The PESO Model® Diagnostic: Inside the Liquid Death Operating System

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® Certification at spinsucks.com/peso-model-certification.

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 actually sits. Not optimistically sits. Truly sits.

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 through the PESO operating system lens and shows exactly where coordination ends and integration begins.  The lesson isn't about $8M ad budgets. It's about sequencing, depth, and a central nervous system—and any brand, at any budget, can build them. Take the self-assessed PESO Diagnostic at spinsucks.com/self-peso-diagnostic to find your own integration gaps.

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 keeps showing up, this episode is for you.

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 falls flat, and what communicators can do now to become the obvious answer.

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 as a workforce one.

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.