Brand intelligence.
Essays, rants, case studies and trend reports for founders tired of templated marketing. One piece a week. No SEO sludge. No drip campaign hooked to a webinar.
The latest.
One piece. Fresh ink.
Paid search is not dead. It just got weird.
AI rewired search and your CPC dashboard is the last to know. A field report on AI Max, Performance Max, and the new winner-take-all reality.
Read the full piece →Start here.
4 essential pieces
New here? These four pieces explain the worldview. Read them in order if you want the full GHIVE thesis. Read them out of order if you do not.
Why your brand sounds like everyone else's.
The brief was wrong before anyone opened Figma. What to fix before you hire your next agency.
The AI tools everyone's using wrong.
ChatGPT is not a strategy. The companies winning right now treat AI like plumbing, not like a brand.
Stop optimising for vanity metrics.
If your engagement line goes up but booked calls stay flat, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem.
Why most agency websites still look like 2015.
Three columns. A process section with circles. A team photo on a brick wall. Why nobody fixes it.
All thinking.
Newest first
Paid search is not dead. It just got weird.
AI rewired search and your CPC dashboard is the last to know. A field report on AI Max, Performance Max, and the new winner-take-all reality.
Why your brand sounds like everyone else's.
Three agencies pitched a colour refresh. We pitched a different company. Why most brand work fails before the first sketch.
Stop optimising for vanity metrics.
If your engagement line goes up but your booked calls stay flat, you do not have a marketing problem. You have a measurement problem.
The AI tools everyone's using wrong.
ChatGPT is not a strategy. It is a tool. The companies winning right now treat AI like plumbing, not like a brand. We name the five mistakes we see every week.
Brand guidelines that actually get used.
Most brand books gather dust. We rebuilt ours after our own designers stopped opening it. Here's what survived the cut and what got the axe.
How a sleepy clinic became the most-booked in the city.
Nine weeks. New brand, new site, new paid program built on real patient stories. Waitlist followed in week 6.
Why most agency websites still look like 2015.
Three columns. A process section with circles. A team photo on a brick wall. The visual cliches strangling our category and why nobody fixes them.
The CMOs replacing copywriters with prompts. Here's what they're missing.
We pulled 40 brands' AI-generated headlines past a buyer panel. The brands won twice. The prompts won once. Plain prose still wins.
One launch. One sprint. Zero stock photos.
A Series A fintech needed a website in time for their funding announcement. We shipped brand, site, and paid in one compressed sprint. The full timeline, day by day.
Your landing page has 14 seconds. Spend them better.
We A/B tested 22 landing-page openers across paid traffic. The pattern that won every time is the one your designer keeps trying to cut.
"Brand stories" are not a strategy.
Every brand says they tell stories. Most of them tell the same story. We argue for fewer stories, sharper claims, and a metric the writer has to hit.
Most read.
The pieces founders kept sending around
Why your brand sounds like everyone else's.
14.2k reads 03How a sleepy clinic became the most-booked.
11.6k reads 04The AI tools everyone's using wrong.
9.8k reads 05One launch. One sprint. Zero stock photos.
8.4k reads 06Stop optimising for vanity metrics.
7.1k reads 07Why most agency websites still look like 2015.
6.7k readsBy category.
Every piece sits in one
Six categories. Every piece sits in exactly one. Pick the one that matches your problem.
AI strategy
How smart teams use AI without losing their voice. Tools, prompts, workflows, and the mistakes we see every week.
8 pieces BRBrand thinking
Positioning, naming, identity, voice. The decisions that happen before the design.
11 pieces GRGrowth tactics
Marketing that pays for itself. Channel selection, copy, CRO, lifecycle. Numbers, not vibes.
6 pieces CSCase studies
Client work with receipts. Before, after, what actually moved. No hero metrics in isolation.
4 pieces RTIndustry rants
Naming what is broken in our category. Written so we do not have to repeat ourselves in client calls.
5 pieces TWTrend watch
What is coming next. What is overhyped. What to ignore. Quarterly reads on the market.
3 pieces