The Spin Sucks Podcast with Gini Dietrich

Your executives have plenty of thoughts. They just don't have time for your thought leadership calendar. In this week’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich shares how a CEO who called a voice-note idea "stupid" became famous in his industry because of it, why the fix is adding one small step to something your execs already do, and what AI can and can't do to turn their thinking into earned media.

Read the post: https://spinsucks.com/communication/thought-leadership-for-executives/  PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/Spin Sucks...

Your executive team wants "the numbers" by Friday, and you know what's coming: six logins, a Thursday-night spreadsheet, and a CEO asking, "So what actually worked?" The problem isn't you—it's a process that asks for activities, judges you on outcomes, and scatters the data across teams and agencies that all measure differently. In this week’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich breaks down why measurement keeps breaking and how to fix it: start from organizational goals, measure each PESO Model® media type for its job, and report what the numbers mean instead of just what they...

Novartis made the most likable pharma ad of the Super Bowl—Gronk, hammocks, "relax your tight end"—and won the Pharma Lions Grand Prix at Cannes for it. But when paid media is the only channel that legal can fully control, the ad quietly becomes your whole operating system, and everything it can't say gets handed to someone else. 

In this month's PESO Model® Diagnostic, Gini Dietrich runs the full Novartis campaign through the PESO lens, names the regulated-industry trap, and lays out the fixes that survive a compliance review—at every size of organization.

Take the...

Give 1,000 people the identical AI-assisted résumé and change only the first name, and James is "resourceful" while Emily "can't even write a CV herself." Three studies this year show women are judged more harshly than men for the same AI use—and in a profession that's two-thirds women, that's not an HR footnote; it's how the job loss Alex Karp predicted actually happens. 

On this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich walks through the research, why the adoption gap doesn't close with access or training, and four things to do about it, whether you lead th...

A new report says earned media is disrupting the PESO Model® for AI discoverability—and a second survey, published the same month, says paid media matters most. They can't both be right, and Gini Dietrich argues neither question is. In this week’s Spin Sucks episode, she walks through what both surveys found, why "which media type matters most" measures who you asked instead of what works, and the finding everyone should be talking about: a 28-point confidence gap between agencies and brands that comes down to one word—measurement.

Read the post: http://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-peso...

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich explains why the AI persona you built last year just got promoted to referee, the only two signals it checks before it vouches for you, and the four moves to make before someone in your building tries to solve "the AI problem" with a bigger ad budget.

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-agents-gatekeepers/ 

Take the free PESO Model Diagnostic®: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ 

PESO Model Certification®: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/ 

AI Visibility Is a PESO Model Problem: https://spinsucks.com/com...

Everyone is writing the same article about AI visibility: it's a new discipline, and—what luck!—they sell the thing that fixes it. Nope. AI systems reward probability, not popularity, and probability gets built through the integrated program communicators have been running for more than a decade: the PESO Model®. 

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich breaks down the specific job each media type does in the evidence base LLMs actually score—and the claims-versus-corroboration audit to run with your team this week.

Links: 

Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communicati...

Everyone wants the AI visibility tool with the free trial and the dashboard. We don't have one to sell you, and neither does anyone else—because if AI isn't recommending your brand, that's usually a trust problem wearing a tooling costume. 

In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich makes the case that trust is a supply chain with stations you cannot skip, and she walks through the three shortcuts that failed in public last year. You'll also learn why getting cited by an AI engine isn't the finish line, and how to tell an aware...

Duolingo built the internet's favorite brand on rented land—the best shared media engine on the planet, run through one green owl on platforms it doesn't control. In this month's PESO Model® Diagnostic, Gini Dietrich looks at what the legend leaves out: an owned media record too thin to defend the brand when the 2025 "AI-first" backlash hit. You'll learn why Duo's chaos is actually disciplined character work, why AI engines ignore your funniest channel and cite your machine-readable record instead, and the three fixes that apply to any brand being told to "just go viral."

Read the ful...

