CaJu Archive

Ideas, breakdowns, and field notes you can actually use.

Use the archive to browse past writing on marketing, media, production, data, and the odd useful detour.

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20 articles shown

April 3, 20262 min readCasey Franco

Where Correct (Ad) Ideas Come From

A short reflection on where strong advertising ideas really come from. This piece argues that the best marketing insight does not emerge from abstraction alone, but from lived experience with a product, service, or customer journey. Drawing on phenomenology, workplace observation, and Mad Men’s famous Kodak pitch in “The Wheel,” the article makes the case that marketers need direct contact with the things they are trying to describe. If you want better copy, better positioning, and better customer language, you need to move through the funnel, use the product, notice the frictions and pleasures, and pay attention to how the thing actually enters lived experience.

Marketing

March 27, 20262 min readCasey Franco

Marketing Tactics For Hard Times

This article examines marketing during economic hardship at the level that matters most: political economy, consumer psychology, pricing, retention, messaging, and market structure. It moves from historical examples, from the Great Depression to the 2008 crisis, into practical lessons for businesses and marketers today. Readers will learn why panic cuts and indiscriminate discounting often backfire, how downturns can open market-share opportunities, what kinds of messages become more persuasive when people feel financially constrained, and how to adapt offer design, attribution, tone, and customer strategy before conditions get worse.

Marketing

March 20, 20262 min readCasey Franco

Why Good Efforts Still Fail

Why do good plans still fail, even when the effort is real? This article explores the difference between planning and strategy by moving through systems thinking, feedback, emergence, human psychology, choice architecture, and cybernetics. Along the way, it argues that success depends less on isolated tactics than on understanding structure, interconnection, incentives, audience behavior, and the larger systems our actions operate within.

Marketing

March 14, 20262 min readCasey Franco

Situating LLMs for Creatives: Philosophy, Workflows, and Political Economy

A practical, philosophical, and politically grounded guide to how creatives should use AI without surrendering the human parts of creative work. This article explains what large language models really are, why they are not “intelligent” in the human sense, where AI tools help with automation, research, coding, file handling, and analytics, and where they still fail at novelty, judgment, meaning, and strategy. It also explores generative AI through the lens of labor, value, and creative work, arguing that the real threat is less aesthetic than economic. For marketers, editors, designers, producers, and other digital creatives trying to decide whether AI belongs in their workflow, this piece offers a clear answer: let the computer do the computer things, and protect the human work that only humans can do.

MarketingData AnalysisProduction

March 6, 20262 min readCasey Franco

The Return of Hybrid Attribution: Ad Conversion Strategies for Unusual Business Models

Learn how hybrid online/offline ad attribution helps businesses track conversions when standard digital tracking alone falls short. This article covers offline attribution, promo codes, call tracking, QR codes, CRM uploads, and creative conversion strategies for podcasts, service businesses, restaurants, real estate, and other unusual business models.

MarketingData Analysis

February 27, 20262 min readCasey Franco

ROAS Explained: How We Got a Campaign to 17x Profit

ROAS measures revenue per dollar spent on ads, but it only works when tracking and conversion values are accurate. Here’s how we used persona research, content testing, and ruthless optimization to move a campaign from 8x to 17x ROAS.

Marketing

February 20, 20262 min readCasey Franco

The Marketing “Gimmick” Lives On in Brazil

From Carnaval umbrellas and free beers to Big Brother Brazil’s shameless sponsorships, Casey follows a simple question: why do “marketing gimmicks” feel alive in Brazil but increasingly dead in the US? The answer is not just culture. It is goodwill. This edition connects reciprocity, political economy, and direct response discipline to argue that social media content and “untrackable” generosity still pay off, even when attribution dashboards insist otherwise.

Marketing

February 13, 20262 min readCasey Franco

Absence Makes the Brand Grow Stronger: CaJu 2.0

Rather than walk you through every false start and every experiment we ran this past year, I’m going to use this edition of the newsletter/blog to update you on CaJu’s 2026 operations and the specific problems each change was meant to address. A lot of our growing pains are probably the same ones you’ve felt as a business owner. Here’s how we worked through them and why.

CaJu Services

February 15, 20252 min readCasey Franco

Why Your Customers Don’t Want What You’re Selling (And How to Fix It)

People don’t buy products. They buy permission slips to become a slightly shinier version of themselves. Marketing isn’t about filling gaps, it’s about widening them. The best campaigns don’t sell solutions. They sell beautiful, aching questions: Who could you be? What are you missing? How much longer will you settle? So here’s my challenge to you: Stop trying to satisfy your customers. Start haunting them. Ethically, of course.

Marketing

February 5, 20252 min readCasey Franco

Seeing Beyond the Numbers: Why Data Visualization Matters

This is called Anscombe’s Quartet, and it’s a striking reminder that data visualization isn’t just a nice extra, it’s often the critical step in truly understanding what those numbers are trying to tell you.

