Journal
Writing.
How we think about marketing, automation, agency work, and the parts of the job most agencies don’t want to talk about. Plain English. No buzzwords.
2026
May 2026
The brief is the deliverable.
What an agency actually produces in the first 30 days is a brief, not a campaign. Most agencies hide that fact behind a discovery deck because a document sounds like less than a strategy.
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April 2026
We don’t pitch.
The agency pitch deck is the dumbest 90 minutes in modern marketing. We replaced it with a real conversation, a small piece of paid work, and a reference call. Slower at the top. Compounds at the bottom.
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March 2026
The only marketing question that matters.
Most marketing problems get reframed as channel problems, creative problems, or measurement problems. They’re not. There’s only one question that ever mattered, and the channel falls out of the answer.
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February 2026
Plain ads beat clever ads.
Cleverness wins awards. Clarity wins sales. Why most ads try to be interesting before they try to be understood, and why plain ads outperform clever ones for almost every business buying paid traffic.
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January 2026
Most marketing problems are positioning problems.
When a company says the ads aren’t working, the ads usually aren’t the problem. You can’t out-market a bad position. How to tell which one you actually have.
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2025
December 2025
Most agencies don’t have a strategy. They have a deck.
The two are not the same. The difference shows up in the first sixty days of the work.
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November 2025
What premium actually means.
Premium is a price tag, not a strategy. What it actually means in operating terms and why most premium positioning is a paint job.
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October 2025
Senior living marketing in a tight market.
What holds when the funnel tightens and the math underneath stops looking the way it used to. The pattern below the funnel that most agencies miss.
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September 2025
The local search game changed in 2025.
Three shifts most multi-location operators have not adjusted to. AI overviews, review velocity, category-specific signal weighting.
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August 2025
Brand voice is a thing you ratify.
Voice documents do not change how anyone writes. Why most brand voice work fails and what works instead.
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July 2025
The CRO industry is mostly cosmetics.
The biggest CRO wins live above the page in audience and offer, not below the fold in button colors. Why the industry doesn’t advertise it.
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June 2025
Three questions that kill bad campaigns.
Three questions we ask at the front of every engagement. They have killed more work than they have approved.
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May 2025
The discovery call is a sales call.
Both sides know it. Naming it changes what gets asked, what gets answered, and which agencies get hired.
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April 2025
The growth word.
Growth is the most over-used word in marketing. It used to mean revenue. It now means anything anyone wants it to mean. What people actually want when they say they want growth.
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March 2025
The case study problem.
Most agency case studies are useless. They tell a story about the agency, not the work. Three structural choices separate the case studies that move buyers from the case studies that go in the pitch deck.
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February 2025
Why agency referrals beat agency outreach.
Referrals close at four times the rate, retain twice as long, and cost nothing to source. Why the numbers tilt and what changes when you build for them.
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January 2025
The annual report nobody reads.
The marketing annual report is theater. A team spends five weeks producing a deck the CFO opens once, after the budget conversation it was meant to shape was already over.
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2024
December 2024
Quiet work compounds.
Three years of unglamorous craft outperforms a viral campaign every time. Why the noisy stuff is overrated and what to build instead.
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November 2024
The performance marketing trap.
Performance and growth are not the same. The companies that confuse them spend efficiently into a wall.
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October 2024
What the senior living buyer actually researches.
The senior living buyer is not who most communities think they are. What adult children actually research before they tour and why the website is the wrong place to start.
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September 2024
The marketing org problem.
Most internal marketing teams fragment around the org chart. The companies whose marketing works share two structural traits.
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August 2024
The first thirty days problem.
The first thirty days of any new agency engagement determine the next twelve months. Most agencies waste them on onboarding theater.
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July 2024
The pre-construction marketing playbook.
Selling units in a development that does not yet exist requires a different funnel and a different patience curve. Lessons from a 24-month build.
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June 2024
Most audiences are made up.
Personas with names and photos and weekend hobbies. Real audiences cluster on three or four observable behaviors. The rest is theater.
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May 2024
What a good media plan actually does.
Most media plans are spreadsheets of placements. The good ones are documents about audience and intent. The placements fall out.
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April 2024
The agency-of-record fade.
The AOR relationship is shortening and most agencies have not adjusted their proposals. The shorter cycle changes how engagements get priced, structured, and won.
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March 2024
The let’s-just-test-it problem.
Testing is a great way to replace thinking. The companies that test their way to nowhere have one thing in common — no thesis.
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February 2024
Content calendars are not a strategy.
The calendar tells you when. Strategy tells you why. Conflating the two is how marketing teams stay busy and miss the year.
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January 2024
The vanity metrics list.
Twelve metrics that always look good and almost never matter. Cut them from the dashboard and watch decision quality improve.
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