Your marketing goals.

My cunning plans.

Marriott

As a strategist for Informa TechTarget’s global content studio, I develop editorial ideas for Marriott’s website.

January to October 2024 saw $500K of bookings attributed to links in those articles. The last quarter we received data for showed an average visit time of 4 minutes 44 seconds – way above industry average.

Rough Guides

To marry up Rough Guides’ print and digital identities, I conceived and brought to publication a photobook called You Are Here. The images came from a travel photography competition that we ran on the website, with the winner’s image forming the book’s jacket and hundreds of entries featuring in its pages. Martin Parr, one of my heroes, provided the foreword. I wrote the intro below.

Culture Trip

The pandemic brought great upheaval to Culture Trip, a travel and culture website where I was an editorial director. As travel ground to a halt, so too did the company’s business plan, which at the time hinged on the launch of its custom-made digital travel agency.

The brand needed a reason to exist during this difficult period. I conceived an article series that hit the brand’s cornerstones of culture and travel, and felt super relevant to what was happening in the world at that moment. Each article in this ‘Chinatown’ series was a deep dive into the history and human stories associated with a handful of global Chinatown neighbourhoods.

With Culture Trip’s impressive organic traffic, I hoped the series would help counteract some of the wild anti-Chinese sentiment around at the time.

Beam

Many-fingers-many-pies web3 operator Beam (formerly Merit Circle) has one of the largest treasuries in the crypto world.

As Beam’s strategist, I was brought in to help them flex that might. I introduced an editorial plan with two brand-building goals: interesting a web2 audience in all things web3; and positioning Beam as a guiding light for editorial figures outside of web3.

The background to this was the organisation’s belief that web3’s user-friendliness was nearing ‘mass adoption’ potential, and that ‘normies’ would soon be needing to work with terms like blockchain, gas fees, DeFi, Merkle roots and smart contracts.

With one of Beam’s pillars web3 gaming (video games with blockchain integration), I commissioned and edited a series of articles promoting the ‘Web3 Gaming Revolution’. These articles went through an editorial process of much greater editorial rigour than is usually seen in the web3 space.

The mass adoption wait goes on, but we got some good engagement.