Author: Jai Whiting
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Field of Dreams was a film, not a go-to-market plan
Building a great product is not a marketing strategy. The product graveyard is full of better mousetraps nobody ever heard of. Why distribution, demand and the buying experience are the business, not the afterthought to it.
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Kylie’s Tension. The category is: the reinvention
Kylie’s Tension, scored stage by stage across the full 8-stage funnel — 72/80. How a near-free “Padam Padam” moment became a $78M tour and a tenth UK No.1. The category is: reinvention.
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Display is for being seen, not clicked
Like buying a billboard and sulking nobody pulled over to touch it. Display is a being-seen channel: presence at scale, where the click was never the point.
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The marketing team is the product. Everything else is the packaging.
When marketing underperforms, the instinct is to change the agency, the tool, the framework. The constraint is almost never the framework. Why the most under-rated lever in marketing is how the team is led, and why almost nobody in the market will tell you that.
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The 121: highest trust, lowest volume
The lowest volume on the map and the highest trust. The 121 doesn’t scale — and that’s the entire point. For the moments too important to automate.
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Podcasts: patience as a channel
Six episodes, no leads, channel cancelled — abandoned right before the compounding starts. Podcasts are a long-trust channel: depth, not reach.
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Madonna’s Confessions II. The category is: The comeback
Madonna’s Confessions II comeback, scored stage by stage across the full 8-stage funnel — 77/80. Most brands run three stages. Here’s what the other five buy.
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Affiliate: paying for the close
The channel that only charges when it works — in theory. The hardest question in affiliate isn’t how many sales it made. It’s how many would’ve happened anyway.
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What sponsorship actually buys
Bought with the heart, judged with the wrong spreadsheet. Sponsorship doesn’t generate leads — it buys association and presence. How to judge it honestly.
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Events: expensive, and worth it when staged right
The priciest channel per person reached, and the worst-measured. The value of an event isn’t the room — it’s what you do in the three weeks after it.
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Same channel, different job
“Is LinkedIn an awareness channel or a conversion channel?” Wrong question — it assumes a channel does one job. Why the same channel does different work at every funnel stage, and the push-pull test that tells you whether your marketing is actually running.
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PR is a Notices lever you don’t control
Paid media you control and pay for. Earned media you influence and pray for. PR buys association and authority a paid placement can never quite manufacture.
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Content positions; it rarely converts
Everyone agrees they need content; almost nobody can say what it’s for. It rarely converts — and was never meant to. Its job is positioning, not closing.
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There’s no such thing as a half-win in marketing
Click-through up, impressions up, everyone nods, then nobody can say what it sold. Why a campaign that hits its target and misses every commercial KPI is a write-off in a fancy hat, and the one number that survives a finance review.
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LinkedIn organic: the consideration-set channel
When a buyer hears your name, they look you up on LinkedIn before your website. That check happens whether you post or not. The only question is what they find.
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Email nurture runs the long game
Most “email marketing” is a newsletter wearing a lanyard. Nurture is the owned channel that walks a known contact from interested to convinced to renewed.
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Paid search is bought intent, spend it like cash
The most honest channel on the map: the meter never stops. You rent the buyer’s attention by the click, and the landlord raises the rent every quarter.
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Organic search catches the intent you’ve earned
Paid search rents intent by the click. Organic earns it once, then stops charging — the durable answer to the questions buyers ask on the way to a decision.
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Your website is the orchestration layer
Every other channel sends; your website receives. It’s the orchestration layer where each click gets identified, moved a stage — or quietly wasted.
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Being the answer: search’s new front door
There’s no page two of a chat answer. If the assistant names three options in your category and you’re not one of them, you were never in the room.