# dgtl dept*

> Essays on growth, marketing, e-commerce, and technology by Rebecca Rae Barton, Fractional CMO/CDO. Operator notes from inside the work, not industry punditry. Topics: marketing strategy, e-commerce, retail media, MarTech, AI implementation for marketing, agentic commerce, AEO, and the absurdities of modern work.

## About

- [About dgtl dept*](https://dgtldept.com/about): Publication overview and author bio.
- [Rebecca Rae Barton](https://rebeccaraebarton.com): Author site and consulting practice.

## Top performers

- [Claude Opus 4.6 Regression: What Broke and How to Fix It](https://dgtldept.com/p/claude-opus-4-6-actually-did-get-dumber-regression-fixes): Three silent default changes between February and March 2026, the developer transcripts that documented them, and the exact CLAUDE.md, session, and effort-level fixes that work.
- [The Marketing Expertise Layer for Claude Code](https://dgtldept.com/p/the-marketing-expertise-layer-for-claude-code): Why marketing teams should treat Claude Code as a programmable expertise layer rather than a copywriting assistant, with the architecture pattern that makes it work.
- [Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER) and Contribution Margin vs ROAS](https://dgtldept.com/p/marketing-efficiency-ratio-mer-and-contribution-margin-vs-roas): Why ROAS misleads scaling brands and how MER plus contribution margin replaces it for board-ready performance reporting.
- [The Professional Brand AEO Playbook](https://dgtldept.com/p/professional-brand-aeo-playbook): Hands-on playbook for getting cited by AI answer engines: JSON-LD, llms.txt, FAQPage schema, and the entity-graph moves that compound.

## Strategy and analysis

- [Your AI Strategy Has a People Problem](https://dgtldept.com/p/your-ai-strategy-has-a-people-problem): Why most AI implementations fail at the org-design layer, not the model layer.
- [Agent Orchestration Is the Hard Part: What Breaks and How to Fix It](https://dgtldept.com/p/agent-orchestration-is-the-hard-part-what-breaks-and-how-to-fix-it): Patterns from running multi-agent pipelines in production, including failure modes, handoff design, and persistence.
- [The Shift to A2A (Agent-to-Agent) Commerce](https://dgtldept.com/p/the-shift-to-a2a-agent-to-agent-commerce): What e-commerce looks like when buying agents talk to selling agents, and what brands need to do now.
- [Brand Legibility, Agentic Commerce, and AEO](https://dgtldept.com/p/brand-legibility-agentic-commerce-aeo): How AI agents read brand signals and the entity-graph work required to be legible to them.
- [AI Agent Marketing Metrics: Ghost Clicks](https://dgtldept.com/p/ai-agent-marketing-metrics-ghost-clicks): The measurement problem when AI agents take the actions humans used to take, and what to track instead.
- [The Money Is Getting Worse: Private Credit and the PE Collapse](https://dgtldept.com/p/the-money-is-getting-worse-private-credit-pe-collapse): What the private-credit unwind means for marketing budgets and exit timing.

## Optional

- [Archive (all posts)](https://dgtldept.com/archive): Complete post archive.
- [GitHub: dgtldept](https://github.com/dgtldept): Open-source projects and tooling tied to the publication.
- [LinkedIn: Rebecca Rae Barton](https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccaraebarton/): Professional profile and long-form articles.