I MAKE
PEOPLE
GIVE A
SH!T.

We were handed a multimillion-dollar, seven-part fantasy epic set in fifth-century Britain, as the Roman Empire was packing up its little leather skirts and leaving the country to figure out indoor plumbing on its own. The cinematography was beautiful. The soundtrack was exquisite. The sets were enormous. And absolutely no one asked for it.

If the audience did not already exist, we were going to find every person who might plausibly join it. We spent thousands calculating the Total Addressable Market, which is what TAM stands for and also what consultants call guessing when they would like the invoice paid.

We bought billboards, cut dozens of trailers, produced cast interviews, created behind-the-scenes diaries and a website that won a Webby. We sent more than 400 million emails and 100 million push notifications. We even hired actors dressed as characters from the series to stand beside bull statues in major cities, because nothing attracts a potential viewer quite like a scantily dressed man near a bronze testicle.

The audience said hard pass. There were no protests or furious Reddit threads. They simply did not care. Like the house on Halloween handing out dental floss instead of candy.

Eminem was releasing The Marshall Mathers LP 2, and the album cover featured his childhood home in Detroit. The home was never going to be featured on MTV Cribs, but it was instantly recognizable. It was part of Eminem's story, part of the original artwork, and now the centerpiece of its sequel.

Give someone Eminem's house. The property was sitting in foreclosure and could be purchased for roughly $30,000 — less than most national promotions spend creating a landing page no one remembers. I called Legal. I called Finance. I called the company president. I made the pitch, built the campaign, and started working through the logistics of giving away a structurally questionable piece of hip-hop history. We made it all the way to conversations with the bank. This was definitely going to happen. I was practicing my acceptance speech.

On November 7th I turned on CNN Headline News and saw the story. Someone had burned Eminem's house down. My grand prize had gone from an iconic piece of music history to an active fire scene before we could finish the paperwork.

There are contingency plans for talent cancellations and winners who fail background checks. There is no section titled "What to Do When Someone Sets the Prize on Fire."

As the biggest broadcast company on the planet, iHeartRadio has something almost no company on Earth has. Nearly 900 radio stations. Hundreds of personalities. Millions of listeners. The plan wasn't to create another promotion. It was to build something that could only exist because iHeartRadio existed.

For twenty-four hours, all of our stations would unite behind one promotion. Every hour would belong to a different national brand. Twenty-four brands. Twenty-four once-in-a-lifetime offers. One hour you're winning front-row tickets to the Super Bowl. The next hour you're flying to Los Angeles to meet Bruno Mars. The next, you're driving home in a brand-new truck.

The point wasn't discounts. It was creating twenty-four hours where the biggest brands in America knew that, for one hour, they owned the largest radio network in the country. What could go wrong?

Everyone wanted in. A local furniture store wanted an hour. A Tae Kwon Do studio outside Des Moines wanted an hour. A pizza shop with one location in Menomonie, Wisconsin wanted an hour. The grand prizes disappeared. The national moments disappeared. The exclusivity disappeared. What started as twenty-four unforgettable experiences slowly became hundreds of local promotions. By the end it had become "tell 'em Big Jim sent you for 33% off your next oil change."

Brad Paisley had a new album coming out. The single was about a truck, which in country music narrows the subject matter down to approximately half the format. The cover featured Brad's old truck. Not a showroom truck. The one he drove to Nashville before anyone knew who he was. It had carried the guitars, the miles, and whatever amount of fast-food trash is required to begin a country music career.

Give one lucky listener Brad Paisley's truck. The one he drove before the awards, the tours, and the part where people stopped asking him to move his own equipment. Leadership loved it. The label loved it. We started building the campaign and working through the logistics of transferring a very famous man's personal possession. Everything moved exactly as it should. Until one detail became impossible to ignore.

Brad would actually have to give us the truck.

As the conversations became less hypothetical, Brad realized he could not do it. The truck meant too much. It was not ego. It was a memory. Every dent and stain belonged to a version of his life that existed before arenas, tour buses, and people whose job was making sure there were no stains.

To their credit, the label offered to buy the winner a brand-new truck. A generous offer. Also a completely different promotion.

On my first day in the new office, the CMO walked over, patted me on the back, and smiled. "Ready to launch?" Absolutely. It's why I had been hired.

The company had spent months building a children's streaming platform called Bentkey. The product team had done what most people would consider impossible — building a fully functioning streaming app in four months. The launch date was already set. Disney's 100th anniversary.

While Disney celebrated its past, we'd introduce a different future. The return of Saturday morning cartoons. A place parents didn't have to pre-screen every episode before handing over the remote. The vision existed. The date existed. The app somehow existed. I assumed the marketing existed too.

I should not have done that.

I expected to spend my first day refining campaigns. Instead I started asking questions. What graphics do we have? What are the flagship shows? What's the message? Who's the audience? Where are the emails, the social, the trailers, the landing page? Who's talking to talent? The answers ranged somewhere between "not much" and "figure it out, smart guy."

There wasn't time to complain or assign blame. There was only time to build. It felt less like joining a marketing team and more like wandering onto a Gordon Ramsay cooking competition where nobody tells you what's in the pantry until the timer starts.

We built messaging, emails, social campaigns, and launch videos. We repaired landing pages, established priorities, and uncovered another missing piece nearly every hour. That week, Bentkey premiered as the number-one children's app in the App Store.

Then we proved how quickly it could all stop. There was no meaningful budget secured to sustain the launch. The movie announced as a cornerstone of the platform never reached a final draft. The momentum disappeared, the rankings followed, and Bentkey fell off the side of Planet App Store. Hitting number one did not make the failure easier to accept. It made the size of it measurable.

Fourteen million followers. Melanie Martinez had built one of the most distinct visual worlds in music. Creepy dolls. Pastel nightmares. School uniforms. Baby teeth. A fan base that understood every reference and would follow her into a haunted nursery without a single follow-up question.

We had twenty-four hours to build a sponsor-funded fan experience around her. Then the sponsor arrived with money. A lot of money. The kind that makes everyone in a conference room sit up straighter and describe obvious compromises as "exciting creative opportunities."

Build something that felt like Melanie. Immersive. Strange. Slightly unsettling. The kind of experience her fans would photograph, post, and spend six months explaining to relatives. Then the sponsor started adding requests.

They wanted summer. They wanted a pool party. At their private pool. And somehow, by the end of the meeting, Melanie Martinez — a goth girl who dresses like a haunted porcelain doll — was appearing at an M&M&M pool party that would make Beach Bikini Barbie ask what on earth was happening. Branded inflatables. Colorful decorations. Cheese sticks. Because nothing says Cry Baby quite like room-temperature mozzarella near a swimming pool.

The sponsor got everything it wanted. The logo was everywhere. The brand colors were everywhere. Melanie was also technically there. She sat in the corner, away from fans, with cheese sticks. We had taken an artist beloved for her extraordinarily specific identity and removed almost every trace of it.