I DIDN’T PLAN ANY OF THIS 😅

I went into undergrad with zero strategy and one very serious special interest: Classical Humanities aka Latin + ancient Rome + the whole Greek mythology thing.

Genuinely useless by every practical metric … I knew that going in. The options were doctoral research (hard pass), teaching Latin to the eight students still bothering to take it, or law school. I took the LSAT twice. Crashed out watching Suits. Knew immediately I didn't want to be a lawyer.

So I added Interactive Media Studies. A weird, experimental track I basically made up combining graphic design, digital art, and human-computer interaction. By graduation I had a completely nonsensical combination of classical antiquity and digital instinct and no idea what to do with either.

Turns out that was the methodology.

Ten years of Latin trains you to read structure before you read meaning. To find the load-bearing parts of a thing before you decide what it says. I didn't know I was doing that when I started building marketing systems for all kinds of businesses. Small B2B, advanced higher ed, Fourtune 500 retail … I just kept noticing the same gap everywhere I landed: brands that knew what they were trying to build but the execution wasn’t matching.

The ideas were fine. The foundation was missing.

That gap has a name now. Translation.

The industry will tell you the fix is more data, better tools, smarter automation. But I just graduated with a Master’s in this stuff alongside (some) idiots. Those things matter, but we've AI'd too close to the sun and somewhere in the process we lost the part where marketing is fundamentally a humanities discipline.

It's not about what happened in the data. It's about what it means. Why it matters. What the person on the other side actually needed to hear.

That's what I do. I find the vocabulary for worlds that are already trying to exist. Before the brief gets written, before the designer gets briefed, before another campaign goes out that's technically correct and fundamentally not you.

If something resonated here but you couldn’t figure out why. That's why.

M. 👩🏽‍🦰