[§] Where the receipts get read
Twenty years running campaigns where ROI gets measured against the grocery bill. Email, paid, print, social, promotional, SEO. Through Media Explode and now through the operator hat I wear on my own businesses. No vanity metrics. Just whether the door opened.
EDDM neighborhood drop
Q2 · 26New leads
1,240
Reach
412k
[§ 01]
How I think about it.
Media Explode
Operator's side since 2012
Marketing for me has always been the operator's side, not the agency's. I've sat in both seats. The agency seat wants beautiful decks, brand sprints, and quarterly retainers. The operator seat wants this week's door to open and next week's phone to ring. Both can produce good work. They're solving different problems.
Media Explode has spent over a decade running marketing for small and mid-sized businesses across NYC and beyond. Restaurants, retail, professional services, ecommerce, healthcare. The mix changes by client. The discipline doesn't: what would actually move the needle this month, and what's just noise dressed up as strategy.
Marketing that doesn't connect to the rest of the business is decoration. I've never been interested in decoration.
[§ 02] Channels
Different businesses lean different ways. A pharmacy is print, SMS, and afterhours intake. A restaurant is email club, social, and reviews. The mix is the work, not the brochure.
[§] Digital
[§] Print & physical
[§] Social
[§] Automation
[§ 03] Shape of the work
01
Email · SMS · automation
[§] Lifecycle automation
Full eClub lifecycle from popup signup through reservation reminder, post-visit review request, and birthday promo. Sits on a webhook backbone that ties signup to CRM to email to SMS.
02
Multi-loc · ops
[§] Franchise rollout
Marketing system replicated across multiple franchise locations: central campaign management, local-store customization, shared review pipeline, unified reporting back to ownership.
03
Google · Shopify
[§] Paid recovery
Google Ads account recovery and rebuild after a vendor-side suspension. Restored shopping campaigns from scratch, rebuilt PPC strategy, returned the business to monthly scale.
04
AI · marketing automation
[§] Afterhours intake
Afterhours phone line that captures inquiries, answers FAQ from a knowledge base, takes messages, and notifies staff. Plugged into automated birthday outreach and product cross-sell on the back end.
Full case studies on the work page →
[§ 04] How it connects
A campaign without a backbone is decoration. A backbone without a campaign is dead weight. The reason the marketing on the businesses I work with actually moves the needle is that the web stack underneath catches every click, the AI handles the unglamorous middle, and the operator on the other end is set up to act on it. All four disciplines, one operator.
[§] Start a campaign
Send a short brief: what you're running now, what's underperforming, and what would constitute the door moving. I'll come back with whether I think I can help and what the first month would look like.