The Second Audience

When a customer asks an AI assistant what to buy, it doesn't see your ads. It reads what has been written about you and answers in its own words. This talk looks at what that machine reads, why the strongest website doesn't reliably win, and what a campaign should leave behind on public pages.

For marketing conferences, marketing teams and industry associations.

Marketing Used to Be One Conversation. Now It's Four.

Two questions sort the work: who is speaking, and who is deciding. The answers give four conversations: The Craft, The Second Audience, The Delegated Voice and The Silent Trade. Most marketing teams are built for the first one. This talk introduces the Conversation Grid from my Digital Marketing textbook and shows a team where its unowned work sits.

For marketing conferences, leadership teams and business schools.

Strategy Is a Story

A strategy has the same shape as a story. It starts with a context and a problem, gives a reason it matters now, and makes choices that follow from one big idea. I walk through the nine beats and show how to write a strategy your team can repeat without the deck.

For leadership teams, company offsites and industry associations.

Teaching Marketing When AI Does the Homework

How assignments and assessment change once AI is in every course, and what a marketing graduate now needs to be able to do. Drawn from sixteen years teaching at BCIT and Capilano University and from writing the AI material in Pearson's Canadian Digital Marketing text.

For business schools, educator conferences and faculty development days.

From a Kitchen Table to Harrods

I started Sweet Peanut, a children's clothing company, at my kitchen table and grew it into more than 1,500 stores on four continents, including Harrods and Nordstrom. This talk covers distribution, pricing for wholesale, the decisions I'd make differently, and what selling the company taught me.

Also available as a workshop, Before You Quit: the decisions to make on paper before you leave your job to start a business. Built on my book of the same name.

For entrepreneur conferences, founder communities and consumer-brand events.