I set the strategy, run the team, own the numbers, and report to your board like it's my P&L. At TCL, Samsung, and Motorola, it was.
Two decades of brand and growth leadership, available on the fraction of time you actually need — for companies where growth requires change, not optimization.
A proven marketing executive on the fraction of time you need. I set the strategy, hire and run the team, own the scoreboard, and answer to your board. Not advice from the sidelines — actual operating leadership.
For brands stuck competing on price or losing relevance. I reposition what your brand means, build the go-to-market to back it, and define the scoreboard before a dollar is spent. This is the TCL playbook: value brand to premium tier, 97 percent category growth in a year.
I make AI real inside marketing teams: the workflows, the tools, the measurement, and the training to actually use them. Stanford-educated on AI leadership and hands-on from running this transformation inside a Fortune-scale organization.
AI collapsed the cost of execution to almost nothing. Anyone can generate a hundred versions of a campaign before lunch. What it did not do is tell you which one is any good, and that is now the scarce part.
Which makes taste a business problem, not an aesthetic one. It is the difference between a team that ships more and a team that ships better. Here is the vocabulary I use for it, because a thing you cannot name is a thing you cannot teach.
What you leave out. Every brief has a version with one more message in it. That version is worse, and it is the one that usually ships.
Knowing what came before. You cannot tell whether an idea is new if you have not seen what already exists. Most "original" work is a reference nobody in the room recognized.
The opposite of adequate. Vague work tests fine and moves nothing. A margarita in a measuring cup travels; "premium lifestyle content" does not.
Defending a choice you cannot A/B test yet. Data tells you what happened, never what to make. Someone still has to decide, and be accountable for deciding.
Pace and contrast. Where to be loud, where to shut up. A campaign that shouts the whole way through is just noise with a media plan.
Seeing why something works, not just that it did. Fluency is what lets you repeat a success on a different brand, in a different category, with a different budget.
The gap between good and nearly good. Nearly good is the most expensive thing in marketing, because it costs full price and returns nothing.
Matching tone to the moment. The same sentence can read as confident or as tone-deaf depending on the week it runs.
Killing the part you like most. If cutting does not hurt, you were not close enough to it to be useful.
Caring past the point that is reasonable. Reasonable is the enemy. Nobody ever shared something because it was proportionate to the budget.
The last five percent nobody asked for. It is also the only five percent anyone remembers, and the part AI still will not do for you.
The right idea in the wrong week is a wrong idea. We had 24 hours to answer the Martharita. That is the whole discipline.
A longer version of this is coming. For now, it is the standard I hire against and the one I hold my own work to.
You build taste the way you build any skill: with a vocabulary, deliberate exposure, and someone willing to tell you when a choice is weak. Study what came before, name why specific work succeeds, make decisions you have to defend out loud, and cut the parts you are most attached to. Taste is not a gift. It is a practice.
Not by counting licenses or output. AI is working when the cycle time from idea to in-market drops, quality holds or improves, and the team spends its recovered hours on judgment rather than production. If volume went up and quality went down, you bought tools instead of building a capability.
Challengers win by being smarter, not louder. That means picking a fight on ground the leader cannot defend, launching the innovation rather than the spec sheet, and engineering ideas the press wants to cover so earned attention does the work of paid. Every dollar has to do the work of ten, so the idea has to be the media.
If the answer is more of what's already running, you don't need me.
I take on a small number of engagements at a time, because operating leadership isn't something you can do from a distance. If growth requires change, that's the work I want.