A friend paused mid-scroll to ask if a post's "low" likes were being throttled. It had 15K likes and 2K shares — that's not low. That same night, a Ted Lasso episode showed the exact same problem: a commercial with massive online support yet a less-than-desired attendance at a match. Here's what 100,000 likes actually look like translated into a real crowd — and why the number that matters isn't the one everyone's counting.

Most platform advice tells you how. Almost none of it tells you why. Substack and a traditional newsletter platform are not the same thing. And using them interchangeably means you’re trying to solve the wrong problem. Using the Jones Soda X Crayola collab as an example, here's what it looks like to run one launch across a newsletter, social, and Substack — three different jobs, working together instead of duplicating each other.

"My buyers don't need social media." "It's full of noise and nonsense." I've heard versions of this sentence from a lot of smart, experienced people - and most of the time, it's a personal opinion cosplaying as a strategic decision. Here's how to tell bias from data, and why it matters.

"My buyers don't need social media." "It's full of noise and nonsense." I've heard versions of this sentence from a lot of smart, experienced people - and most of the time, it's a personal opinion cosplaying as a strategic decision. Here's how to tell bias from data, and why it matters.

In The Devil Wears Prada, Miranda Priestly is fashion. She knows every unspoken rule, every hierarchy, every nuance - and she cannot fathom why anyone would need them explained, especially her new 2nd Assistant, Andy. Miranda is passion. Andy is purpose. And Andy is the one who figures out how to make it work. The same dynamic is spelled out in more marketing job descriptions than you'd think.

Imagine you're at a concert. The lights go dark. The crowd gets quiet. The band walks on, the dancers take the stage - and then BOOM, the headliner arrives. The show is unforgettable. Not because of the headliner alone, but because of everything working together to make that moment inevitable. That's a campaign. And most brands are skipping straight to Beyoncé.

In 7th grade, my English teacher ran a weekly writing challenge called Show, Don't Tell. The prompt changed every week. The principle never did. Fifteen years into building brand programs, I can tell you: the brands that break through aren't the ones that say the most. They're the ones that show the most. Moira Rose never picked up the spoon. Julia Child never put it down. There's a whole brand strategy lesson in there.

A business is a kitchen. HR is the fridge. Operations is the oven. Finance is the plumbing. Sales is the sink. Marketing is the counter - the surface everything moves across. It's not the heaviest appliance in the room. But take it out and suddenly nothing has anywhere to land. You don't realize how much you need the counter until you're trying to prep a meal over the sink.

"In case your dad didn't show you this" is a good hook. It creates instant connection and gets clicks. But the more I watched, the more I found myself thinking — wait. What did my dad actually gatekeep from me? He was deployed. And I suspect some version of that story belongs to a lot more people than that hook accounts for. This is what digital empathy in content strategy actually looks like.

There's a line in The Princess Bride that lives rent-free in my head. Westley - recovering from being mostly dead - surveys an impossible situation and says: "I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something." It's the Swiss Army Knife of problem-solving quotes. Not a complaint. A rallying cry. Marketing works the same way - but only when the rest of the business is ready to storm the castle together.

I’ve spent the last decade-plus building brand programs, running campaigns, writing copy, directing creative, and thinking constantly about what it means to actually connect with an audience rather than just reach one. To recognize pain points is to acknowledge someone’s actual lived experiences. To build a content strategy around those experiences is to create confidence not just in the brand, but in the individual themselves.