Is Prime Day a Real Holiday Now?

Happy Prime Day! Amazon Prime Day just turned 11 years old, and what started as a single day invented to fill a sales lull has become somewhat of an actual holiday. How do we celebrate? We buy stuff! In this episode, our panel digs into celebrations engineered by brands and commerce (Cyber Monday, Small Business Saturday, Starbucks Red Cup Day) to question whether these types of moments build real community or just psychologically condition consumers to spend on cue. Joining the conversation is Pearl Servat, a fractional CMO who helped scale Verizon's Visible brand from zero to over a million customers and led the brand's Visible Acts of Kindness campaign, a movement that grew organically out of a single email. Pearl brings the brand-side perspective on building trust, avoiding the "race to the bottom," and the difference between a manufactured sales event and an authentic cultural moment.