I find the why behind the what.

Holding companies are the most fluent marketers alive and the least convincing. They can explain brand equity to a client on Monday and quietly delete it from their own operating plan on Tuesday. Nobody argues more persuasively for long-term brand investment, and nobody abandons it faster when a quarter gets tight.

The fundamentals they sell are the first things cut: distinctiveness, consistency, a real reason to believe, enough share of voice to be noticed by someone who isn’t already a customer. What replaces them is a story told to analysts — consolidation, efficiency, principal media, an artificial-intelligence narrative with a margin attached. It is a good story. It is not a marketing story.

Here is the irony that should keep the industry awake: the category designed to enshrine the power of marketing is the category most eager to forsake it. If the discipline works — and it does — then the businesses that sell it ought to be the best-marketed companies on earth. Instead they are functionally indistinguishable. Five networks, one deck, the same three abstract nouns on the cover, and a positioning that survives only until the next reorganization.

This is not hypocrisy. It is incentive. A holding company is not a marketing company; it is a financial structure that owns marketing companies, and financial structures are rewarded for predictability, not distinctiveness. Brand building is the one line item whose return arrives after the compensation committee has stopped watching.

The cost is not just reputational, it is evidentiary. Every time the industry declines to practice what it sells, it hands its clients the argument that marketing is discretionary. We are not losing the seat at the table to procurement or to consultancies. We are vacating it, politely, in advance.

So make the case where the case is actually decided: in the operating plan, not the awards entry. Defend a brand, not a billing. And be the proof.

For part of my time as a marketing director at Keurig Dr Pepper, I also worked at Monsieur Marcel, a French market in Los Angeles. On paper it made no sense: a day spent on a multi-brand portfolio, an evening spent behind a counter explaining cheese to strangers. In practice it was the most useful marketing education I have had since business school, and considerably cheaper.

Nobody at a cheese counter asks for a brand. They ask what’s good. So you cut a sliver, hand it over, and tell them something true — the animal, the region, the season, the reason this wheel tastes different in March than it will in August. For about eight seconds they are somewhere else. Then they buy the cheese. Then they come back the following week and ask for you by name, which is the part no media plan has ever delivered for me.

That is the whole mechanism, and it is embarrassingly simple. A good story transports someone. Transportation earns trust. Trust builds a relationship, and relationships are the thing that compounds — not the sale, which is only the receipt.

Marketers trade in attention for a living and almost never ask the reciprocal question: what are we giving in exchange for it? We behave as though attention is owed to us because we bought the impression. It isn’t. Attention is a transaction, and most of our work enters it with nothing to trade — no story, no usefulness, no craft, no reason for a stranger to give up eight seconds of a finite life.

Two corrections, both free. Stop expecting attention; give someone something worth their time and they will hand it to you willingly. And stop believing your logo carries value on its own — it is a receipt for value already delivered, not a substitute for delivering it.

I have competed on Jeopardy three times. The first was during Covid, which means my introduction to the most examined trivia stage in the world came with no studio audience, a great deal of plexiglass, and a green room where everyone stood six feet apart pretending to be relaxed.

The weeks before were worse than the taping. Quarantine has a particular way of amplifying whatever you are already anxious about, and I was anxious about preparing for something fundamentally unpreparable. You cannot study for Jeopardy. You can review, you can drill categories, you can practice the buzzer on a ballpoint pen — and none of it touches the actual variable, which is what three strangers happen to know at the same instant.

So I stopped. Standing behind the podium, with nobody in the seats and no way to influence a single clue that was about to appear, I made the only decision available: breathe into the moment, breathe out the expectations. Not a mantra. A logistics decision. Expectation was the only thing in the room I actually controlled, so it was the only thing I could afford to put down.

What arrived instead was presence, and behind it something closer to gratitude — the recognition that in a year when almost everything had been canceled, I was being handed a strange, slightly absurd gift. I was loose. I was fast. I was having, improbably, a very good time.

I won. I am not going to pretend that presence is a system for winning game shows, because it isn’t. But it is the only strategy that remains when the outcome is not yours to manage, and I have since watched it work in rooms with considerably more money on the line than a Daily Double.