Topic pillars

Five arguments this show won't stop having.

Every episode sits inside one of these conversations. Pick the one your week is about — or the one your board meeting is avoiding.

After 78 episodes, certain arguments keep coming back — not because we can't move on, but because the industry keeps moving them forward in ways that change the terms. This page groups every episode by the five territories the show has spent the most time in. If you're about to walk into a board meeting, an RFP response, or a strategy offsite, find the territory that matches and use the episode list as your pre-read.

Pillar 1

The future (and survival) of the DMO

If your org still exists in five years, this is how.

The show's longest-running argument — whether DMOs as they're currently structured can survive the combined pressure of AI-powered travel planning, fraying funding models, and resident pushback. We've titled episodes *"Are DMOs Doomed?"*, *"What Happens to DMOs When Everything Changes?"*, *"Is This the Beginning of the End for DMOs?"* — none of them rhetorically. The argument isn't whether destination marketing survives. It's whether the *organization* survives in its current shape, with its current funding, serving its current stakeholders.

Browse all "the future (and survival) of the dmo" episodes →

Pillar 2

AI as co-worker, not as feature

Stop treating AI like Google. Start treating it like a team member.

Forty-six episodes touch AI. But the show's distinctive argument — the one you can't find anywhere else in destination-marketing media — is that most DMOs are using AI wrong because they're treating it like a better search engine. The useful mental model isn't Google. It's a new hire. This pillar includes the original AI episodes from late 2024, the AI-adoption deep dives with C.A. Clark, the "brand in the prompt era" argument, and the most recent conversations about what changes when AI becomes the interface between a traveler and a destination.

Browse all "ai as co-worker, not as feature" episodes →

Pillar 3

The broken economics of destination marketing

RFPs, funding, incentives — everything that makes this business harder than it should be.

Destination marketing runs on an incentive structure that doesn't match its stated mission. DMOs are funded for transactions they can't measure, scored against metrics that don't correspond to impact, and forced through procurement processes (RFPs) that select for the wrong agency traits. This pillar is the show's running argument about how to actually fix it — or at least stop pretending it's fine. Episodes here feature the industry's most direct conversations about what's wrong with tourism funding, why RFPs select against the work that would matter most, and what the DMO-agency relationship could look like if both sides stopped tolerating a process that produces mediocrity.

Browse all "the broken economics of destination marketing" episodes →

Pillar 4

The DMO's real job (beyond the transaction)

If the booking disappears, what's the job? Residents. Stewardship. Community.

If AI takes the transaction — and there's a real chance it does — the DMO's remaining job is everything that isn't the transaction. That's where this pillar lives: residents, stewardship, community impact, economic development, the full visitor journey before and after the booking window. The episodes here are the show's longest-running sincere argument (as opposed to its provocations). Nobody on the show thinks DMOs are about to disappear if they can't prove transactional ROI. But everyone on the show believes the DMO that matters in 2030 will be structured around a different question than the one it was built to answer.

Browse all "the dmo's real job (beyond the transaction)" episodes →

Pillar 5

Measurement honesty

Zombie metrics, data hangovers, and the discipline of admitting you don't know.

Destination marketing has a measurement problem that nobody on conference stages wants to say out loud: most of what gets tracked doesn't mean what we claim it means. Correlations get reported as causation. Activity metrics get dressed up as impact metrics. Entire annual reports rest on numbers the organization can't actually attribute. This pillar collects the show's most direct conversations about measurement honesty — what to stop reporting, what to start reporting, how to tell the difference between a zombie metric (looks alive, measures nothing) and a useful one, and how to have the hard conversation with a board that wants false certainty.