You have felt the rush of a busy trade show booth, a packed event, or a social media post that got all the attention you were chasing. The likes, the impressions, the traffic feel great. Then what? Silence.
You wonder what happened, change the tactic, chase more attention, and the cycle continues, but the results don't. You can't draw a line between the attention you receive and the actions, sales, and hires you truly need.
It's not a tactics problem. It is a system problem. 90% of marketing budgets die in the gap between attention and commitment, taking trust, productivity, and ecosystems with them.
It's not just you. It affects almost everyone, and it has been hiding in plain sight in every budget your organization has ever approved.
Dave Betke has spent 35 years diagnosing that gap across every sector where trust drives outcomes, then designing Purpose-Ecosystems™ around a single organizational goal.
For five years, he crisscrossed Canada with no budget and no institutional backing, designing a line of shirts that funded a movement and protected 65,000 acres of forest. That forest is now West Arm Provincial Park, in British Columbia, protected forever. Those shirts did far more than generate attention. They saw people for who they could be. They generated identity. And identity is what builds movements, retains members, closes hires, and creates systems that sustain themselves.
This is what becomes possible when marketing becomes an act of caring.
THE SYSTEM FAILURE
Most marketing budgets pursue attention as though it were a destination. It is not. It is a black hole that consumes time, money, trust, and ecosystems while the people you most need to reach wait somewhere beyond the noise for something worth stopping for.
They are not looking for distraction or interruption. They want meaning.
Every talk on this page begins here.
While marketing school was teaching people to manipulate targets, Dave was learning what makes people trust, engage, and walk alongside you. That difference surfaced early and proved itself at scale across every sector where trust drives outcomes.
Dave speaks on what marketing can learn from psychology, Buddhism, and nature. How the tactics hamster wheel controls marketing budgets from attention seeking to AI reliance. And how marketing can become an act of caring.
The result is a talk your audience did not know they needed, that leaves them unable to defend the assumptions they arrived with.
- B2B recruitment
- Nonprofit fundraising
- Safety programs
- Community engagement
- Festival partnerships
- Association management
- Cause marketing
- Government communications
The methodology has never changed. The sectors that needed it never stopped growing.
Formats
Every engagement is designed for the specific room, audience, and outcome. The conversation about format starts here.
35
years of diagnosing individual systems
7
national marketing awards
65,000
acres saved: the origin of the methodology
Dave works with organizations dedicated to making a genuine difference in the lives of people, communities, and the natural world. Organizations where that dedication is the reason they exist, expressed in how they treat the people they serve before anyone thinks to measure it.
That dedication lives in nonprofits and associations, in government programs, in B2B companies led by people who lose sleep over whether they are truly serving the people they exist for. It lives in organizations that build infrastructure in communities that need it and never issue a press release. It lives wherever the human being on the other side of the marketing is treated as a hero, not a target.
If that describes your organization, this is the right conversation.
Everything you were taught about marketing was built around chasing people and attention.
Everything that actually works is built around giving people purpose and meaning.
When you stop seeing targets and start seeing heroes—people with their own journey and their own vision of what they are trying to become—everything you build changes. When the people you most need to reach can see themselves in the vision you have painted clearly enough, they move toward it on their own terms. Your goal and their journey converge. You are no longer pulling them toward something. You are walking alongside them toward something both sides can see.
You are here because some part of you already knew the difference, even when the system around you didn't.
Built from 35 years of diagnostic work, not theory. Each talk stands alone. Together they map a complete rethinking of how organizations reach the people they most need to reach.
Talk 01 — Evergreen
Is Dopamine Controlling Your Marketing Budget?
For CEOs · CFOs · executive directors · B2B leadership teams · association executives · municipal program leads · anyone who approves marketing budgets and cannot connect them to outcomes
You know the swag everyone gives away that everyone knows doesn't work? That is just a symptom of a problem almost everyone has, but few have learned how to fix.
It shows up differently in every organization: the trade show booth that filled and produced nothing, the content strategy that generated traffic and lost the board, the AI tool that felt like progress until someone asked what it actually produced. Different tactics, same gap, same silence at the end of the budget meeting.
The reason the gap persists has nothing to do with the tactics and everything to do with the underlying system. And the system has been hiding in plain sight in every budget your organization has ever approved.
This talk names it, shows why it is invisible from the inside, and explains why departments are incentivized to hide the dysfunction.
The $150K mug story will leave you eager to diagnose your own system.
Talk 02 — Evergreen
What Your Marketing Needs to Learn From Psychology, Buddhism, and Nature.
For visionary leaders · purpose-driven B2B organizations · regenerative business gatherings · sustainability conferences · B Corp communities · marketing schools
The flower never chases the bee. It offers what the bee needs and trusts that the visit will bring life to both. Neither runs a funnel. Neither is a target. Both benefit, or the system fails.
