A prompt is not a skill: what shipping 59 marketing agents taught me
Marketers are publishing their Claude skills. Most are prompts wearing a new name. The anatomy of a skill that survives daily use, from 59 shipped agents.
Writing
Notes from the field on demand gen, marketing automation, and operator-led growth.
ChatGPT is selling ads. The money showed up before the measurement did.
OpenAI's ad pilot crossed 100 million dollars annualized in six weeks, while advertisers could see little more than impressions and clicks. Here is how I read the early signals, where the budget is actually coming from, and why I would treat this as an experiment, not a channel.
I moved budget from performance to brand in a down year. Here is the math.
A performance marketer arguing to spend less on performance sounds like heresy. But most B2B buyers have already chosen a vendor before they search, which means last-click is harvesting demand that brand created. Here is how I defend the shift to a CFO.
The 9x conversion stat is how vendors are selling you AI search. Look at the denominator.
AI traffic converts far better than organic, so the pitch goes, so you need an AEO program now. The multiple is real and the conclusion is wrong. Here is what the numbers actually say, and where I would put the money instead.
Building this blog the way I'd build a marketing system
Why a personal blog deserves the same discipline as a demand-gen engine - constraints first, zero waste, every feature earning its place.
I read code fluently. I am not a daily-driver developer.
The operator-builder distinction, and why it changes how I pick tools, ship sites, and spend my attention.