Your best work goes into review sounding like your brand, only to come out sounding like a terms-of-service update—and legal isn't actually to blame. Nearly 80% of CMOs tell Lippincott that bureaucracy regularly interferes with decision-making, and that's not a culture problem—it's a brand-erosion mechanism. In this episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich breaks down the difference between compliance bureaucracy and the self-inflicted kind, and shares the quarterly content pod system regulated teams use to ship fast without skipping review.

Links: Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/org-chart-brand-sabotage/  

Lippincott CMO Outlook 2026: https://www.li...

AI tools are already answering questions about your brand—to your buyers, your board, and the journalists who cover you—and they're confidently wrong often enough that one Minnesota company is suing Google for as much as $210 million over a lawsuit its AI invented. To make matters worse, Muck Rack research shows that in 29% of organizations, nobody owns this at all. In this episode, Gini Dietrich shares the four-move discipline for governing what AI says about your brand—baseline the narrative, fix your source of truth, correct the record with infrastructure, and give the work an owner—and make the case...

Gartner predicts that more than 40% of CMOs who push for bigger budgets this year will lose influence with the C-suite—because their asks never connect to what the business runs on. Here's the thing: your CFO's language has only four words—pipeline, risk, retention, and cost-to-acquire—and 'reach' isn't one of them. In this episode, I show you how to translate your work into those four numbers, which budget lines to cut before someone cuts them for you, and why one traceable story beats 12 metrics in any budget meeting.

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/defend...

HubSpot lost roughly 75% of its blog traffic to AI search—and grew revenue 19% anyway. Everyone wrote the obituary for content marketing, but the traffic that died was the content HubSpot never had the right to own, and everything built on real authority held. In Episode 4 of the PESO Model® Diagnostic, I break down what survived, what didn't, and how to tell which of your own content is an asset versus exposure—before AI makes the call for you.

Take your own PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/

PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

F...

Your buyers are asking their AI tool of choice who to trust—and if AI doesn't cite you, you don't exist. Communicators missed SEO once because it felt "too technical," and the Lippincott data says we're on track to repeat history with AI. In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich shares the five-move visibility engineering playbook, plus the moment Martin Waxman ran his own organization through the PESO Model® Diagnostic live and turned a 50% score into a blueprint. If you're determined to own AI visibility before someone else does, this one's for you.

Take the f...

A new Lippincott study says only 28% of CMOs feel they have real influence in their organization—and your CEO has probably already seen it. Most people blame short-term thinking, but Gini Dietrich argues that the real problem is structural. CMOs are managing a pile of channels rather than running a system. You'll learn why the brand-versus-performance debate is a trap, why dumping budget into AI while starving owned media makes you less visible inside AI, and how the PESO Model® works as the operating system that earns C-suite influence back. If you're working hard and still can't prove your val...

You understand the PESO Model®, so why does it still feel like a pile of tactics instead of a system that runs? In this episode, Gini Dietrich takes you inside the PESO Model Certification® she tore down and rebuilt—what changed, what she refused to touch, and who it's honestly not for. If you've ever understood something cold and still couldn't make it run, this one's for you.

Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ 

Explore the PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

A cartoon pig ran one of the most integrated campaigns I've seen in years—and it still leaves the most important question unanswered. In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, I run the Peppa Pig pregnancy campaign through the PESO Model® Diagnostic to show you the difference between a brilliant campaign and an actual operating system: one has a finale, the other never ends. 

Take the PESO Model® Diagnostic: https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/ 

Explore the PESO Model® Certification: https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/ 

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/peso-model-diagnostic-peppa-pig

Your dashboard is full of green arrows—and your CFO still isn't impressed. That's because most of what we measure flatters us instead of informing us, and the numbers that actually matter in 2026 are the ones almost nobody is tracking yet. 

In this episode, Gini Dietrich walks through the four metrics that survive the budget meeting—LLM visibility, citation frequency, narrative share of voice, and credibility loop close rate—and why you can't bolt them onto a system that isn't running as a system. If you've ever been proud of a report that couldn't answer "did this move th...

