Frequently Asked Questions
A few practical questions about the work, how I tend to approach it, and what working together might look like.
The work itself
Quite a range, but diagnostics, audits, and top-to-bottom reviews are a particular sweet spot. I enjoy tracing how a business goal has translated into strategy, execution, measurement, and platform setup, and checking whether the pieces still make sense together.
That said, it isn’t a boundary. I also work on paid media, analytics and measurement, marketing operations, implementation, and broader strategic projects.
Absolutely. They’re something of a specialty.
An audit can be as focused as a paid media account or measurement setup, or broad enough to look across strategy, execution, analytics, processes, and agency or internal-team involvement.
The point isn’t to generate a long list of issues for the sake of having findings. A sensible shortcut is still sensible. I’m much more interested in identifying what genuinely matters.
Both.
Sometimes the useful outcome is a recommendation or second opinion. Other times it makes much more sense to fix the tracking, change the setup, build the reporting, or work directly in the platforms rather than write a document explaining that somebody else should do it.
I’m very happy rolling up my sleeves when the work calls for it.
No, although paid media and performance marketing are among my deepest areas of expertise.
My work has also covered strategy, measurement and analytics, marketing operations, websites and tracking, automation, and plenty of things that sit between those categories. I also know specialists across other disciplines and am quite comfortable bringing in additional expertise when it genuinely adds something.
Yes. That is often exactly where a diagnostic becomes useful.
Any context or suspicions you already have are a helpful head start, but you don’t need to arrive with the answer. Sometimes the answer is where everyone expects it to be. Sometimes it is two layers further down, or a team across.
Working with your setup
Of course.
I tend to see that as adding another perspective rather than arriving to catch somebody doing something wrong. Existing teams usually know a great deal about why things are set up the way they are, and sometimes an apparent oddity is a perfectly reasonable shortcut or compromise.
The useful part is being able to distinguish those from the things that are genuinely getting in the way.
Absolutely. I’ve spent a large part of my career in agencies, so it is a very familiar environment.
That can mean senior strategy or performance support, diagnostics, analytics and measurement work, technical help, overflow capacity, or simply another experienced set of eyes on a difficult account or project.
Very much so.
Nonprofits and mission-driven organizations have been a consistent part of my career, across fundraising, donor acquisition, Google Ad Grants, lead generation, measurement, and broader digital marketing support.
I also genuinely enjoy the space. The objectives, stakeholder structures, funding realities, and resource constraints can make the work particularly interesting.
Useful, but rarely the whole story.
Previous industry experience can shorten the learning curve around audiences, regulations, terminology, and the way an organization operates. On the other hand, coming in without years of inherited assumptions can occasionally produce surprisingly useful ideas.
The technical fundamentals travel particularly well. Good measurement is good measurement, and data quality does not discriminate by industry.
Both small and large.
I’ve worked with local businesses and small nonprofits with very constrained budgets, as well as major organizations running large and complex media programs. The underlying business and marketing logic changes less than people sometimes assume, even if the trade-offs, opportunities, and execution certainly do.
Practicalities
Usually with a little background by email, followed by an exploratory conversation.
From there, we can work out what is actually needed, whether I’m the right person for it, and what kind of engagement makes sense.
Yes. I’m based in Toronto, but most of this work can be done perfectly well virtually.
And if a project genuinely benefits from being in the same room, I’m happy to travel too.
AI, automation, and the current obsession
Yes, particularly where they can make marketing operations, analysis, QA, workflows, or repetitive processes better.
I’m more interested in using AI where it is genuinely useful than in forcing it into every problem because it happens to be fashionable. Sometimes an AI-assisted workflow is exactly the answer. Sometimes a proper data pipeline, dashboard, or simpler process is considerably better.
Quite a lot, actually. And we should use it.
AI is already an extremely capable assistant for analysis, research, coding, automation, and plenty of everyday marketing work. What it still lacks is the accumulated context a person builds from knowing the organization, the business, the people, the history, and all the little exceptions that never made it into the prompt.
For now, I see it as an extraordinarily useful tool rather than a substitute for judgment.
Still have a question?
Ask away. If it is about marketing, an interesting problem, or something you think I might be useful for, feel free to get in touch.