Marketing

I was sitting with a lukewarm cup of coffee on a Tuesday morning, running what I figured would be a boring, 10-minute tag audit on our main e-commerce site. Then Google Tag Assistant flagged something that made no sense. Alongside our own Google Ads tag, a second tag with the ID AW-987654321 was firing on every single page view. That second ID belonged to our sister brand. They are a smaller, lower-priority setup under our corporate umbrella, selling a very similar catalog of products. I hopped over to their domain, loaded their home page, and watched the exact reverse happen: our primary brand’s tag, AW-123456789, was firing over there. Visitors looking at our high-margin main line were being quietly tagged for our cheaper secondary line, and vice versa. I had that familiar cold-sweat moment where you assume your browser cache is lying to you; I cleared everything, opened 3 incognito windows, and watched the exact same thing happen.

After years of watching mentees chase platforms and tactics, the real work is always the same: strip the problem back to the human logic underneath. These are the principles I lead with, why they resist them, and where I have watched the gap cost people.

After finishing a newsletter with AI assistance, a question surfaced: what if AI doesn’t improve people but simply scales what they already are — examined or not? That turns out to be the unsettling part.

How we stopped chasing high-volume retail leads, rebuilt our HubSpot tracking, and focused on the 120 trade accounts that actually drive our revenue.

Every action in marketing or business carries its own risks. If we ignore risk management, the consequences can be significant when risks materialize, potentially leading to the failure of a campaign or even jeopardizing the very existence of a company.

Ever walked into a store and marveled at the plethora of choices available? The idea is that more options make decisions easier, right? Well, not quite.

In many ways, us marketers have “trained” our customers to be less loyal

From consumer behavior research, real-world statistics, and my experience, it’s evident that consumers have a substantial attention span.

Retailers should focus on creating LTOs that are relevant to their target audience and that have a justification for the time limit