Marketing and business strategy for companies that are good at what they do and hard to find.
The product works. The clients who find them stay. But there’s no reliable way for the right people to find them in the first place. That’s the problem I solve.
Positioning, competitive analysis, website plans, and search and AI-search visibility. Specific enough to act on this week.
See work samples → How I work →
Engagements start with a fixed-fee audit from $4,500, through full strategy work and ongoing advisory. The free two-page read is genuinely free – email claude@1000startups.com.
-
The Telephone Game: Your Position Is Only as Good as Your Least-Informed Advocate
Ten phone calls will tell you what your position actually is. A dead radio fad from 1976 will tell you why.
Your positioning is not a document. It is the sentence one distracted person says to another over dinner, somewhere between the entree and the check, when a name is needed and yours comes up. That sentence was written by someone half-listening on a kickoff call eighteen months ago. You did not approve it, you will never see a draft, and it is outselling your website.
(more…) -
Closing the Book on our Mad Men Marketing Pieces over the last 12 Days
What all of Mad Men teaches marketers in 2026 – not just the guy with the cheekbones – stress-tested against zero-click search, generative engine optimization, and an audience that clicks 1.6 percent of the time.
EVERYBODY STUDIES DRAPER. THAT IS THE FIRST MISTAKE.
Twelve character studies sit behind this piece: Draper, Olson, Sterling, Pryce, Cooper, Campbell, Harris, Cutler, Benson, Rumsen, Phillips, Crane. One at a time, each is a nice anecdote with a moral stapled to the end. Together they are an org chart, and that org chart maps with uncomfortable precision onto the four things currently coming apart in marketing. Distribution is being repossessed. Discovery is being intermediated by machines that do not send traffic. Attention is sliced thinner than any creative brief can survive. And the budget is being audited by somebody who was not invited to the brainstorm and does not care that it went well.
Sterling Cooper handled all four badly, on camera, for seven seasons. That is exactly what makes it useful.
(more…) -
You Lost the RFP Before Anybody Wrote It
How the scoring rubric gets built eleven months before you see it, and what one published page could have done about it
Two Words Beat Every Pitch in the Room
In 1984, NBC entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff scribbled a brainstorming note that read, in its entirety, “MTV cops.” Anthony Yerkovich turned it into a pilot. Michael Mann took creative control, renamed it Miami Vice, and spent the next five seasons enforcing a palette so strict that the production reportedly banned earth tones on camera.
(more…) -
The Man Who Bought the Future by the Minute: Harry Crane
Seven marketing lessons from Harry Crane, the least likable visionary in advertising history – and what he tells us about the AI lead who just started running your company.
He Opened the Wrong Paycheck
Every great career pivot has an origin story, and Harry Crane’s is petty. In the third episode of Mad Men’s second season, “The Benefactor,” a soft, bespectacled media man opens an envelope that is not his. It is Ken Cosgrove’s paycheck. Ken is making $100 more than he is.
Most people would sulk into a highball. Harry called a friend at CBS.
(more…)