The world of marketing seen through the eyes of an engineer
My job title said Marketing Effectiveness, Senior Director. For years. But when I look back, 95% of my time was spent helping teams make better ads. From Pedigree to Snickers, from Lay's to Quaker... Better media plans. More focus on quality and attention reach. Using better creative measurement
The way I keep in touch with my friends on social media in 2026 is by typing their names in the search box. Not scrolling. Not waiting for the algorithm to show me their updates between AI slop, a crypto ad, or a cat video. I go to the search
Sales is the only metric that matters in marketing. If marketing doesn’t move sales, it’s just art. For years, I’ve measured ad campaigns through one lens only: behavioral business outcomes. Not intent. Not clicks. Not surveys. Sales. Everything else is a proxy. Proxies lie
Stop prompting. Start writing. When AI replaces writing, we become stupider. Admit it. You write less than ever. The implications are dangerous. Writing is thinking. Building a sentence forces you to decide what you actually believe. Your brain cannot write clearly about things you do not understand. When you replace
Advertising + Standup Comedy = LOVE We write briefs, frameworks, guidelines, and new testing protocols. We are optimizing the creativity out of creativity. Still, we barely get a few seconds of attention . Meanwhile, a comedian walks on stage with a microphone and a vibe and holds 200 strangers hostage for an hour.
Your best customer is 54 and completely invisible to your media plan. I recently joined a prestigious panel debating the future of TV advertising. Everyone on the panel was 44+, 90% of the audience was probably 40+. Almost everyone was outside the beloved A18-40 target audience we buy media
AI slop is everywhere. From the cat video my mom sends me every second day on Whatsapp to the Youtube thumbnail that looks interesting enough to click and instantly regret. AI slop is the industry term for low-quality, mass-produced AI content designed to farm attention. Merriam-Webster named
Super Bowl LX was the year's most expensive memory-building opportunity for brands. Absurd production costs, high media investments, expected high celebrity mix, with a single goal. To seduce and/or build distinctive memory structures in the minds of many current and future consumers, one brand logo at
Most non-luxury brands try to advertise their way into premium pricing. Nearly all fail. Because they're optimizing for the wrong lever. They skip structural strategy work and jump straight to ads. Brand premiumness is the customer perception that a brand deserves a higher price than alternatives. Rarely
Last week, in a meeting about brand strategy, someone asked me whether building a brand character still made sense in 2026. It took everything in me not to answer, “How are we still debating this?” Some of the world's strongest brands solved this decades ago. A
Last time I checked, the debate about data killing creativity was still alive in 2026. Which is funny, because I think we are barking at the wrong tree. Data is not the villain here. During my travels, one of my unspoken rules is to try to visit the local art
My love story with advertising started inside an old movie theatre, on a rainy Bucharest evening in the 90s. I became fascinated by the link between products and stories through Jean-Marie Boursicot’s Night of the Ad Eaters . Advertising opened a lens to a world previously impossible to
Let’s be honest: as marketers, we spend much time fiddling with PowerPoint slides. We’re constantly browsing, reading, drafting, copying, pasting, and tweaking. PowerPoint is everywhere in our daily work. My kids even joke about my PowerPoint usage. And with remote work, we’re using it
VTS or Visual Thinking Strategies was one of the highlights of my learning path this year. I was so lucky to participate in the IRG 2024 program in Oxford/St. Paul de Vence, where I was introduced to Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) under the guidance of my instructor, Dabney Hailey.
In boardrooms worldwide, marketers' comments are often overshadowed by finance colleagues. To speak the language of CEOs, marketers have to change their jargon. Awareness or consideration talk is nice, but when boards only care about the revenue generated and the cost of acquisitions, marketers need to find another slang.