
CMO Joe Paluska on the ‘Gravitational Pull' of Fusion and a Marketing Strategy for the Next Energy Revolution
Joe Paluska, CMO of Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS) is on a mission to 'mainstream fusion into the public consciousness.'
He's taken CFS to the World Economic Forum and Cannes Lions to introduce fusion to new and influential audiences. Paluska says fusion is critical to meeting the energy demands driven by AI and the global trend of electrification and is the only clean energy solution to avoid more fossil fuels.
CFS, a company of over 1,000 people with a diverse workforce, is more than halfway through building its 'Spark' machine in Massachusetts. The goal is to hit a major milestone in 2027 by demonstrating net energy gain, often referred to as the holy grail of fusion.
According to Paluska, the climate crisis demands a rapid shift to new energy. He believes that by scaling up their company's unique magnet technology, they can make fusion power common by the 2050s, which would significantly help address climate change.
The company is working on a big public awareness campaign leading up to 2027 and is likening it to a 'lunar lander' moment to get global attention.
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Fast Company
3 hours ago
- Fast Company
Thanks to social media, consumers have more power than ever. Just wait until generative AI becomes commonplace
Hello and welcome to a special edition of Modern CEO! I'm Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs; this week I'm dropping a few extra newsletters from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. Engaging with consumers and clients has traditionally been the purview of customer service teams and chief marketing officers (CMOs) who communicate with customers through advertising and messaging. CMOs are the folks gathered at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity this week. But thanks to social platforms, consumers now have the ability to tarnish or burnish brands, impact revenue, and even hurt or help stock prices —all part of the CEO remit. Consumers 'are more powerful, and they have more access and more tools,' says Anton Vincent, president, Mars Wrigley North America and global ice cream at Mars. 'The creator economy will only help to accelerate consumer power.' Straight from the top As a result, more CEOs are going 'direct to consumer.' LinkedIn says it has seen a 52% increase in posts from CEOs in the past two years. 'We think about [posts] as a conversation,' says Dan Shapero, LinkedIn's chief operating officer. 'Executives feel safe posting because it is a platform for constructive conversation.' Indeed, comments on LinkedIn are up 32% year over year. The most progressive companies and CEOs aren't just talking to customers, they are harnessing customers' energy to help build loyalty and support for their wares—and even to help companies build new products. Research from ad agency TBWA\Worldwide found that 15% of adults globally would spend more for a brand that lets them 'participate in collaborative projects via co-creation, decentralization, or crowdsourcing.' The customer connection Thanks to generative AI, consumers are already creating art, marketing messages, and other content for brands, much of it unauthorized and much of it 'technically impressive but conceptually shallow,' says Jen Costello, global chief strategy officer for TBWA\Worldwide. A better approach is 'where co-creation is less about spectacle and defined more by transparency, reciprocity, and the infrastructure for true partnership,' she says. 'Think co-branded product lines with fans, closed-loop design labs with select contributors, and shared revenue or credit for substantial contributors. With that in place, AI becomes a powerful accelerant rather than the showpiece.' Vincent of Mars Wrigley says the company engages consumers by offering superfans a peek under the tent of what may be coming next. The M&M candy brand, for example, has embraced personalization, selling customized packaging and candies, and its Fun Club community engages members with quizzes, surveys, recipes, and more. Vincent says he also is 'upskilling' his employees to become fluent in technologies and platforms that consumers are using to communicate displeasure or loyalty. CEOs who cede responsibility for engaging with consumers do so at their peril. Says Jim O'Leary, North America CEO and global president at Weber Shandwick: 'Consumers are much more important to CEOs today because they have a much greater ability to influence things.' How are you connecting with customers?

Business Insider
4 hours ago
- Business Insider
Gig worker identity fraud is a 'huge risk' for delivery apps. Here's how one company is trying to combat it.
