An introduction to empathetic transactionalism: a mental model for the manager/report relationship that is honest about the exchange without treating it as the whole of what the relationship requires.
Why make money when you can have fun? Quick post highlighting two personal tools I built for myself recently.
How organizations develop a shape that substitutes activity for direction, why the dysfunction is self-protecting, and what it actually takes to change.
A practical guide to handling channel decline at every level of the marketing organization, from the IC closest to the data to the CEO who should mostly stay out of the way.
Before investing heavily in Generative Engine Optimization, we should learn from the uncertainty, unproven methodologies, and rapid shifts that marked the emerging SEO industry.
A framework for thinking about marketing measurement expectations by organizational size and resource availability, from small businesses getting the basics right to enterprises that need will, not direction.
A practical orientation to media mix modeling for mid-sized companies: what it does, when it makes sense, how it interacts with attribution and incrementality testing, and what your options look like for getting started.
Projections built without explicit documented assumptions have nothing to monitor, nothing to update, and no early signal when reality diverges from expectation. A framework for building marketing forecasts the way less mushy disciplines already do.
How do you conceptualize the ways AI can actually help a marketing team, across knowledge management, insight generation, and planning support? From there, what are the practical challenges to implementation, and what approaches address them? A practitioner framework.
In banking, insurance, healthcare, and legal, genuine product differentiation is hard to achieve and often legally constrained. The standard response is to declare a positioning advantage instead. Many organizations treat naming the desired position as equivalent to actually occupying it. A look at what real differentiation requires in industries where the obvious answers are mostly hollow.
A framework for identifying what your metrics actually capture, why North Star KPIs should be ratios with a clear value direction rather than descriptive counts, and other patterns and failure modes worth naming before they cost you.
SEO and GEO are treated as separate disciplines, but they share a common foundation. It's time for a unified model of digital brand presence.
A practical framework for integrating AI into marketing organizations without losing the human judgment that makes marketing work.
A framework for how in-house marketing departments should think about structuring their agency relationships — from fully outsourced to fully insourced and everything in between.
Click attribution is just one signal, and not a reliable one on its own. A practical model for combining attribution, incrementality testing, and qualitative inputs to get closer to the truth about what's actually working.
The early internet promised more efficient markets. It delivered extraction engines instead. This isn't a story about villains. It's about a system where locally rational decisions produce worse outcomes at the societal level.
Building segments to understand your market is still fundamental. But translating those segments into in-platform targeting, third-party data purchases, and manual audience selection is increasingly counter-productive in an era of auto-optimizing AI.
The same forces that doomed Soviet collective farms and planned cities play out every time a new marketing leader blows up existing structures before understanding why they exist. What James C. Scott's political science classic teaches us about driving transformation without destroying institutional knowledge.