Category: Marketing Leadership

Twenty-five years is long enough to watch digital marketing reinvent its vocabulary several times. Portals became platforms. Hits became sessions. Campaign automation became AI orchestration. Each generation arrives sounding permanent.

I am starting this site again because permanence is the wrong test. I want to examine which ideas remain useful after the interface changes.

Experience can become a trap

Pattern recognition helps. It can also turn into an excuse to stop looking. Familiar debates return in new packaging, but the surrounding conditions do change: customer expectations, privacy, distribution power, production cost and the speed at which average work can be created.

The useful posture is neither awe nor dismissal. It is curiosity with a memory.

The questions have become organizational

Many hard marketing problems now sit between disciplines. A measurement issue may really be a definition problem. A technology failure may begin with ownership. An AI policy affects brand, data, procurement and management.

That is where I expect to spend most of my attention: the operating reality behind the tool.

Why write publicly

Writing forces a claim to become specific enough that someone can disagree with it. It exposes gaps hidden by a meeting or a slide. A public archive also makes changing my mind visible, which seems healthier than pretending every opinion arrived fully formed.

Google’s people-first guidance asks whether content demonstrates first-hand expertise and gives an intended audience something satisfying. That is a better editorial test than chasing volume.

What comes next

I will write about digital strategy, marketing technology, measurement and leadership, with AI running through those subjects rather than replacing them. Some posts will offer a practical model. Others will argue with habits that have become too comfortable.

Starting over does not mean discarding the past. It means bringing forward what earned its place and putting everything else back under review.

Sources

• Google: Helpful, reliable, people-first content
• DataReportal: Digital 2026 Global Overview

A new channel arrives with screenshots of early success and a familiar warning: brands that wait will be left behind. The fear is effective because, occasionally, it is true.

It is still a poor operating principle.

Presence has a continuing cost

Opening an account is trivial. Serving an audience well requires format knowledge, response capacity, content, governance, measurement and patience. A neglected presence can damage trust more than absence.

The cost is not only budget. It is the attention taken from channels already connected to a useful customer journey.

Reach is not audience fit

DataReportal shows billions of people using social and messaging services, with behaviour varying sharply by platform. Large adoption numbers say little about whether a specific audience expects a specific organization to participate there.

Start with the audience’s task and context, then assess the channel.

Run bounded experiments

A new channel may deserve a test. Define the audience, hypothesis, content commitment, measure and end date before beginning. Decide what evidence would justify continuing and what would trigger an exit.

This prevents an experiment from becoming a permanent obligation because nobody wants to admit the results were ordinary.

Concentration can be ambitious

Doing fewer things allows better creative, faster learning and a more recognizable presence. The organization can still watch emerging behaviour without publishing everywhere.

Channel discipline is not resistance to change. It is a refusal to confuse novelty with strategy.

Sources

• DataReportal: Digital 2026 Mid-Year Update
• Pew Research Center: Social Media Use 2025

An agency can write the plan, build the deck and run the channels. It cannot own the consequences of the choices in the same way the organization does.

When strategy is fully outsourced, internal leaders often receive polished recommendations without building the capability to judge them.

Strategy depends on knowledge that is hard to transfer

Customer history, political constraints, service capacity, risk tolerance and the reasons previous attempts failed rarely fit neatly into a brief. Partners see the portion the organization manages to articulate.

That outside view is useful. It is not complete.

Keep the decisions inside

The organization should own the audience priority, value proposition, objectives, investment trade-offs, data access and definition of success. A partner can challenge those choices and show better options. The accountable leader still decides.

This boundary also prevents channel plans from masquerading as strategy. A list of campaigns is downstream of the choices that matter.

Use partners for advantage

External specialists can supply scarce expertise, pattern recognition, production scale and an honest view of internal habits. They are especially valuable when the mandate is clear and internal owners are available to work with them.

The relationship should leave behind stronger decisions, documentation and skills—not dependence on a presentation nobody inside can maintain.

