Meet the Author

Ah, automation — everyone’s favorite buzzword. Along with machine learning, chatbots and General Data Protection Regulation, it’s one of the prevailing themes of marketing trends and predictions for 2020 and beyond.

If you’re like me, you’re in full-on Futurama-face mode, and automation feels like a bunch of slick-talking Google reps trying to take our jobs. 

If you follow American football, or the news, or literally anyone on any social medium, you know what’s happening in Atlanta this weekend.

Our precious city in the trees is being invaded by throngs of inebriated Bostonians in TB12 jerseys, here to pilfer our bars’ supplies of Sam Adams and shout “28-3” in Waffle Houses from Adairsville to Zebulon Rd. These outlaws will stop at nothing until everyone in the state talks like Ben Affleck in Good Will Hunting.

As America gears up to spend Labor Day weekend drinking excessively at the lake, watching college game after college game, it’s time to come to terms with an important fact of life for Georgians:

Atlanta might be the worst-best sports city in the country.

Here at Nebo, we’re big fans of Atlanta. Not Donald Glover’s "Atlanta" (though I think many of us are also big fans of the show), but the actual city.

Atlanta is the city that facilitated Nebo’s 14 years of growth, so of course, we want to see it thrive.

It’s the ninth-largest metropolitan area in the United States by population and the tenth-largest in terms of GDP.

It’s the city where Bobby Petrino became a villain and Nayvadius Wilburn became Future.

It’s also a city on the cusp of a metropolitan tipping point: affordable enough to be accessible for everyone, but cool enough to attract celebrities and start-ups. We’re approaching the point where we can either embrace our chicness and send rents skyward, or remain affordable and compete with Oklahoma City for the “Kind of Cool, I Guess” award.

On its surface, urban development doesn’t seem like an issue for a digital marketing agency to worry about. Really, though, it’s an issue that everyone needs to care about.

Growing up, I had no idea what I wanted to do when I got older. I would go from marine biologist to race-car driver to nighttime security guard in the span of an hour. At any given moment in high school, I might have told you I either wanted to study sociology at UC Berkeley or drop out to find a berth on a cod-fishing vessel.

The only things I could never see myself doing were marketing and sales (might also throw air traffic control and law enforcement in there for posterity). I was passionate about social and environmental causes as a child, and my parents made sure that I hated Wal-Mart before I could even pronounce the name of that unholiest of places.