Tag: brand control
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Your AI Has No Loyalty to My Brand
When your AI shops for you, it picks the cheapest or best-reviewed option every time. It has no memory of the guy who showed up at 2am. The death of ‘my gu
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The Default Economy and the Small Brand Death Trap
If UCP collapses shopping into a single Pay button, Gemini surfaces one brand as the definitive answer. How do smaller brands survive a default economy? Da
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Google Calls It Open. I Call It a Channel.
UCP moves competition upstream toward platforms while merchants carry operational complexity. Will’s skeptic take on whether ‘open’ ever means what it says
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What UCP Means for the Franchise Model
Corporate mandates UCP compliance. The local franchisee has a different price sheet. What happens when an AI agent hits the franchise manifest and finds a
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UCP Isn’t a Tech Standard — It’s a Business Survival Kit
UCP Isn’t a Tech Standard — It’s a Business Survival Kit I’ve been in enough rooms where someone shows a PowerPoint about a new technology standard and watches the audience’s eyes glaze over. Standards feel like infrastructure. Infrastructure feels like someone else’s problem. The CTO might care. Finance definitely doesn’t. Sales is already back on…
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The Loyalty Program Is Dead. Here’s What Replaces It.
The Loyalty Program Is Dead. Here’s What Replaces It. I have loyalty cards for eleven businesses. I actively use two of them. The other nine are in a drawer somewhere, or in an app I haven’t opened since 2022, or expired, or require a minimum spend I never hit. The businesses that issued them spent…
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The UCP Skeptic’s Case
Will steelmans the critics: when transactions happen inside Google’s environment, merchants lose UX, merchandising, and post-purchase engagement. Products
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What Happens to Loyalty Programs When My Agent Shops for Me?
AI agents have zero brand loyalty. Loyalty programs built over decades get bypassed at the moment of purchase. Will’s take from a small operator who’s watc
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Azoma Launches AMP for Brand Control in AI Commerce
Azoma’s Agentic Merchant Protocol (AMP) is an open standard framework enabling retailers to maintain authoritative control over product catalogs, pricing, and merchandising rules across AI-powered shopping agents through machine-readable specifications and standardized APIs, with real-time inventory synchronization and transaction authorization against merchant-owned data sources. AMP establishes vendor-agnostic technical specifications for autonomous agent query validation and…