For a long time, RADAR was more idea than publication. It existed in conversations, outlines, half-finished ideas, and an absurd number of open tabs. The team has talked about what it should cover, what it should sound like, and (probably most importantly) what would make it worth coming back to. And now it’s finally here.
We didn’t want to build yet another corporate blog with a shiny new name and nicer packaging. RADAR starts with what audiences are paying attention to, the questions they’re asking, and the behaviors beginning to take shape. From there, we use reporting, research, audience intelligence, and editorial judgment to decide what deserves a closer look — and whether that story is best told through an article, an interview, a video, or something else entirely.
This month, RADAR, RAD Intel’s editorial hub for marketing news and insights, is live.
For September, we’re starting with Before it Happens, an issue about what marketers can see before everyone else sees it too.
Foresight can sound a little like fortune-telling when we talk about it in marketing. But most of the things we eventually call trends don’t appear out of thin air. Before something becomes obvious enough to earn a name, there are usually people already behaving differently. Audiences adopting something, communities developing their own language, small choices repeating across places that, at first glance, don’t seem connected. Foresight starts with recognizing what those behaviors might add up to.
This month's cover story, The Marketers Who Saw It Coming, looks at companies that made decisions early enough that, in hindsight, they can look almost prophetic. They recognized something meaningful in those behaviors early enough to act on it.
Marketing spends a lot of time looking backward. We study performance reports. We dissect campaigns after they work. We even write case studies explaining why something happened once the outcome is already sitting in front of us.
By then, we know how the story ends. But what could we have seen before we knew the outcome? That’s where we wanted to spend some time this month.
But beyond this edition, RADAR gives us a place to be curious. To pay attention to something that feels worth understanding, even when we’re not quite sure where it will lead. That might mean digging further into a story everyone is talking about, then spending some time on one we think deserves more attention. Or talking to experts, following an unexpected idea, and maybe finding out that what looked interesting at first really wasn’t.
We’re not going to pretend we’ll always know the answer going in. I don’t think that would be very interesting anyway. We want to show you what we find, what we learn, and (occasionally) what we got wrong. Mostly, we want to give you something worth thinking about after you close the tab.
And with that…our first issue of RADAR is officially out in the world. I’m very glad you’re here for the beginning.
Okay, go read,
Carly Cowie
Editor-in-Chief, RADAR
