Why I Started Writing About Marketing in Public

A personal blog about marketing is either a vanity project or a forcing function. I started The Marketing Juice because I needed the latter. After two decades running agencies, managing large teams, and sitting across the table from some of the biggest brands in the world, I had accumulated a lot of opinions. Writing them down publicly is how I test whether those opinions are actually worth holding.

This is not a thought leadership play. It is a record of what I have seen, what I have got wrong, and what I think the industry consistently misunderstands about its own work.

Where This Actually Started

My first week at Cybercom, the agency founder had to step out of a Guinness brainstorm for a client call. He handed me the whiteboard pen on his way out of the room. I had been there five days. The room was full of people who had been there for years. My internal reaction was something close to panic, followed immediately by the decision to just get on with it. That moment taught me something I have carried ever since: the only way to find out whether you know what you are doing is to do it in front of people who will notice if you do not.

Writing this blog is the same mechanism. Every article I publish is a version of picking up the whiteboard pen. If the thinking is soft, it will show. If the examples are vague or the logic does not hold, readers with real experience will see through it immediately. That accountability is the point.

I have spent the better part of my career in rooms where marketing was discussed at a level of commercial seriousness that most published content never reaches. P&L conversations. Turnaround situations. Pitches for accounts where the brief was genuinely difficult and the stakes were real. The Marketing Juice exists to bring some of that seriousness into writing that is publicly accessible.

What Most Marketing Content Gets Wrong

The volume of marketing content published every day is enormous. Most of it is produced to rank in search, to generate leads, or to build an audience for a product. That is a legitimate commercial activity. It is not the same as writing to transfer genuine understanding.

The structural problem is that content produced primarily to rank tends toward the safe and the generic. It covers what people are already searching for, which means it covers what people already broadly know. It rarely challenges assumptions, rarely calls out the gap between what the industry says and what practitioners actually do, and almost never names the things that do not work.

I judged the Effie Awards. Sitting in those rooms, reading through how campaigns were built, what objectives were set, how results were measured, you develop a very clear picture of what effective marketing actually looks like versus what gets celebrated in industry press. The gap is instructive. A lot of what wins awards is genuinely good work. Some of it is good work dressed up in a framework that makes it look more strategic than it was. The ability to tell the difference matters enormously if you are trying to learn from it.

If you want to go deeper on the strategic frameworks that underpin how I think about growth and go-to-market decisions, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is where most of that thinking lives.

Why Commercial Experience Changes How You Write About Marketing

There is a version of marketing writing that is entirely conceptual. Frameworks, models, matrices. It is not useless, but it is incomplete. The frameworks only make sense if you have experienced the conditions that make them relevant or irrelevant.

I grew an agency from 20 people to over 100. That is not a number I mention for credibility signalling. It is relevant because the marketing decisions you make at 20 people are structurally different from the ones you make at 60 or 100. The resource constraints change. The client expectations change. The internal communication requirements change. The way you build a go-to-market strategy for a new service line when you have a small team is not the same as when you have specialists in six disciplines who each have a stake in the answer.

I have managed hundreds of millions in ad spend across 30 industries. That breadth matters because it exposes you to the ways that the same fundamental problems manifest differently in different sectors. A B2B SaaS company and a retail brand are not running the same plays. But the underlying questions about audience clarity, channel fit, and commercial objective are identical. The surface looks different. The structure underneath does not.

When I write about strategy, I am drawing on that breadth. Not to name-drop categories, but because the pattern recognition that comes from working across sectors is genuinely useful and most marketing writing is produced by people who have worked in one or two.

The AI Baseline Problem and Why It Matters for This Blog

A few years ago, I was in a meeting where a major technology partner presented results from an AI-driven personalised creative programme. The numbers were striking. Significant CPA reductions, strong conversion uplifts. The room was impressed. I was not, for a specific reason.

The baseline they were comparing against was creative that had been genuinely poor. Static, generic, badly targeted. The AI-driven creative was better, but it was not significant work. It was a correction. They had replaced weak creative with something less weak and attributed the improvement to the technology rather than to the simple fact that the starting point had been so low. That is not a technology success story. That is a measurement problem dressed up as an innovation story.

I think about that meeting often when I read marketing content that presents impressive-sounding results without interrogating the baseline. The question is never just “did performance improve?” It is always “compared to what, and under what conditions?” That discipline of baseline thinking runs through everything I write here.