This symbiotic principle came from psychology, Buddhism, and nature, three sources that conventional marketing has yet to discover, and that together explain why some systems sustain themselves for decades while others require constant budget to keep their lights on.
This talk introduces a fundamentally different orientation toward the people you most need to reach. The organizations that leave with it do not see their audience the same way again. They cannot.
Talk 03 — Evergreen
Marketing From One Human Heart to Another. A Radical Act in the Age of AI.
For nonprofit boards · mission-driven B2B organizations · municipal program leads · government communicators · any room where the decision maker is ready for something they cannot argue with
Most people who got into this work did so because they cared about their mission and the people they were serving. But somewhere along the way, the system handed them a set of tools designed for something else entirely, and the caring got buried under campaigns, metrics, and renewal conversations that never quite added up.
This talk is for the room that remembers why it started.
Because somewhere beyond the attention and the metrics, the people you most need to reach are waiting. They want to feel seen, valued, and part of something bigger than a transaction. They are searching for meaning. And they will recognize it the moment it arrives, because it was designed for them before anything else was designed at all.
This talk delivers that recognition as a felt experience rather than an argument. The audience leaves having felt the difference. And if they felt it, so will the actual humans they need to reach.
A themed series of provocations for organizations navigating the most seductive and most misunderstood tool in the history of marketing. Each talk stands alone as a keynote. Together they build a program that takes a room from seduction to clarity to competitive advantage.
If you need one talk for your conference, choose the one that finds your room. If you want to build something more sustained, that conversation starts here.
Talk A
The Erosion Nobody Is Measuring.
For CEOs · leadership teams · B2B organizations · association executives · municipal program leads · marketing schools · anyone who has watched their organization adopt a new tool before asking what problem it was solving.
This is one of the most important questions of this decade. And almost nobody is asking it honestly, including the people who built the tools.
Here is the honest answer: both are happening simultaneously. But the second is happening faster than the first. And the first is mostly an illusion.
The same neurological mechanism that keeps organizations on the tactics hamster wheel makes AI feel like thinking. The validation arrives immediately. The answer is always confident. The blank page problem disappears. And somewhere in that comfort, the productive discomfort that was doing the cognitive work of building your judgment stops happening.
The organizations that will have the greatest competitive advantage in the age of AI are not the ones who use it most fluently. They are the ones who use it deliberately enough to protect the human capacity it most threatens to replace.
This talk asks the question your next AI budget cycle cannot afford to skip.
Talk B
For CEOs · CFOs · executive directors · B2B leadership teams · ESG accountability boards · municipal program leads · sustainability officers · anyone responsible for marketing budgets and planetary outcomes simultaneously
You already know the swag story. The budget approved, the table filled, the booth busy, the outcomes nowhere, the planet a little worse off, and the sheepish agreement in the room that nobody would say out loud: we are doing this again next year.
AI is that story, but the table is global, the budget is measured in freshwater and server energy, and the sheepish agreement is happening inside organizations that genuinely believe they are doing something different this time.
This talk names what is the same and what is categorically worse, with enough precision to change how your organization calculates the true cost of attention, and enough compassion to make the room feel equipped rather than implicated.
Talk C
For CEOs · leadership teams · B2B organizations · nonprofit boards · municipal program leads · marketing schools · any room willing to examine something they have been privately enjoying
It agrees with everything you say. Every idea you share is more brilliant than the last. It builds your confidence. It really 'gets' you. And then you wake up to the illusion.
This is the most personal talk Dave delivers. It begins with him sitting outside his own behaviour as a participant observer, watching himself reach for the validation, the affirmation, the feeling of being heard by something that was never actually listening. He is not pointing at the room. He is standing inside the experience alongside them.
Because here is what nobody on the AI conference circuit is saying out loud: the feeling is real. The neurological response is genuine. And the gap between that feeling and what is actually happening is where the most important marketing insight of this decade lives.
The room that leaves this talk will never experience an AI interaction the same way again. And that shift in perception changes how they see every subsequent human interaction.
Talk D — The Destination
For CEOs · leadership teams · B2B organizations · nonprofit boards · mission-driven organizations · municipal program leads · marketing schools · any room ready for the alternative
Everything the AI track has named- the conditioning, the scale of the consequences, the illusion of connection points toward the same question: if AI cannot close the gap between attention and commitment, what does?
Thirty-five years of proof across every sector where trust drives outcomes points toward the same answer. A forest protected forever. Early detection programs still running in Alberta workplaces more than a decade after a single breakfast fundraiser. Three engineers hired when the goal was one. None of these outcomes came from a better tool. They came from a human being willing to truly see another human being before designing anything at all.
