Writing
Notes on performance marketing, AI, and building software.
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Why Google Ads Still Wins (And What AI Gets Wrong About It)
AI tools are good at Google Ads execution and poor at strategy. Here's the three questions every advertiser needs to answer before touching the account, and why they matter more now.
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What Google's New AI Ads Actually Mean for Your Budget
Google's Gemini-powered ad formats are live. Here's what I've seen in real accounts during the learning period, what inputs you need to get right, and what to expect.
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What an AI-Native Marketing Team Actually Looks Like
When AI handles execution, the bottleneck shifts to judgment. What Anthropic's team restructure taught me about running better marketing operations and where to focus human attention.
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Meta's Personal AI Changes How Customers Buy. Here's What to Do.
Meta's Muse Spark will mediate how customers discover and choose products. Here's what I'm prioritising across client accounts as this shift unfolds and what your business should focus on now.
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AI Is Rebuilding Marketing. Here's What's Actually Changing
AI has automated marketing execution. Here's what I see shifting in real accounts and what your business should do before your competitors figure it out.
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Before You Give an AI Agent Access to Your Ad Account
AI automation in Google and Meta accounts is powerful and risky. Here's what I've learned about scoping permissions, monitoring for problems, and staying in control.
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What Performance Max Is Actually Telling You About Your Customers
Performance Max isn't a black box. Here's where the real signal lives inside asset labels, search categories, and audience insights, and how I use it to improve whole accounts.
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Why Meta's AI Chip Investment Affects Your Ad Performance
Meta's custom AI chips widen the gap between strong and weak ad accounts. Here's what to prioritise in your Meta campaigns so your ads benefit from better targeting infrastructure.
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YouTube Shorts Is Now a Serious Performance Channel
MRC brand safety accreditation opens YouTube Shorts to serious ad budgets. Here's what I found testing it, what creative actually works, and how to measure it right.
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Local Intent Has Changed. Are Your Campaigns Keeping Up?
Local search journeys are longer than most campaigns assume. Here's the three-layer funnel structure I use for local clients and why most campaigns miss the middle entirely.
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Your AI Marketing Tools Are Only as Good as What You Document
Undocumented business knowledge produces generic AI output. Here's how I capture client context and what it does to the quality of AI-assisted campaign work over time.
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How Meta Builds Its AI Tells You How to Run Your Ads
Meta tests AI models with hypotheses, isolated variables, and pre-defined success criteria. Here's how I apply the same discipline to Meta ad accounts and what it does to results.
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AI Won't Fix a Bad Campaign Setup. Here's What to Audit First
I've audited dozens of accounts where AI-powered Google Ads campaigns collapsed. The problem was never the AI. Here's the four inputs to fix before you enable anything.