Data Analysis

January 17, 20252 min readCasey Franco

Semiotic Marketing in the New Year

Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols, and how meaning is created within them. In other words, think of every logo, slogan, and ad design being a 'sign' to represent something else. The meaning is not locked inside the sign itself; it comes up from the cultural context in which it would appear. By analyzing cultural codes, you can gauge how different segments of your audience might perceive your choices. What feels whimsical to one group might seem trivial to another. Semiotics ensures your brand speaks authentically to everyone.

Marketing

January 14, 20252 min readCasey Franco

How Small Businesses Are Using Algorithms and Statistics to Hack Marketing

You don’t need a tech degree to start using algorithms in your marketing. Affordable tools and platforms like Google Ads or email marketing software often have built-in features to analyze performance and recommend next steps. Begin by identifying a specific marketing challenge and apply these principles step by step. Over time, you’ll see smarter campaigns and stronger results.

Data AnalysisMarketing

November 22, 20242 min readCasey Franco

Three Examples of Qualitative vs Quantitative Marketing

Any marketer will tell you, all marketing is purely a numbers game. You can either try to increase the quantity of your outreach or the quality. We’ve opted for the latter here. Again, just a small amount of increased theoretical consideration is enough to increase the quality of your output as opposed to paying more money in order to increase quantity. It’s the eternal battle of time vs money.

MarketingProduction

September 25, 20242 min readCasey Franco

CAJU Q&A #1

Though tracking conversions across different digital marketing channels can feel like juggling flaming torches, I’ve got some multi-touch attribution techniques that might simplify things. Exploring advanced attribution models like Data-Driven Attribution (DDA) can be a game-changer. They use machine learning algorithms to analyze how each marketing touchpoint contributes to a conversion, giving you a clearer picture of your customer's journey.

Q&AMarketingProduction

September 13, 20242 min readCasey Franco

The Best Marketing Book I’ve Read in 2024

"However, considerations like these aside, I consider Marketing 5.0 the best marketing book I’ve read in 2024, and one of the best I’ve read on the topic ever. Much of that comes from the fact that it has little to do with the techniques of marketing (there’s a “For Dummies” book for learning those) and more to do with the conditions of modern marketing. Being written in the way-back year of 2021, famed author Philip Kotler lays out a clear-eyed view of the post-pandemic world we seem to forget that we live in."

Marketing

August 30, 20242 min readCasey Franco

The 5-Minute Guide to Mastering Studio Lighting

At the root of any lighting setup, there are two major aspects to always keep in mind: Temperature and Diffusion. Lower lighting temperatures are more orange and dim, while higher temperatures are bluer and brighter. In a studio setting, you'll typically want neutral white lighting that daylight temperatures provide, as these are more easily adjusted in post-production. Additionally, consider the harshness of your light sources. Light that has been diffused or reflected off another surface is softer and can allow your cameras to capture a more neutral exposure, giving you more flexibility in post-production. Remember, it’s not just about how much light you have, but how you use it.

Production

August 16, 20242 min readCasey Franco

The Phenomenology of Advertising

Even a pedestrian understanding of Hegelian philosophy gives one immediate access to a higher level of generalistic knowledge. For those working in creative fields and for those who consume the output of creative fields alike, that is an asset that cannot be overstated. Only a more holistic philosophical framework for weighing the deluge of ideology hefted at us every minute of every day can break one from the confines of the common view which sees every thing, idea, and person we encounter as fully formed, static, and rigidly defined as opposed to a momentary and blurry capture of a greater, continuous process.

MarketingPhilosophy

August 2, 20242 min readCasey Franco

The Budget-Friendly Beginner’s Guide to Perfect Audio

Imagine a person standing in the middle of the room with a flashlight; the sound is going to come out of their mouth in a particular direction and begin bouncing off all of the walls until it becomes so dissipated that the waves would no longer be noticeable. How would you stop the flashlight beams from bouncing off the walls? Make the walls less reflective. So how would you stop audio from bouncing? Same way. Make the surfaces less reflective.

Production

July 19, 20242 min readCasey Franco

What Programmers and Creatives Can Learn From Each Other

Coding can be easily dismissed by creatives as non-creative, but one only thinks that way if one has never really tried programming. When you find an elegant and simple solution to a difficult logical problem in a coding language, it is a feeling of such sublime bliss, that it rivals the feeling one gets from a eureka moment when creating art… If you make a mistake or if life throws you an error, smile! You just learned something. If you’re clever, you’ll build new ways of handling that situation in the future. That is how bugs become features.

Data AnalysisProductionPhilosophy

July 5, 20242 min readCasey Franco

Video Editing Principles for Benevolent Propagandists

Less is often simply less, not more. Short TikTok-style videos briefly entertain but leave something to be desired. They are consumed not digested… The modern person is busy and strapped for cash, not stupid. They have a shortage of attention because they have a shortage of time because they have a shortage of money. But they will make time for that which puts time back into their lives, puts money back into their pockets, or puts grandiose dreams back into their imaginations.

ProductionPhilosophy