Test for retained capability

Ask whether internal leaders can explain why the plan exists, access the accounts and data, change priorities, evaluate performance and replace a supplier without losing the strategy. If not, too much has been handed over.

Outsource work. Buy advice. Borrow experience. Keep the compass.

Sources

• Google: People-first content and expertise
• Nielsen Norman Group: Ownership and oversight

Accessibility is often discovered late. A site is nearly finished, someone runs a scan, and a list of defects becomes the web team’s problem. Fixes are made under pressure. The next campaign repeats them.

That cycle continues because accessibility was treated as a property of a website instead of a way the organization works.

Marketing creates accessibility decisions every day

Headings, link text, colour contrast, captions, document structure, form labels and image descriptions are shaped by writers, designers, producers and campaign managers. Procurement choices determine whether third-party forms and platforms can be used by everyone.

A technical audit can find symptoms. It cannot create responsibility across those decisions.

Put the standard into ordinary work

W3C recommends integrating accessibility goals into brand guidelines, publishing processes, training and procurement. That approach is less dramatic than a remediation program and far more durable.

Templates should make the accessible choice easy. Briefs should state requirements. Reviews should include keyboard use, contrast, structure and meaningful alternatives. Vendors should know the standard before they quote.

Assign ownership without creating a bottleneck

A specialist can guide interpretation and difficult cases, but every contributor needs responsibility appropriate to the role. Writers need to understand headings and link purpose. Designers need contrast and focus states. Developers need semantic implementation. Publishers need a final check.

Management must provide time and authority. “Everyone owns accessibility” becomes empty when nobody can delay a release that fails basic requirements.

Compliance is the floor

Conformance targets matter, especially where law or policy applies. Yet the point is not to produce a clean audit while people still struggle to complete a task. Include users with disabilities in evaluation and maintain a way to report problems.

An accessible marketing operation communicates more clearly, reaches more people and carries less avoidable risk. More importantly, it stops making exclusion somebody else’s cleanup job.

Sources

• W3C WAI: Organizational accessibility policies
• W3C WAI: Implement accessibility

Digital marketing has spent two decades promising clean revolutions. Search would replace interruption. Social would replace websites. Automation would replace manual work. Mobile would change everything, followed by data, then AI.

Each shift mattered. None erased the need for judgment. Time has made me less impressed by novelty and more interested in what survives it.

I used to give tools too much credit

A good platform can make capable people faster. It can also help a confused organization produce confusion at scale. I now look at ownership, process and definitions before features. If a team cannot agree on who a customer is, a new CRM will preserve the disagreement in cleaner fields.

This is not an argument against technology. It is an argument for sequencing. Decide how work should happen, then choose the tool that supports it.

More data did not create more certainty

Measurement improved dramatically, yet many reports became harder to use. Teams learned to collect what platforms exposed, even when those numbers had little connection to a business decision. Precision around a weak proxy is still weak measurement.

The useful move is to work backwards from outcomes and admit what cannot be known. Honest uncertainty is more valuable than a complicated attribution model presented as fact.

Owned assets became more valuable

Platforms remain useful, but their rules, formats and economics can change without asking. A website, an email permission base, a content archive and clean first-party data give an organization room to adapt. Ownership is not isolation; it is bargaining power.

The open web also rewards durable work. Google’s current guidance still emphasizes original, people-first content and first-hand expertise rather than content produced mainly to capture search traffic.

Strategy is mostly subtraction

Earlier in my career, a plan with more channels felt more ambitious. Now I see the cost of every addition: another workflow, audience, reporting stream and claim on attention. Saying no is one of the few ways to protect quality.

The durable parts of digital marketing are not mysterious. Know who you are trying to help. Make a clear promise. Build an experience that keeps it. Measure something tied to a decision. The tools will keep changing around that work.

Sources

• Google: Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
• DataReportal: Digital 2026 Global Overview