You're doing the work—the content, the media, the campaigns—and the minute leadership asks what it's all worth, you've got nothing to hand them. So you go looking for a better dashboard. In this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich explains why a measurement problem is almost never a measurement problem—it's the first place a broken system shows up—and shares the Diagnostic data proving the biggest budgets aren't buying readiness. You'll learn why pitching the PESO Model® as a marketing expense loses the budget every time, and how to reframe it as the operating system that...

Google just announced the biggest change to Search in more than 25 years, and your CMO is about to ask if you're on top of it. You probably are — but the work doesn't have a name your leadership recognizes. On this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, learn why the visibility gap has two halves, the vocabulary problem costing you budget, and the four moves to close both.

In the second of the monthly PESO Model® Diagnostic series, Gini Dietrich diagnoses the operating system behind Liquid Death, the rare brand sitting at Stage 5 / Leadership on the PESO Maturity Ladder, where the operating system isn't supporting the product. It IS the product.

Take the free PESO Model® Diagnostic at spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic, or learn about the 2026 PESO Model® Certification at spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification.

The PESO Model® has six stages of maturity—and the data says 91% of communications teams are stuck in the bottom half of the ladder.

In this episode, Gini walks through the six stages (Foundation, Pilot, Scale, Systemize, Real-Time, and Leadership), what each one looks like inside real brands like Oracle, McDonald's, Dove, Sephora, Netflix, and Liquid Death, and how to find out where your team actually sits. Not optimistically sits. Truly sits.

After 18 months of AI-assisted repurposing, most communications teams are quietly producing weaker, more generic content than they were producing two years ago. The leverage is real. The dilution is real, too. 

In this episode, Gini Dietrich walks through the telephone game effect—and how you can fix it.

After 12 years and several refreshes, the PESO Model® has a new graphic — and Gini is drawing the line between free use and theft. In this episode, she discusses what changed, what the four outcomes (Authority, Credibility, Discovery, Growth) actually mean, how to read the graphic correctly, and what now requires a license. Download the graphic at spinsucks.com/peso-model-graphic. Use it well.

Budweiser won USA Today's Ad Meter for the 10th time—and while everyone was arguing Monday morning about the Clydesdale, the bald eagle, and whether "American Icons" was AI-assisted, the real story wasn't 60 seconds of creativity. It was whether the ad was part of a system.

In the first episode of the new PESO Model® Diagnostic series, Gini Dietrich runs Budweiser's "Made of America" program through the PESO operating system lens and shows exactly where coordination ends and integration begins. 

The lesson isn't about $8M ad budgets. It's about sequencing, depth, and a central nervous syst...

Earned media is still one of the most powerful credibility signals you can get, but in today’s AI-shaped market, a single hit is no longer enough. In this episode, Gini Dietrich explores visibility engineering, why disconnected media placements create noise instead of authority, and how to connect earned and owned media to build credibility that compounds. If you want to become the answer that keeps showing up, this episode is for you.

In this week’s Spin Sucks episode, Gini Dietrich explores why publishing more content is not enough to build authority in an AI-shaped market. Instead, the brands that win are the ones with clear positioning, consistent messaging, proof-backed content, and third-party validation that reinforces what they stand for. Tune in to learn how owned and earned media work together, why generic content falls flat, and what communicators can do now to become the obvious answer.

Women are on the front line of AI disruption, especially in communications, marketing, content, and other roles built on critical thinking, writing, and judgment. In this episode, Gini Dietrich unpacks Alex Karp’s comments about AI reducing the power of highly educated, often female professionals, what that reveals about who is most vulnerable as AI scales, and why this is a power problem as much as a workforce one.

On this week’s Spin Sucks podcast episode, Gini Dietrich explores how hustle culture trained us to confuse keeping up with actually understanding, why the performance of consumption is not the same thing as thinking, and what communicators, marketers, and leaders stand to lose when everything is optimized for speed.

