Log 003 // Humanities Marketing

Waking up and the TV’s still on. Some late-night commercial for a CD box set — just four easy payments of $19.99! I knew every word to all my favorite commercials as a kid with no money and no need for anything they were advertising. You probably didn’t have a structured settlement, nor did you need cash now…but you knew exactly who to call.

As an undergrad, I took a class called Roman Spectacle with the head of the Classics Department, Dr. Tuck. We covered the games, triumphs, theaters, and of course gladiators. Yes, it was fun watching Russell Crowe clips in a 300-level course. But we were actually watching the full apparatus of public entertainment as a political and social instrument.

Our final papers analyzed a modern American spectacle through a classical lens, exploring cultural parallels and connecting to larger belief systems beneath them. Only rule? Couldn’t write about the Super Bowl. Too obvious.

So I chose the next best thing: The Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. A triumphal procession through a major city, sponsored by powerful patrons, igniting collective pride. Nothing in the parade is accidental. It constructs a narrative reflecting what America wants to believe about itself. It’s one of few nationally unifying moments.

A primary source. Uniquely American, that balances gratitude with an impending season of holiday spending.

Now with added marketing experience, it’s like I’ve zoomed out. Taking in ads and commercials in aggregate - not the individual buys. What saturated categories say about our anxieties. What desires are manufactured by different elements of culture.

Look at this year’s Super Bowl and Halftime Show. Remember how many conversations exploded just around the language Bad Bunny performed in? And the commercial right after? Both deliberate choices against our political backdrop.

And yet most of the ads were about AI. To me, that means it’s here to stay.

I can barely watch Hulu without Serena Williams trying to sell me Ro every ad break (literally need to invest in premium for my mental health).

One of our generation’s greatest athletes selling weight loss medication you can buy from your couch. We want to blame the marketing — the messenger — but we’re the ones creating the demand. We’re in the 2000s skinny swing of the pendulum, except the 2026 version comes in a bottle.

That level of saturation is a cultural stance. Something “we’ve” decided is socially acceptable to want. By the time something has marketing, the desire (or fear) already existed in the zeitgeist.

Sorry for saying zeitgeist … sometimes it’s just accurate.

The marketing-ism says you aren’t your customer. To some extent that’s true. But marketing requires the capacity to understand the underlying human emotion that precedes action. To see new signs of old desires, find new technologies serving ancient problems, hear what someone is reaching for before they’ve found the words for it.

Classics taught me that, not a dashboard.

Marketing isn’t exempt from the list of fields begging for a return to a humanities foundation. AI tools can replicate the science of language. I don’t think they can reproduce the art. How to choose words that connect, not just communicate. Rhetorical devices that earn trust on an emotional level. And human instincts to combine it all.

The tools make it easy to build something that looks like a brand. But without the art, the idea gets lost: wrong symbols, wrong connotations, wrong customer at the door.

At its best, marketing is translation.

How a brand shows people it understands what they care about.

Log 002 // Soap Games

I used to make potions in the bathroom at my grandma’s house. Every bottle under the sink, every travel shampoo from the last hotel stay, the conditioner I wasn’t supposed to touch. All of it into the tub. The smell was questionable. Final product unusable. I just loved the process.

Combining things made new things. That was enough.

Eventually the potions stopped. Not because I lost interest. Because at some point the mess became wasteful. The product was unusable, the materials were spent, and there was nothing to show for it. Play started requiring a justification. A purpose. An output worth the input.

The older I got the more that logic compounded. Messing around with something — at work, at home, wherever — started feeling irresponsible. Like I should already know what I was doing before I started doing it. Experimentation without a guaranteed outcome stopped feeling like learning and started feeling like waste.

So I stopped experimenting.

At Wholesale Supplies Plus, the resident maker had been doing it forever. She knew everything without a recipe. Watching her work felt like a different language. I’d never be fluent because I’d started too late. It was a whole world I just found out existed.

Then she retired. And someone needed to make the soap for my Instagram videos. That someone was me.

I started where the business tells everyone to start: melt and pour. Melt the soap base, add fragrance, pour into a mold. Low stakes, fast results, nothing to ruin. The perfect on-ramp for someone who’d been told for years not to waste materials on something she didn’t know how to do yet.

But melt and pour went somewhere. Sugar scrubs. Lotion from scratch. Body butters.

Recipes I found, then modified, then made entirely my own. The formula wasn’t the final thing. It was just the starting point for finding what I actually wanted.

The community found me at the same time. While I was photographing ingredients, writing captions about new fragrances, and adding soap making staples to our emails, people were turning them into things I couldn’t even imagine. The same base products in a hundred different hands became a hundred different things. No two makers working the same way. No ceiling on what the materials could become.

I fell in. Not as a marketer. As a maker.

And that’s when the marketing got good.

I knew what questions beginners asked because I’d asked them. I knew what made a formula feel worth trying. I knew what the community celebrated and what it side-eyed.

I knew the difference between a brand that understood soap people and one that was just selling to them.

At some point the flicker started. This could be a business. I could sell this. I could build something here. Our customers were doing it, so why couldn’t I?

And the moment I started optimizing the hobby, I lost the plot. The potions stopped feeling like magic. They started feeling like inventory.

I’ve been trying to find my way back.

The best thing that ever happened to my marketing was stopping trying to do marketing. I made the thing. I joined the world. The rest followed.

I’ve been making things in my kitchen again.

Log 001 // The Wag

A Happy Meal on the counter. The Golden Retriever, again. Already have three. Still need the Dachshund.

Recess ran on a trading economy. The duplicate burned a hole in your pocket all morning, just waiting for the moment you could finally hand it off.

Then, Nintendogs. A pink DS Lite and a virtual Chihuahua you named something embarrassing. You fed it. Trained it. Took it on walks to nowhere. Cared about whether it was happy.

We grew up and got the real actual dog. Walked them, fed them, taught them the basics.

The world opened up slowly. Patios started allowing dogs. Your favorite bar added a water bowl by the door. Pet-friendly became its own Google search, its own filter, its own world.

We modified our world around them.

Nobody imagined there was more to it than that.

Turns out there’s a whole science to what dogs actually need. Mental stimulation. Sniffing. Chewing. Zooming. Digging. Species-specific enrichment to keep them regulated and grounded.

The ones who found out couldn’t unknow it.

It was time to build a world with them.

The Wag opened in November 2025 with every reason to believe. Traffic flowing. Reviews glowing. Clean. Safe. Finally.

Then it got warmer. One 53°F day in February and traffic dropped 22% in a week. The owner felt it before the data said anything.

Most problems live first in the felt experience. In the space between what a business meant to build and what people are actually experiencing. Metrics that look fine until you realize the floor is unstable. The thing that exists before you know what to call it.

The Wag launched as an indoor/outdoor dog park. Useful in February but optional in May. The Wag centered itself around the dog. Not around what it means to have one.

The Wag needed a world.

A system with its own vocabulary, lifecycle logic, and internal rules. Somewhere for its stories to live across every channel and every season.

That’s the difference between storytelling and world building.

Storytelling is a moment. A campaign, a launch. A single season’s yield.

World building is infrastructure that gives every future story a safe place to grow. You till the soil, plot the rows, plant the seeds. And the harvest comes as planned.