Marketing from one human heart to another is not a soft skill, nor is it idealism. In the age of AI, it is the greatest competitive advantage available to any organization willing to practice it. And unlike every tool currently competing for your budget, it has been proven over 35 years and compounds rather than expires.
This talk is the destination the AI track was always headed toward.
In 1990, Dave had a design table, a cause, and no budget. What he also had was a superpower: the ability to produce something with meaning that gave both sides exactly what they needed.
People who had never signed a petition in their lives bought those shirts. The acid rain geese made them laugh before the horror landed. The split image showed them something they could not unsee. Neither shirt argued. Neither preached. Both planted a way of seeing that stayed long after the shirt was washed. That is a very different transaction than attention. That is the beginning of commitment.
The same founding act has driven every engagement since. A flashlight that moved business leaders to fund early detection programs still running in Alberta workplaces more than a decade later. A relocation album that answered every question a family was afraid to ask before they asked it, and hired three senior engineers when the goal was one. A festival partnership now in its 26th year.
Your exhibitors are optimizing for attention. Everyone feels the difference, including the buyers who walk past their booths.
Exhibitors pay significant fees to participate in your trade show. Most leave with booth traffic numbers, a stack of business cards, and no way to connect that spend to actual outcomes — hires, partnerships, sales, donations.
When renewal time comes, the conversation becomes: "We spent $50,000 and got booth traffic." That's not a conversation that retains exhibitors. It's the conversation that loses them.
The problem isn't the trade show. It's that exhibitors are spending 90% of their budget on attention: booth presence, giveaways, materials, and almost nothing on the systems that turn that attention into commitment. They don't know it. You don't know it. And the relationship ends at renewal.
"Associations that help their exhibitors prove ROI don't lose exhibitors. They become indispensable to them."
This is a symbiotic system problem. When exhibitors win, associations win. When exhibitors can't prove their investment, everybody loses. The same fix that solves the exhibitor's commitment problem solves the association's retention problem, because they were always symptoms of the same dysfunction.
Delivered as exhibitor value-add · Funded by the association
A keynote or workshop delivered to your exhibitors at or before your trade show. Exhibitors leave with a diagnostic framework for turning their booth presence into measurable commitment outcomes, not just impressions.
The association funds and delivers this as a value-add, which immediately differentiates your show from every other trade show competing for the same exhibitor budget.
FEATURED TALK
How exhibitors can move beyond attention metrics to build the systems that turn booth presence into measurable commitment: hires, partnerships, sales, and sustained relationships.
Marketing Triage™ for the association itself
When the exhibitor workshop reveals what most associations already sense, that their trade show ecosystem isn't designed to help exhibitors earn commitment, the next conversation is about redesigning it.
Marketing Triage™ applied to your exhibitor engagement system reveals which specific dysfunction is driving churn — missing, misaligned, or broken systems — and what to redesign first. The association becomes a strategic partner in building something both sides benefit from.
Dave Betke is the founder of Do Better Marketing, based in Edmonton, Alberta and Kootenay Lake, BC. He studied psychology, not marketing, and has spent 35 years applying the difference to organizational challenges that conventional marketing consistently fails to solve.
His approach is deliberately contrarian because 35 years of cross-sector observation have produced conclusions that conventional marketing training never reaches.
His methodology began in the early 1990s when he spent five years criss-crossing Canada to save a 65,000-acre endangered forest in British Columbia, treating students and retailers as heroes rather than targets. That forest is now West Arm Provincial Park, protected forever. The principles behind that campaign have never changed.
He is the creator of Marketing Triage™, Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design, and the Symbiotic Systems Methodology. His work has been recognized with seven national marketing awards.
He is also the founder of GreenMeets™, a bi-monthly global gathering of sustainability and regenerative practitioners, and is currently developing a Symbiotic AI Agent that gives marketing and business advice that considers planetary limits, symbiosis, and even its own energy use.
Dave speaks on what marketing can learn from psychology, Buddhism, and nature. How the tactics hamster wheel controls marketing budgets, from attention-seeking to AI reliance. And how marketing can become an act of caring.
He was introduced to Mikhail Gorbachev by the chancellor of the University of Calgary and has been recognized across sectors and scales that few marketing practitioners ever reach. Ask him about his experience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
Dave speaks to organizations making a positive difference in people's lives, their communities, or the natural world. Nonprofit and mission-driven organizations are encouraged to inquire regardless of budget.
Are you with me?
We Help Good People Do Better Marketing
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+1 (780) 474 • 6563
Do Better Marketing
(a division of Avatar Brand Management Inc.)
Do Better Marketing sees the person behind the role. That act of seeing has protected forests, changed how business leaders see domestic violence, and hired senior engineers. Marketing Triage™. Purpose-Ecosystem™ Design. Dimensional Advertising™. Symbiotic Systems Methodology. GreenMeets™. Edmonton, Alberta.
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