Some gig workers don't play by delivery companies' rules, using accounts under names other than their own to get more work. That's a big problem that Dennis Moon, COO at delivery service Roadie, is trying to solve. Like Uber, DoorDash, Walmart's Spark, and other delivery apps, Roadie relies on independent contractors to pick up customer orders and drop them off at their doorstep. Like those other apps, Roadie has also seen issues with driver fraud and getting deliveries to customers on time. Roadie and other apps verify contractors' identities when they sign up. However, some workers then hand over their accounts to other people who want to game the system to make money. For instance, Business Insider previously reported that users have posted ads on some social media pages for driver accounts on Walmart's Spark delivery service and similar providers. The results can include delivery workers juggling multiple phones, each with a different account open, and delivering orders under a name other than their own. Using someone else's credentials can help bypass the weeks or months it can take gig workers to get approved on a delivery app, or allow workers to pick up additional orders, for example. Moon said fraudulent drivers represent "a huge risk" for Roadie. Traditional delivery services like UPS — which owns Roadie — rely on a network of sorting centers and drivers who are usually nameless to customers. Delivery services like Roadie, meanwhile, are more personal. "It is different in our world because you know the name of the driver, you have a picture of the driver," Moon said. "This is the person who has your package, who picked up your package, and it gets a lot of the spotlight." Roadie is using biometric facial recognition and geofencing to fight driver fraud Roadie is using biometric facial recognition to help combat the issue. The app prompts contractors to take photos of their faces. The company's technology then compares the photos with those it has on file to ensure that the person using the app and the person registered to use the app are the same. Face scans are now "part of the process in almost every delivery," Moon said. Roadie also uses AI to flag specific times where a face ID check might be necessary, such as when a driver takes a delivery after changing their phone number or when the delivery is high-value. "It could depend on what you're delivering," he said. Roadie is also working on using more precise GPS locations in its app — something that could guard against drivers trying to steal deliveries as well as innocent mistakes. GPS chips in smartphones are typically accurate within about 15 feet. But stand-alone GPS devices have long been accurate down to one foot, Moon said. As smartphone GPS systems become more accurate, Roadie wants to use them to confirm that deliveries have made it to their final destination. Currently, many Roadie deliveries require delivery workers to take a photo of the delivery in place through the app. But Roadie wants to develop a GPS feature that could prevent delivery workers from completing that final step until they're actually in the right spot. "The app will tell them, 'You can't take a picture, it is not in the geofence zone of where that package should be,'" he said. Roadie isn't the only company trying to deter delivery workers from sharing accounts. Walmart uses a facial recognition tool and has asked some drivers to verify their identities in person at Walmart stores. Uber in January gave an updated overview of the processes and technology it uses to prevent ongoing fraud, including real-time ID checks. And DoorDash in December said it would require drivers to verify their identities more often as part of a larger effort to curb account sharing. Moon said detecting fraud on its app is also complicated because it can look similar to innocent mistakes. "If a driver didn't take a photo at drop-off, it might be because cell signal is bad in that area, or it might be because there was some sort of an issue with their device," he said. Moon said he encourages Roadie's Trust and Safety employees to investigate before deactivating a contractor's account. Gig workers for other delivery services have had their accounts deactivated with little warning or explanation from the apps, BI previously reported. "I tell the team all the time, we've got to communicate," he said. "You don't just deactivate a driver."