It also shapes how I think about tools and tactics more broadly. Growth hacking examples tend to circulate widely because the outcomes look impressive. What circulates less often is the context: the market conditions, the competitive landscape, the team capability, the starting point. Without that context, the case study is entertainment, not instruction.

What I Am Actually Trying to Do Here

The honest answer is that I am trying to write the marketing content I wanted to read when I was building my career and could not find.

Content that treats the reader as commercially intelligent. Content that does not pretend every marketing problem has a clean solution. Content that acknowledges the messy reality of working inside organisations where resources are constrained, politics exist, and the brief is rarely as clear as it looks on paper.

I have turned around loss-making businesses. That experience is not glamorous in the way that growth stories are, but it is more instructive. When a business is losing money and you are responsible for the marketing function, you develop a very clear sense of what matters and what is theatre. You cannot afford to run campaigns that look good in a deck but do not move commercial numbers. You cannot spend time on brand exercises that are not connected to revenue. The constraints clarify everything.

That clarity is what I bring to this blog. Not cynicism about marketing, but a refusal to separate it from the business outcomes it is supposed to serve. BCG’s work on go-to-market strategy makes a similar point: marketing and commercial strategy are not separate disciplines that happen to share a budget. They are the same discipline operating at different levels of abstraction.

The Discipline of Writing in Public

There is a version of professional expertise that exists only in rooms where everyone already agrees with you. Client meetings where you are the most senior person. Internal strategy sessions where your view carries institutional weight. Those rooms are comfortable, but they are not where your thinking gets tested.

Publishing is different. Once something is written and public, it is available to people who have no reason to be polite about it. That is a useful corrective. It forces precision. Vague claims that would pass unremarked in a meeting look weak on a page. Assertions that rely on authority rather than argument do not survive without the authority in the room to back them up.

I have found that the process of writing forces a quality of thinking that conversation does not always require. When I am preparing an article, I regularly find that positions I held with confidence turn out to be less solid than I thought once I try to write them down clearly. That is not a failure. That is the point. The writing is the thinking, not the record of thinking that has already happened.

For practitioners who want to build that same discipline, the broader context around growth strategy is worth understanding, not because growth hacking as a discipline is always sound, but because the examples illustrate how quickly tactics get separated from strategy when the pressure to show results is high.

Who This Blog Is For

Senior marketers who are tired of content that tells them things they already know. Marketing directors who are trying to make better decisions with imperfect information and limited time. Agency leaders who want a perspective from someone who has been in the same position and is willing to be honest about what worked and what did not.

It is also for people earlier in their careers who want to understand what commercial marketing actually looks like from the inside, not the version that gets presented in case studies or taught in courses. The gap between those two things is significant and I do not think it gets acknowledged enough.

I am not writing for people who want validation. If you are looking for content that confirms the approach you are already taking, this is probably not the right place. I am more interested in the questions that do not have clean answers, the decisions that involve genuine trade-offs, and the situations where the conventional wisdom is either wrong or only partially right.

Scaling marketing functions, for instance, is one of those areas where the received wisdom is consistently oversimplified. BCG’s research on scaling agile touches on some of the organisational dynamics involved, but the marketing-specific version of that problem, how you scale capability without losing the commercial sharpness that made you effective when you were smaller, is something I have lived through and want to write about in more depth.

What Comes Next

The Marketing Juice is a long-term project. I am not trying to publish at volume or optimise for traffic in the short term. I am trying to build a body of work that is genuinely useful to people who take marketing seriously as a commercial discipline.

That means writing about strategy and planning in a way that is grounded in real decisions, not theoretical frameworks. It means writing about measurement in a way that acknowledges the limits of what data can actually tell you. It means writing about channels and tactics in a way that is always connected back to the commercial objective they are supposed to serve.

It also means being willing to write about the things that do not work, the campaigns that looked right on paper and failed in market, the strategies that were coherent in theory and fell apart in execution, the industry trends that attracted enormous attention and delivered very little. Those articles are harder to write but they are often more useful than the success stories.

Go-to-market strategy, in particular, is an area where I think the published thinking is consistently weaker than the practice. Forrester’s analysis of go-to-market challenges in complex sectors illustrates how quickly the standard frameworks break down when the buying process is non-linear and the stakeholder map is complicated. That gap between framework and reality is where most of the interesting work happens, and it is where I intend to spend most of my time writing.

Everything on this site connects back to the same central question: how do you build marketing that drives real business outcomes, not just activity? If you want to follow that thread across the full range of strategy and growth topics I cover, the Go-To-Market and Growth Strategy hub is the best place to start.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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