The Spin Sucks Podcast with Gini Dietrich

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 w...

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...

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®...

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...

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 provin...

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® Certificat...

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 act...

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 throu...

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 kee...

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 fall...

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...

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 act...

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...

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...

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, educate...