WDMA - Daily Marketing News · John Miglautsch

Scotch Optimism, Meta Bugs & AI, Avoid Passive Voice

·24 min

John opens with housekeeping. He reminds listeners about the WDMA meetup on the 29th, says it is next Wednesday at 3 p.m. Chicago time, and tells them to look up WDMA on LinkedIn and register there. He jokes that if you did not get a personal invite, it is because you have not done enough to get connected with WDMA, but still says there is time and there is hope. Then the tone shifts. He argues that the social platforms people used to share work and market their businesses began as communities but are now actively harvesting people’s skills and experience for their own profit without recompense. That is the complaint. He says the network effect keeps people locked in, so even when a platform is extracting value, leaving is not simple. Meta gets named next. He says what Instagram users signed up for was post content and eyeballs, which Meta sells as ads, and he adds that the company strips out metadata such as geolocation and also strips out copyright information. He treats that as a direct derivative problem: millions of copyrighted works, including your own work, become the raw material for second-order content that competes for attention on the platform and also competes off platform against originals for merchandise sales and other revenue. AI shows up too. He says AI influencers already crowd the top spots and prompt slop already powers viral feeds. Then he reads the comments, including Johan’s reply and likes from Dr. Augustine Foo and himself, to reinforce the point that nobody should be surprised by any of this. The last turn is writing advice. He wraps by saying to kill passive constructions, aim for subject-verb-object, and prefer 'I'll send you your kit now' over 'the kit will be forwarded to you immediately.'

As heard by us

A direct complaint about platform extraction that closes with a plain active-voice writing lesson.

John Miglash opens with a WDMA meetup reminder, then moves into a familiar complaint: social platforms began as places for community and now turn people's skills and experience into product.

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Why you'd press play

You want a fast, skeptical take on Meta, content harvesting, and cleaner business writing.

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