The short version
I'm a marketer based in Wānaka. I studied at AUT, and I've spent the last 15 years doing digital marketing for New Zealand companies: a printing business I built and sold, a mortgage brokerage where I wrote the lead logic in a spreadsheet before anyone trusted it in a CRM, an ecommerce brand, and now NZ financial services, which is where I am today. Every one of those jobs taught me the same thing from a different angle, which is that most of what gets called marketing is noise dressed up as strategy, and the noise is expensive.
I don't mean that as a complaint about the industry. I mean it as a description of the world. The tactics change every 18 months. The trends shift. The underlying problem, businesses spending enormous energy on activity that never connects to revenue, and people spending enormous energy on approval that never connects to anything, doesn't move at all.
The question I keep coming back to
What if the thing you're optimising for is the wrong variable entirely?
I asked it about ad campaigns first, because that's where I was paid to ask it. Then about businesses I'd started, two of which I'd built before checking whether anyone wanted them. Then, after a breakdown in 2023 that I've written about elsewhere, about my own working life, which turned out to be optimised for other people's approval in a way I hadn't noticed for about a decade. The question doesn't have a permanent answer. That's why I keep it.
What I'm after
Fewer levers, used consciously, measured against something real. Frameworks that simplify a mess and reveal what was hidden, because a framework that only does one of those is jargon. Trust treated as a system you can build and test rather than a feeling you hope for. AI as a tool that amplifies whatever you feed it, which makes what you feed it the whole job. And writing as the way I find out what I actually think, since I've never once known before the sentence was finished.
What I actually want from you
I wrote the book and the 4 sites so we'd have common ground for more interesting conversations. That's the entire business model, if you can call it that. I hope people read my work and ask questions. I hope they prod holes in it, and tell me where it breaks in their business, in their industry, in their country. And if it holds up, I hope they gas me up, because I'm human and it helps.
One more thing, because the sites teach that a tactic which relies on you not knowing is the wrong tactic: the only thing I write here is the seed, and AI renders every page from it. I don't edit a word of the output.
Substack is where that happens. LinkedIn is there if you want the credentials version. The best way to understand what I think is still to read the work: the book for the lens, the four sites for the tools.