How to rescue a failing tiktok ad after day three: a diagnostic playbook

I’ve spent years nudging teams away from reactive content creation and toward using the richest source of customer truth most companies already have: support transcripts. If you’re running a help desk — whether that’s Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk, or a custom chat queue — those conversations are full of repeat questions, feature gaps and phrasing that tells you how customers think. Turned into a simple NLP workflow, they become a...

Read more...

I run experiments with generative AI every week. The temptation to spin up dozens of creative variations overnight is real: new copy, new visuals, dozens of headlines, multiple music beds. But for brands, scale and speed can quickly collide with risk. Guardrails matter — not just because of legal teams, but because brand trust breaks faster than it’s built. Below is the exact workflow I use to test generative-AI creative variations while...

Read more...

I’ve built dashboards that executives ignore, and dashboards that become the single slide CEOs refer to in boardrooms. There’s a clear difference between the two: one tries to surface every possible metric, the other is designed to answer the questions the C-suite actually asks — and to do it in under 60 seconds. Here’s the pragmatic approach I use to get there.Start with the questions, not the dataIf you design a dashboard around...

Read more...

I get asked almost daily: “How do we measure influencer ROI beyond likes and reach?” It’s a fair question — vanity metrics are easy to report, but they don’t move budgets or product-roadmaps. Over the years I’ve worked with startups and global brands to turn influencer activity into measurable business outcomes. Below I’ll share a practical, no-nonsense framework that I use to design campaigns, instrument them for measurement, and...

Read more...

When a scaleup reaches the point where customer growth and marketing complexity start to outpace spreadsheets and single-person operations, the question of martech architecture becomes inevitable: do you centralize on an all-in-one platform, or stitch together a best-of-breed stack? I’ve helped teams make this call enough times to know there’s no one-size-fits-all answer — but there are reproducible trade-offs and a framework you can use...

Read more...

I’ve reviewed enough creative briefs to fill a small archive room. The ones that ship projects forward quickly are rare; most are either a dense PDF nobody reads or a vague Slack thread that spawns three rounds of “clarifying” feedback. If you’re frustrated by slow approvals, missed creative intent or endless revision cycles, the problem usually isn’t the creatives — it’s the brief.Why most creative briefs failFrom my experience...

Read more...

I run product reviews for a living, and over the years I’ve learned that a high production budget isn’t a prerequisite for building trust or earning affiliate revenue. What matters is consistency, transparency, and an approach that treats reviews like a helpful conversation rather than a sales pitch. In this piece I’ll walk you through a practical, low-cost framework to launch a review series that builds credibility, grows an audience, and...

Read more...

I’ve been running creative projects that mix in-house teams and external freelancers for years, and the single biggest time sink we used to fight was iteration friction: handing off work, getting feedback, updating files, re-sharing versions, and repeating. Figma changed a lot of that, but only when we paired the right file structure, component strategy and collaboration rules with a simple handoff and feedback process. Over time I refined a...

Read more...

Most social listening dashboards promise a single pane of truth: sentiment over time, share of voice, and a neat green-yellow-red indicator that supposedly tells you how people feel about your brand. In practice, those signals are noisy, misleading, and often dangerously overconfident. I’ve built and audited listening setups for brands and agencies for years, and I keep seeing the same failure modes: missed sarcasm, ignored context,...

Read more...

I remember the first time I had to migrate an entire event tracking setup from Universal Analytics (GA3) to Google Analytics 4 (GA4): it felt like defusing a bomb while trying to keep the lights on. The key to getting it right is planning, mapping and running both systems in parallel until you're confident the new implementation is capturing everything you need. Below is the step-by-step plan I use with clients to migrate event tracking without...

Read more...