5 Things 03.04.26

A must read for marketers | What now for social media? | What about these oil prices? | Stock market trends - a historical source? | Why we're using AI wrong

Author

Gideon Barker
April 03, 2026

5 Things

From Gideon Barker, founder of Customer iQ. View the newsletter archive.

Hi reader

Thanks for checking out this email on what is Good Friday (I had totally forgotten).

I have another great set of 5 Things for you to ponder this week and appreciate all the great content that I am finding at the moment in and amongst the AI slop 😜

Actually, AI is what I want to briefly discuss this week. I know, we hear soooo much about AI right now. But this week, I’ve bumped into the same message 3 times from 3 separate people - and I wanted to share it with you.

What are they telling me? Read on…

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Your selection of 5 Things for this week:

  1. A must read for marketers (and business owners). A (the?) definitive article that explains the risks of prioritising performance marketing over brand marketing. Tl;dr: at some point you run out of in-market demand and your brand stops creating pre-purchase consideration. In short: you’re screwed. Thanks to JD Prater for putting this out on LinkedIn. For more on this topic, see the work of Tom Roach, Dr Grace Kite, Les Binet, Peter Field.

  1. Meta’s $375m law suit in New Mexico was quickly followed by a court in LA ruling that Facebook and YouTube were deliberately engineered to be addictive.

    Is this the end of social media platforms as we know them? Interesting read on the ‘addictive’ trial via The Conversation.

  1. Were any of us interested in oil prices before the last few weeks? I’ve become a bit obsessed. I interviewed someone in Australia this week and they told me they’re really suffering there from fuel prices. It’s a global issue for sure. Trading Economics shows that in mid-Feb oil was $62/barrel - shooting up to $99 by mid-Mar. After Wednesday night’s national address by Trump (to calm things down?!), on Thursday it jumped to $112 🤯 Gas prices on Wednesday hit $4/gallon in the US. How long can this carry on for?

  1. Now I’ve found myself falling down a stock prices rabbit hole. But, this data is fascinating and tells us a lot about the world. Have you seen what’s happened to Crypto? Bitcoin has almost halved in value in the last 6 months. The FTSE100 lost 9% of its value in just a month to the end of March (since recovered +5%). I’m increasingly seeing stock market trends as a useful visualisation and historical record of human prosperity. At the moment it looks like an ECG read out of a cardiac arrest!

  1. We’re using AI wrong. This week I’ve received this message 3 times, from 3 different people - posts from Matt Spry and Tony Udomiaye and a blog from Matt Lerner. The universe is trying to tell me something. That something is that we’re using AI just to speed up old, bad processes. Time to completely re-think what we’re doing?

You’ve read this far? Great work!

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Thanks for reading 🖖