The PESO Model® did not become less relevant because of AI—it became more necessary. In this episode, Gini Dietrich breaks down how AI exposed the flaws in disconnected marketing and why modern paid, earned, shared, and owned media must work as an integrated system. She also explains why certification matters for marketers who want to move from knowing the acronym to knowing how to run it.

Measurement isn’t math. It’s storytelling with numbers—and in a PESO Model® operating system, it’s how you prove what changed (not what you did).

In this Spin Sucks episode, Gini Dietrich breaks measurement down for marketers who would rather alphabetize their spice drawer than open a dashboard. You’ll learn the outcome-first framework behind PESO measurement, how to stop reporting outputs and activities, and how to measure PESO as a system that creates, validates, distributes, and amplifies proof with purpose.

Running the PESO Model®as separate tactics creates noise, not momentum. In this episode, Gini Dietrich shares what PESO Model integration really is: repeatable decisions, a stop list that prevents chaos, and a one-page integration map that keeps everything connected.

In this episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich resets what shared and paid are actually for inside the PESO Model® operating system. She covers why these two areas feel like chaos, how to define “proven signals” before you spend, and how shared and paid work together to create consistent, compounding visibility in a world shaped by communities, creators, and AI-driven discovery.

In this episode, Gini Dietrich unpacks the visibility engine: Owned and Earned media working together. Owned is your home base—structured expertise built on defendable themes, repeatable authority anchors, and proof. Earned is credibility transfer—validation you can’t buy that makes your expertise easier to trust, repeat, and surface across the web (and in AI answers).

AI has changed discovery. Your audience is getting answers without clicking, and “post here, pitch there, boost this” doesn’t just feel scattered—it performs scattered. Gini Dietrich walks you through the 2026 PESO Model® Certification, rebuilt to help marketers and communicators run PESO as an operating system and engineer visibility, credibility, and trust across paid, earned, shared, and owned media—without needing a bigger team or a bigger budget.

A powerful image out of Minnesota keeps resurfacing: federal agents inside a Target store, terrorizing employees and customers. Just the mere image collapses everything into the questions people are asking in real time: Am I safe at work? Am I safe while shopping?

When leaders respond with silence or vague calls for “de-escalation,” they create a vacuum filled by fear, rumor, and the message they cannot control: “declined to comment.”

In this episode, Gini Dietrich unpacks why companies default to silence, why that rationale fails, and what communicators should push for instead: decisions, documented protocols, manager...

We’ve been told the growth strategy is simple: comment a lot, get noticed, build relationships, and win customers. But when busy professionals outsource those comments to AI, engagement turns into performance—and buyers can tell. In this episode, Gini Dietrich shares the “trust math” behind why AI comments backfire, how they create reputation debt, and what to do instead.

The PESO Model® isn’t outdated—but many implementations are. In this episode, Gini Dietrich explains how the PESO Model has evolved from a framework into a marketing operating system designed for today’s reality: fewer journalists, more creators, AI-driven discovery, fragmented trust, and rising expectations for measurement.

Sir Martin Sorrell said, “PR is dead.” The PR industry responded. And the real issue isn’t whether he’s right—it’s why that line even sounds believable to leadership.

In this episode, Gini Dietrich separates publicity from PR, unpacks why executives often treat PR as a replaceable distribution channel, and explains what modern PR actually does in 2026: it builds credibility that compounds, educates LLMs, engages humans, and drives revenue by reducing friction in the buyer's journey. 

Plus, she shares exactly what to do about it—how to frame PR in executive language and what to measure...

The PESO Model® has evolved—and that evolution matters more than ever in 2026.

As AI accelerates execution and marketing teams are asked to deliver more with fewer resources, the real challenge isn’t whether to use AI. It’s whether your organization has a system strong enough to govern it.

In this episode, Gini Dietrich explains how the PESO Model has evolved from a framework into an operating system—one that helps senior marketers integrate AI, align teams and agencies, and measure what actually drives business outcomes.