Work
Work
Case 01 · Case 01 · PSE-listed property developer
Exited a ₱1.44M-a-year retainer, and put the same money into working media.
A content agency was on retainer at ₱120,000 a month and producing single-digit inquiries per project. The instinct in the room was to renegotiate the deliverables — ask for more posts, more articles, a tighter brief.
That would have treated it as a performance problem. It was a structural one. The money was buying fees rather than reach, and no amount of renegotiation changes what a line item is fundamentally purchasing.
I ended the retainer and rebuilt content, organic and paid social inside the company — then moved the same ₱120,000 into working media. Three project pages became six. Monthly spend per page went from ₱3,000 to ₱20,000.
The retainer was not the only thing worth reading. I reviewed all seven inherited marketing contracts against what each had actually delivered, then renegotiated, restructured or exited every one — including cutting a single vendor by 60%, from ₱150,000 to ₱60,000 a month. Roughly ₱2.5M in annual vendor cost came out, of which ₱1.44M was the content retainer.
None of that was a marketing decision. It was a decision about what the function was structurally buying — which is the kind of decision that only gets made by someone accountable for what the function produces.
Case 02 · Case 02 · Luxury residential, two developments
Eighteen qualified inquiries became 498 in the same four-month window.
2018 – 2021 · Customer acquisition
The engagement arrived described as a conversion problem. Leads were coming in. Sales were not following. The available explanation was that the sales team needed better leads.
As the diagnosis went on, the actual problem surfaced. The campaigns were reaching people who were interested in the properties but a long way from buying one. The messaging led with floor plans and unit features — the things a developer finds interesting. The people responding were browsing, not deciding.
One caveat on the baseline, because it matters: 18 was the first period in which qualified inquiries were tracked at all. Part of what changed was the measurement, and I would rather say that than let the multiple do work it hasn’t earned.
The fix was not a new campaign. It was a change in who was being reached and what was said to them. Within the same four-month window a year later, qualified inquiries had gone from 18 to 498, at ₱38.96 each.
Through the 2020 national lockdown, eight active developments continued producing qualified inquiries — not as a response to the pandemic, but because the digital function had been built as a primary commercial channel before it became the only one.
₱7.3M through a developer’s first digital collections channel.
2024 – 2026 · Payments infrastructure
Overseas Filipino buyers were the strongest segment and the hardest to close, because paying still required someone physically present in the country. That is not a marketing problem, and no campaign was going to fix it.
We built and launched online payment capability across three projects — removing the primary conversion barrier and establishing the client’s first digital collections channel.
1,978 inquiries from sixteen landing pages — 92% of them organic.
2022 – 2026 · Acquisition system
Sixteen conversion-focused landing pages with connected lead-capture forms, built over two years and left running.
The organic share is the part that matters. An acquisition system that keeps producing when the campaigns aren’t running is a different asset from an ad budget — and it is the difference between a function that compounds and one that has to be refunded every quarter.
Diagnose before prescribing.
Most organizations have been told what to do before anyone has properly read what is happening. The sequence below exists to prevent that. It is also why the four cases above look like different problems and were solved the same way.
Read
The system as it actually operates — not as it is described in strategy documents.
Diagnose
The cause, not the most visible symptom. Getting this wrong is expensive.
Intervene
The specific change the diagnosis points to — not the one most available or most familiar.
Test
Against commercial outcomes, not marketing metrics. The question is whether the business moved.
Scale
Build what worked into the operating logic, so the result outlasts the engagement.
If something here resembles what you are dealing with.
Thirty to forty-five minutes about the situation as it actually is. No proposal is being prepared in anticipation of your message.
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Think It Through
What I noticed, and where I’d start. Two short sections, once a month, plus a photograph from wherever I happened to be.
Reply to any of them. They come straight to me — not to a list, not to an assistant. Some of the better thinking here started as somebody’s disagreement.
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