Yahoo
10 hours ago
- Yahoo
Gap Inc. CEO explains strategy to balance revenue & relevance
Gap Inc. (GAP) president and CEO Richard Dickson sits down with Yahoo Finance Executive Editor Brian Sozzi at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity to discuss the US-based apparel retailer's branding journey, customer strategy, and more. Click here to watch more of Yahoo Finance's coverage from the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity. So let's pick apart brand by brand, the Gap story. What is the Gap story that you're telling this audience? So Gap, as you know, is a 55-year-old brand that really sort of its claim to fame was the personification of American classics, basics that personified style, and it was really about how you wore it, not how we told you to wear it. And the marketing campaigns that we built over time were epic, leveraging music and fashion and big ideas into real marketing and media machines that were arguably what we call fashiontainment. Now along the way, as you also know, Gap lost its way from a storyteller to become a retailer that sold stuff. And we sold a lot of stuff, which we had revenue, but we were missing relevance. And so part of the narrative that we've been working on now is how do you combine relevance to drive revenue? And that's being better storytellers. So we've leveraged, we've gone back to our history to be inspired by it, but essentially create a new playbook for today. Leveraging music, going back to fashiontainment, recognizing that our media mix and up model needs to be where our consumers are, digital, social, influencer, leveraging all of those big ideas whether it's the Get Loose campaign with Troye Sivan, or linen as a fabric that we want to be a leader for, or the various different campaigns we've done recently with Parker Posey that put us right on top of the cultural conversation, that's where Gap should be, that's where we are now and that's where we're going to accelerate going forward. So when I was way back when, when I was an analyst covering Gap, and I wrote some tough stuff, but nonetheless, I I always asked, is Gap going to show up in a big way on the holiday earnings calls? It was a constant question. So for how this holiday season, are you ready to make that big marketing commitment to plaster Gap all over TV? Listen, TV is one area that we will of course, we'll have presence in. But to be relevant today, you need to be everywhere your consumer is. And they're everywhere. It's digital platforms, it's social, it's influencer. It includes some linear. There's a lot of different ways that our brands and brands today need to have consumer conversations. And what I can assure you is that Gap will be part of the cultural and consumer conversation, not only for holiday, but every day leading up to holiday. It is a 24/7 role to be part of consumers' lives. And I think today, you see a much different Gap than you saw just a year ago, and a year from now, you'll see a much different Gap than you see just now. Are you telling all these folks here that your stock ticker changed? First off, I mean, come on, we're Gap. I thought you were at the New York Stock Exchange. Yes, you were GPS. But you were a GPS navigation system for ever. That's right. And and arguably, we were sort of missing the navigation and the destination is Gap. Yeah. And so it was an easy win for us, certainly, your marketing, your ticker everywhere you go. Uh so Old Navy, I, this has to be a prime time in the world and the economy to lean into a value message. Is this, is that correct? Is that what we should expect to see from Old Navy over the next few months? 100%. I mean, Old Navy is the number one specialty apparel value chain in the country in the US. Uh we do have global recognition, but truly an American iconic style, value family proposition in the space. We have leadership market share positions across most categories in the apparel industry. Uh as you know, we've been going after the active space pretty aggressively. We're now the number five active brand uh in the active catego- Old Navy? Old Navy. That's right. Climbing the ranks, consistent quarterly uh comp deliverables, nine consecutive quarters of market share growth. I mean, we're posting more and more excitement, not only in the metrics that matter, but also recognizing that every cohort, lower, middle, and income grew in the last quarter, which really suggests that not only is our product resonating with our core value proposition, but we're starting to attract new customers to the brand, different generations to the brand to consider the style at value proposition. And we believe again, we're just getting started. Um, Banana Republic still on the recovery? I would say it's more than on the recovery. I think that we're in a place right now where if you go into our stores, which I know Brian, you have- Banana Republic shirt. I which looks fantastic, by the way. Appreciate it. Thank you. Yep. We have been working really hard at getting our product narrative back on track. Uh a season after season now, you start to see the brand really come through in design codes, in fit, in function, in feature, and in value. We are a premium lifestyle brand, but we're right at the cusp of that real affordable luxury, if you will. Amazing cashmeres, suedes, leathers, fine details at prices that are truly extraordinary. All told within the brand storytelling DNA, which is really about the modern explorer. So when you go into our stores today, you're going to start to see a very different Banana. In some cases, we've remodeled our stores. So I'm a modern explorer? You you are. Look at where you are. I mean, you're out there, right? And you need to be recognized as what. Yeah. I appreciate it. Well, you know why this shirt fits so well, it's because I have been working out like hardcore, but you got the fit right finally. We did. And that that is that the biggest problem that you fixed at Gap, Old Navy? I've told you this before. The mediums used to fit like larges. Yeah. No, it was a big issue and fit is a really important part of a when you're an apparel company. It's the arguably, it's it's the gatekeeper. It builds trust, it builds loyalty, it builds, it builds reliability. And we've been working across our brands to get that fit right. Uh and as you see, it's working. And so the more that we build that trust and loyalty, and maintain that value proposition with great style, these are brands that are iconic and have much more legroom to grow. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data