Case Studies
Case studies
Etna Interactive
Building answer engine optimization into a live channel before the category had a name.
Search returns a list you compete on. Answer engines return one synthesis you either appear inside or you don't. That is a different unit of competition, and it needed a different content shape, a different measurement model and a different sell to clients.
Etna Interactive
Sixty people, five functions, and one metric nobody puts on a dashboard.
Agency churn gets treated as a culture problem. It is a compensation and promotion-structure problem wearing a culture costume. I restructured the department around whether our subject matter experts stayed.
Steno.ai, Techstars '23
Finding the digital twin use case, then landing Tony Robbins as the flagship customer.
The technology to clone a voice works. The hard question is which people are worth cloning, and for whom. That is a positioning problem, not an engineering one.
GAIN Credit
£40M a year across three continents, and the budget never sat still.
PPC, display and affiliate across Lending Stream and Drafty, run by a team split between San Diego, London and Chennai. Top-performing sales channel inside six months.
GreatCall (now Best Buy Health)
25,000 mobile users to 1.5 million, with CPA cut by two thirds.
A print-and-broadcast brand selling to seniors, repositioned around the adult children making the purchase decision. Two #1 Medical-category apps came down to decisions made before either launched.
TrendSource
Roughly ten inbound leads a year to hundreds a month, outranking Nielsen.
A national market research firm with no page-one rankings, no nurture flow, and manual sales follow-up. The fix started at the brand, not the funnel.
The San Francisco Marathon (via The Lemonade Agency)
Years of decline reversed with a story instead of a discount.
Price promotion was the obvious move and the wrong one. What the race meant to the people who ran it was the asset nobody was using.
Voxox / Telcentris (Cloudphone)
50% more conversion and 80% more ARPU across a B2B and B2C suite.
One product suite, two audiences that wanted opposite things. Segmented messaging, a new affiliate channel, and a blockchain division that produced a utility-token telecom platform that drew global carrier interest.
Voxox / Telcentris (VoxDirect)
It was being built as a virtual phone system. Customers just wanted their answering machine to work.
The roadmap was chasing feature parity with business-phone platforms. Direct customer outreach found a simpler, better-fit product underneath.
GreatCall (now Best Buy Health)
Five patents and two #1 health apps, from a unit with no formal roadmap authority.
GreatCall Labs ran without an executive mandate to build anything. It ran on cheap tests and evidence brought to the table instead of a pitch deck.
Robbins Research International (Tony Robbins)
A record holiday campaign, $1M+ in ten days, without adding paid media.
Growth funded by segmentation and send strategy instead of a bigger ad budget: 200% year-over-year growth in a ten-day window.
Dior (via The Lemonade Agency)
Bringing a legacy fashion house into Web3 without borrowing anyone else's playbook.
Most brand entries into Web3 in 2022 either read as a cash grab or came from tech-native companies with no design credibility. Dior's advantage was Dior itself.