When was the last time your marketing made someone feel genuinely seen rather than targeted?
Most marketing comes from the mind. Who is our target? How shall we manipulate their pain points? How many impressions can we drive? How many pats on the back and pieces of glass can we collect from peers?
Most marketing sees attention as a destination. It measures likes, traffic and impressions and continues to consume resources in pursuit of those metrics.
We prefer marketing that comes from the heart and satisfies the gut. That does not mean we do not use our minds. We just use them differently, to invite, empower, and honour our heroes, not to chase attention and manipulate targets. We answer the questions people feel in their guts before they say yes because we care deeply about those questions.
We see the entire ecosystem from an entirely different perspective. Attention is just a door that reveals a bridge to commitment—actions, sales and hires. The bridge is built through connection, by truly seeing people, honouring their agency, and empowering them to join you on a shared path where both sides benefit, and where the sum benefits both the broader community and our planet.
That orientation was born on a road in British Columbia in 1990.
The roadblock was made up of citizens, children and grandparents who were willing to be arrested. The media showed only the most radical examples—the person in the tree. The angry logger threatening to cut it down. It didn't show the community talking to each other. The police officer apologizing to the grandma for just doing his job.
I felt the story needed to be told about a community that wanted to create an internal solution but was being overridden by outside forces they had no control over.
So I designed t-shirts and set out across the country to tell the real story.
The t-shirts gave students something to become, not something to do. Forest protectors, not protesters. Every shirt sold funded five more years on the road. 180 retailers carried them. Thousands of students wore them. One network sustained entirely by what it was selling.
The t-shirts that didn't argue for the forest. They made the viewer feel the absurdity of destroying it before they had decided whether to care.
Two geese flying into a cloud, two roasted geese flying out. The caption: Acid Rain.
A thousand-foot angry deer mowing over a city with a lawnmower. The caption: Clearcut.
The shirts weren't aimed at the system that forced a false choice between jobs and nature. Satire doesn't argue. It makes the viewer see something they can't unsee.
The students gained an identity worth inhabiting. The stores gained a demographic they had never served before and kept selling the shirts long after Dave moved to the next city. The shirt sales funded the travel and lodging that took the campaign to the next university, the next store, the next community. The system sustained itself across Canada because every participant genuinely benefited from the same engagement, and the product itself generated the resources the movement needed to keep growing. One network sustained entirely by what it was selling.
That is the earliest confirmed proof of the governing principle. When both sides benefit, the system sustains itself long after your involvement ends.
After the forest campaign, festivals and companies began asking for branded merchandise. The company grew. But something was missing: the kind of transformative impact the forest campaign had produced.
I witnessed many customers wasting money on swag that delivered little return. My perspectives on tactics and attention were very different, shaped by what he had learned while saving a threatened forest. I saw them as powerful vehicles for telling a story with genuine impact, capable of sparking an emotional connection every time someone interacted with them.
Just slapping a logo on a product and handing it out was the opposite of everything the forest campaign had demonstrated was possible.
That gap between attention and commitment—the rsult is what led directly to Marketing Triage™.
The race toward AI makes it more urgent. Every organization deploying AI without redesigning the system underneath it is putting a more powerful engine in the same broken vehicle. The dysfunction accelerates. The waste compounds at a scale no previous tactic achieved.
And the move toward more sustainable give-aways deepens the resolve. Greener materials inside a broken system are a bandaid on the underlying problem of system dysfunction. The tactic has never been the issue. The system always was.
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We Help Good People Do Better Marketing
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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