Part five

Why I wrote this

I studied maths at university and planned to become an actuary. Three years in, with top grades, I realised I was heading for a life in statistics, which I found the dullest corner of the subject.

Around the same time, in 2000, I started a web design agency with my best friend. It lasted two years. I spent two more designing marketing and sales processes, and somewhere along the way I fell for marketing.

It unsettled me. I'd spent my life on problems with right and wrong answers, and here was a field that seemed to have neither.

I decided that couldn't be true. Marketing had to be a formula, just a very complicated one, and I've spent my career since trying to find it.

That search ran through agencies: Cru Digital, whose start you met in Chapter 13, then a merger that became JuniorCru, then CXA, the Customer Experience Agency. In between, from June 2017 to July 2019, I was client-side, as Head of Digital at the bank then called CUA. By the JuniorCru years I saw customer experience as the frame for all of marketing: one journey, end to end, and I began designing, in my head, the software to run it. At CXA, with Cos Luccitti, I built the 6D model of customer experience that much of this book stands on.

Through all of it I held one belief. The answer to marketing is the right message, in front of the right person, at the right time. Seen through the buyer's journey, that means many messages, for many people, at many stages. In the age of AI it also means the right answer to the right question.

Then came 2025. I watched AI answers take the searches our content for a lender used to win, and for a while its leads went with them. When I asked an assistant for the top digital agencies in Brisbane, it didn't name mine.

For the best part of a year I'd been working sixteen-hour days, often more. I knew I was close to burning out. I didn't know how close.

On 8 October 2025, while driving, I micro-napped at the wheel and hit a bus head-on. There was a moment, and I remember it clearly, when I thought: "This is it. This is the end." Then I went blank.

I came to a few minutes later. I'd hit the bus at an angle, scraped along nearly half of its side and spun several times. My arm was broken in three places and my shoulder was fractured. There was a small cut on my stomach where a piece of metal had pushed in, no doubt centimetres from being the end of me. Apart from me, nobody was hurt beyond a bruised shin.

I was incredibly lucky to survive, let alone walk away relatively unscathed. Even so, my shoulder took more than nine months of rehab.

In the days after, I reconsidered pretty much everything. I couldn't keep selling time for money. That had to end. I couldn't keep risking my life, or the life of anyone in my car, by living like that. And with my arm months away from healing, I couldn't have kept working that way even if I'd wanted to.

So I made myself a promise. In the next twelve months I'd build the software I'd been designing in my head for years, and I'd write the book I'd always wanted to write: something close to the answer to marketing. Twelve months later, here we are.

I started on the software in hospital, typing with my good left arm and asking AI to help. It was slow going, and AI wasn't up to the job back then. So I made a bigger call. I handed off all the day-to-day work I'd been doing in the agency, mostly design and code, and within days I went from sixteen-hour days to about two hours of work a day.

It was incredibly liberating. Then, within a couple of months, I was bored. I had the energy for a solid eight-hour day again, and only two hours of work to fill it.

On 2 December 2025, a couple of months after the accident, Cos Luccitti, now RocMode's chief executive, came to me with an idea that was very close to my own. We called it BrandGraph at first. It became RocMode, and I've worked on almost nothing else since. You're holding the other half of the promise.

I haven't solved marketing. But I think I know why it looked unsolvable. You can't optimise anything until you've decided what you're optimising for, and marketing never agreed.

Awareness, leads, traffic, brand: every team picked its own. This book argues there's one answer: being selected. Marketing is the work of raising the odds that a buyer picks your brand over the alternatives, at every step of their journey.

You can't force that choice, so there'll never be a clean solution. But the odds can now be estimated, and soon tested and improved. AI lets us do that at a speed and scale no marketing team has had before.

None of this replaces craft. The maths can show where a choice is being lost. It takes imagination to win it back.

And yes, I see the irony. I walked away from statistics, and the answer turned out to be statistics.

So I should be plain about my interest: I build software based on this thinking. That's why the argument in this book had to stand without it.

One idea from my notebooks didn't fit the chapters, so it lives here. I think of brands as living things. They grow, adapt, defend themselves and pursue goals. Most do it by accident.

The brand I want to help build does it on purpose. It senses how buyers and machines see it, moment by moment, without waiting for a quarterly report. It protects what's true about it, and catches a contradiction or a broken promise before it spreads. And it expresses one truth in many forms, each fitted to the moment, without ever becoming a different story.

It's no accident that the word is selection. Living things are selected by their environment. Brands are selected by buyers, and now by the machines that advise them.

That's the long-term vision, and it's a vision, not a product. The score in Part five is the first part of it: a way for a brand to sense where it stands. The rest is work for the years ahead.