A Familiar Feeling
There’s a moment most people in this industry recognize, even if they’ve never named it.
The Draft You Write After The Vendor Pitch
Each unsent version sharpens your internal filter. Over time, patterns emerge. The same promises dressed differently. The same math that only works in slides. The same dependency on “alignment” where ownership should be.
The Email You Send When The Numbers Aren’t There
You don’t over-promise recovery. You don’t weaponize hope. You don’t say “we just need more data” when what you really need is permission to stop.
When to Test, When to Hold: The Quiet Power of Waiting
Run the same experiment two weeks apart and you can get opposite conclusions, both technically “correct” and strategically useless.
The Influencer Gold Rush That Wasn’t
Early on, it worked. Small creators. Real audiences. Loose incentives. Brands borrowing credibility they hadn’t yet earned and paying fairly for the privilege.
The Myth of the Always-On Funnel
Operators who insist on always-on funnels are often solving for organizational comfort, not performance. Finance likes predictability. Leadership likes dashboards that never go dark. Agencies like retainers that don’t fluctuate.
Retail Media: New River or Floodplain?
Most retail media networks were not built to serve advertisers. They were built to monetize existing traffic as quickly as possible.
The Coming Compression of Paid Media
The hardest truth for leadership is that paid media is no longer a growth engine by default. It’s an amplifier. If the underlying offer, pricing, or distribution is weak, paid media will surface that weakness faster than ever—and charge you for the lesson.
Mercury Is In Retrograde (So Don’t Launch That Yet)
Every seasoned marketer claims not to believe in astrology. Every seasoned marketer has a launch that went sideways for reasons no post-mortem could fully explain.
A Favorable Moon for Killing Your Darlings
The best teams aren’t the ones with the most ideas. They’re the ones brave enough to release the right ones at the right time.
The Era of Vibes Marketing (and Why They’re Sus)
What comes next isn’t a return to soulless dashboards or optimization theater. It’s a synthesis: creativity with consequences, intuition with accountability, taste that’s brave enough to be wrong and disciplined enough to learn.
Acts of God: What To Do When Platforms Break
Teams that built redundancy treat outages as inconvenience. Teams that built dependency treat them as existential threats. The difference isn’t talent or tooling—it’s humility about where power actually sits.