Brands As People, People As Brands

    People strive to be brands creating a loss of self, and often a loss of any potential brand. Brands try to be people, in programmatic and contrived ways. Both are organic as a Twinkie asking how the fellow kids are doing.

    On a call for a long-dead startup building its empire on Google+, someone, a person, objected to being paid to appear in a commercial promoting a class they sold because of how it would impact their brand. They were a chef, not a famous one. But in July of 2011, they had quickly amassed a following of about 6,000 in under a month on the hot emerging social network that was Google+, and they believed fame was on the horizon.