The longerversion.

Since we're being honest on this page

I think most of the marketing industry is theater.

A lot of very credentialed people have spent a lot of time trying to turn branding into a formula: funnels, frameworks, the whole apparatus. Some of that works, for some people, in some markets. But in the markets I've actually operated in, it's mostly come down to feel: understand the customer's actual problem, solve it in the fewest possible steps, and don't dress it up more than it needs to be dressed up.

Emotion matters. People don't buy flights the way they buy screws. But there's a line, and past that line you're just making things up to sound clever in a meeting. And yes, with enough budget you can sell almost anything to almost anyone. That's not branding. That's spend. Confusing the two is how a lot of "campaigns" get built that nobody remembers past the quarter they ran in.

One thing I'll die on: mixing sales and marketing is a mistake. Everyone within shouting distance of a marketing budget thinks they can do this job. The CEO has an opinion on the tagline, the sales lead has an opinion on the creative, everyone's cousin does "digital." Branding looks easy from the outside, and that's the whole problem with it. If it were actually easy, everyone would be good at it, and almost nobody is. I'll also say, once, that half the trophies this industry hands itself don't mean very much (a lot of "award-winning" work is completely unmemorable six months later), and then I'll leave that alone, because I know how it sounds coming from someone who has, in fact, won a couple.

I'm also not much of a believer in paid media, despite spending a serious budget on it every single year, because that's simply how the game is played now. I understand media buying and digital promotion well enough to do it properly. I just don't think the granular "insights" these platforms hand back are worth what people treat them as. Most of it is noise dressed up as signal: a lot of confident-looking numbers from sources that aren't nearly as precise as they present themselves. I'd rather spend the energy on understanding real growth than on optimizing a dashboard that's guessing half the time anyway.

A fairly unpopular opinion, said plainly

Most marketing coming out of this country is sub-par. I don't say that as someone who thinks he's above it. I say it as someone who's genuinely tired of being underwhelmed by work that gets celebrated anyway. What actually bothers me isn't the mediocrity itself (every industry has plenty of that). It's the arrogance some people carry afterward, off the back of an award from a panel of their own peers, for a campaign nobody outside the industry could name a week later.

The presentation thing

I started making presentations around 14 or 15, back when it felt like a completely useless skill to be spending time on. Turned out to be a gateway into design and, more usefully in the long run, into knowing how to actually pitch something.

At Analyzen I pitched more brands than I can count, which meant sitting through, and delivering, an enormous amount of confident-sounding nonsense. You'd be amazed what that does for your ability to spot nonsense elsewhere. It's a genuinely useful side effect: once you've built enough decks designed to make something sound better than it is, you get very fast at noticing when someone's doing it to you.

These days I build genuinely investor-grade decks for international investors, for internal stakeholders, for anyone who needs to be talked into something in twenty slides or less. It's a skill that reads as slightly old-fashioned now, in a world of AI-generated slide decks and one-pagers. I don't especially care. It still works, and building presentations by hand has taught me more about persuasion, structure, and pacing than any marketing textbook I've read.

What I actually do when I'm not doing any of this

I'm 30, married, and my real addiction is Dota 2.

I've put something close to 6,000 hours into this game. I've done the rough math on what that translates to at U.S. minimum wage, and I'd genuinely rather not say the number out loud. If you'd offered teenage-me that amount of money to quit, I'd have taken it in about half a second. Instead, here I am, a grown, married man, still queuing up most nights. Am I entirely fine with that? No. Am I stopping? Also no.

I also watch a lot of NBA. I do have one piece of actual evidence I once belonged on a court (Champion, Inter-Department Basketball Tournament, back when my knees still agreed to jump), but that was a while ago now. My playing days these days mostly consist of looking at basketball shoes and imagining what I'd do with the ball if anyone were ever foolish enough to pass it to me. I would not be good. I remain, somehow, undeterred by this fact.

I try to get out of the country twice a year, budget and vacation days permitting. It's usually the first thing I start planning and the first thing that gets sacrificed when either one runs short. I also know four, maybe five chords on a guitar, which I use to attempt songs that all end up sounding suspiciously similar to each other regardless of what they're supposed to be. And I love food, genuinely and a little embarrassingly. A meaningful chunk of my salary quietly disappears into restaurants and food delivery apps every month. Show up with decent food and we will be friends by the end of the meal. That part isn't a joke.

A few things, unfiltered

• I don't think you need a framework to be good at this job. I think you need to actually pay attention
• Paid media platforms are the singing frog of insights: technically impressive, not that useful
• I'm funnier in person than I am in writing. This page is doing its best
• I still think results should outrank tenure, in hiring and in everything else
• If a team can't function without me in the room, I built something wrong