Marketing Quote by Brian Koslow

Koslow frames reputation as marketing that money can not quite buy, and he does it with a sly bit of jujitsu: he calls it an advertisement, then immediately implies it is stronger than advertising. The line flatters the reader's common sense (we all trust people more than billboards) while quietly indicting the whole paid-persuasion economy. If the most powerful promo is "positive reputation traveling fast", then the real battleground is not media spend or clever copy, but behavior: what you do when no one is watching, and how consistently you do it.

The phrase "traveling fast" is the tell. It smuggles in a modern context without naming it. In a pre-digital world, word of mouth moved at the speed of a dinner party. Now it moves at the speed of screenshots, reviews, DMs, and algorithmic amplification. Koslow is pointing at virality, but in a way that dodges the tech jargon and keeps the principle portable: trust scales when it is easy to pass along.

Subtext: you can not brute-force credibility. A positive reputation is earned capital, and once it is in circulation, it compounds. That also hints at the darker mirror image: reputations also travel fast when they are bad, and no amount of ad spend can reliably outpace that. The intent reads like advice to founders, professionals, or anyone building a brand: invest upstream in the work and the relationships, because the downstream "advertisement" will happen with or without you.