The Spin Sucks Podcast with Gini Dietrich

Someone in your organization is about to claim AI visibility in 2027 planning—and if comms doesn’t raise its hand, someone else will. Communicators have been handed this kind of work twice before and lost the seat both times. In this week’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich shares why AI visibility is our third chance, the gaps that could cost us again, and the three things you need to say “this is ours” and back it up with numbers.

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/pr-ai-visibility/ Take your own PESO Model® Diagnostic:https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/PESO Model® Certification:https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/

Ninety-two percent of content marketers use AI, and they’re no more likely to get strong results than the people who don’t use it at all. In this week’s episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich explains what E-E-A-T really means in the AI slop era—and why it isn’t the “25 years of experience” line in your author bio. You’ll learn the three things AI can’t write for you (your people, your process, and your culture), what 260+ PESO Model® Diagnostics reveal about how teams really work, and the AI prompt I use to flag every sentence a competitor could have written.

Read the post: https://spinsucks.com/communication/people-process-culture-e-e-a-t/

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

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

Spin Sucks Community:https://spinsucks.com/community

Your AI visibility dashboard says you’re winning, but it may only be asking AI about your own headlines. In this episode of the Spin Sucks podcast, Gini Dietrich shares how we caught a vendor report flattering a client who turned out to be absent from every real customer question, and I walk through the exact AI visibility audit we use instead: the spreadsheet, the anchor hub, the trust map, and the “says who?” rule for measurement.

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-dashboard-lies/

PESO Model® Diagnostic:https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/PESO Model® Certification:https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/Spin Sucks Community:https://spinsucks.com/community

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 Community:https://spinsucks.com/community

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 are.

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/marketing-pr-measurement-broken/

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

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

Build your measurement spine: https://spinsucks.com/contact/

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 PESO Model® Diagnostic:https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/PESO Model® Certification:https://spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification/Full article:https://spinsucks.com/communication/peso-model-diagnostic-novartis/

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 the team or you're the one using the tools (or both).

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-resourceful-cheating

My conversation with Tara McDonagh: https://communicationsbusinessadvisor.libsyn.com/episode-49-yes-and-what-gini-dietrich-and-i-learned-from-each-other

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

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

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-model-proof

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

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

Spin Sucks Community:https://spinsucks.com/community

D S Simon report:https://www.dssimon.com/earned-media-in-the-ai-era-report/

Sword and the Script survey:https://www.swordandthescript.com/2026/08/ai-visibility-survey/

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/communication/ai-visibility-peso-model/

Meet Your New Buyer Persona:https://spinsucks.com/communication/meet-your-new-buyer-persona/

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/communication//ai-visbility-peso-model

Marketing Dive article:https://www.marketingdive.com/news/why-unpaid-media-is-now-essential-to-ai-visibility/822485/ Free PESO Model® Diagnostic:https://spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic/

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

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 awareness problem from a belief problem.

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-visibility-trust/

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

The full eight-week arc, from the CMO operating system post through the Duolingo diagnostic, is at spinsucks.com

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 full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/duolingo-peso-model-diagnostic/

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

The series so far: Budweiser, Liquid Death, Peppa Pig, and HubSpot at spinsucks.com

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.lippincott.com/cmo-outlook-2026/

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

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

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 that this is reputation management, which means it belongs to communicators.

Read the full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/ai-reputation-management/

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

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-marketing-budget

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

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

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/

Full article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/peso-model-diagnostic-hubspot

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

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

Read the article: https://spinsucks.com/communication/visibility-engineering-playbook

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 value, this one's for you.

Links:

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

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

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Full article: https://spinsucks.com/uncategorized/cmo-operating-system-problem

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