Guitar Center2024 — now
Rebuilding an affiliate program by first making it much smaller
I inherited an agency-run channel stuffed with search arbitrage, browser toolbars, and coupon parasites — while actual content creators were being turned away for insufficient reach. So I cut every partner who couldn't explain what they did to create demand, and rebuilt around the voices the industry actually listens to, including several who had spent years publicly criticizing the brand.
Removed partners representing more than half the program's attributed revenue, with the CEO and SVP behind it. Rebuilt to ~90 actively managed creator partners, funded largely through vendor co-op rather than marketing budget.
Guitar CenterPartnerships
Putting the CEO on the channel that criticizes us
The most credible independent voice in the guitar world built part of his audience on unflattering commentary about the company. I pitched, briefed, and produced a CEO interview with him anyway — twice. Every project draws internal objections that he recently burned us. That is precisely the point: a critic who stays independent is the only kind of coverage worth having.
Universal Audio2019 — 2024
A program built to survive its own stakeholders
Universal Audio is a company of obsessives, and every campaign had opinions attached at every level. So the influencer program got built the way it did for an unglamorous reason: briefs had to be airtight enough to clear VP review and travel across scrum teams. The formal program was born out of a need to manage upward — and it turned out that rigor was what made it scale.
Introduced consumer research to separate baseline growth from real acceleration, replacing viral-post luck with programmatic reach. Audience past one million.
Universal AudioLeadership
Two promotions, ten years overdue
Two producers on my team had each gone a decade without a promotion. One was the on-camera face of the brand and at real risk of leaving; I made the case until it was corrected. For the other, leadership floated bringing in an outside studio owner to run the video team — I spent months arguing for the person already on it, and coaching him and leadership both out of the assumption that he had no interest in leading. He got the job and runs it now.
Pancake Marketing2014 — now
The work I still make with my own hands
Running since 2014 under an earlier name — first as a dispersed bench of contractors I directed, now as a two-person LLC. Brand films, lifestyle pieces, and broadcast and CTV campaign management for clients across pro audio, medical, and consumer. I work across treatment, storyboard, camera, and edit: sometimes carrying the whole thing, more often steering a small team through it.
Most recent: a lifestyle film for a clothing brand, shot this month with my partner.
BEAT2014
A student project that kept receiving submissions for a decade
An electronic music competition built as a custom platform with interactive video and live club events. Long after I graduated it was still taking entries from producers in Germany, Zimbabwe, and Hungary — a useful reminder that the things people keep coming back to are rarely the ones with the biggest launch. The episodes are still up.