Nobody chooses anything for the reason they think they did. Nobody chooses anything for the reason they think they did. Nobody chooses anything for the reason they think they did.

What Is Choice

What if giving people more options is actually making it harder for them to choose you?

We tend to treat choice and options as the same thing. They aren't. Options are inventory. Choice is the cognitive work of comparing, weighing, and committing. This talk follows that distinction through behavioral science, culture, advertising, and travel — from Hick's Law and choice overload to maximizers and satisficers, family buying roles, gatekeepers, and choice architecture. The argument underneath it all is that great marketing doesn't simply provide more things to want. It makes the decision easier to understand.

45–60 min · Keynote

• Why options and choice are fundamentally different
• When abundance creates engagement — and when it creates paralysis
• Why vacations can turn ordinary travelers into maximizers
• How initiators, influencers, gatekeepers, buyers, and users shape one decision
• Why decision simplicity can improve both conversion and satisfaction

Stoic Wisdom for Marketing Leaders

How do you lead effectively in a profession where so much of the outcome is outside your control?

Marketing leaders operate inside uncertainty. Campaign performance, economic conditions, competitors, algorithms, client changes, traveler behavior, and even luck can influence the outcome of work we are still expected to own. The Stoics spent centuries thinking about exactly that tension. This talk uses control, virtue, perception, and daily practice as a framework for modern leadership, then applies those ideas to decision-making, ego, adversity, and the discipline of turning obstacles into information rather than excuses.

45–60 min · Keynote

• How to separate responsibility from control
• Why calm can become a competitive advantage
• How virtue translates into integrity in leadership decisions
• Why perception determines whether obstacles become setbacks or information
• How to turn Stoic ideas into repeatable leadership rituals

The History of Advertising

What has actually changed in advertising — and what have we simply renamed?

Every generation of marketers believes it is living through the industry's greatest disruption. Sometimes they're right about the technology. They're usually wrong about the people. From early print advertising and patent medicine through mass media, Madison Avenue, television, the internet, social platforms, targeting, and today's algorithmic world, this talk is part history lesson, part gallery of extraordinary work, and part argument that the fundamentals of persuasion have moved surprisingly little even while almost everything around them has changed.

45–60 min · Keynote

• The ideas advertisers keep rediscovering under new names
• What historic advertising understood about attention and persuasion
• Why technological change rarely means psychological change
• What today's marketers can steal from people who had far fewer tools

Religion & Branding

Why have the world's most enduring belief systems succeeded at something brands spend billions trying to create: belonging?

Long before anyone wrote a brand strategy, human beings were building systems of symbols, stories, rituals, communities, shared language, moral purpose, and identity. Religion & Branding examines what happens when we look at modern brands through that much older lens. The point isn't that brands are religions. It's that many of the things marketers now describe as community, purpose, identity, ritual, symbolism, and belonging have been practiced and refined by religions for thousands of years. Emotion may draw us in. Belonging is what makes us stay.

45–60 min · Keynote / Conversation

• What enduring religions teach us about building community
• Why ritual and symbolism are so powerful
• The difference between having customers and creating belonging
• Where brands borrow from religion — and where the analogy breaks down

March Forth!

What actually happens between deciding you want something and becoming the person willing to pursue it?

March Forth! is my most living presentation — the only one I rebuild every year. Its roots go back to Joey Reiman's Thumbs Up!, a philosophy that our founder, Tom Love, adapted into a rallying cry for Love Communications. Over the years I began adding my own experiences, research, failures, leadership lessons and philosophy until it became something uniquely my own.

Today it is a living presentation. Every year I revisit it, add new stories, retire old ones, and incorporate the lessons that life insisted on teaching me since the last version. It moves through five ideas: keep a Thumbs Up attitude. Point toward your purpose. Give fear the finger. March forth. And remember the little things. More than anything, it's about choosing action before confidence arrives.

45–60 min · Motivational Keynote · Updated Annually

• Why optimism is a practice rather than a personality trait
• How purpose makes difficult work easier to endure
• Why fear often appears immediately before growth
• The difference between thinking about change and taking action
• Why the little things eventually become the big things

Finding Success With ADHD

What if the thing you spent years trying to control eventually became one of your greatest professional advantages?

This is the most personal talk I give. I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid and spent years trying to become better at fitting into systems that weren't designed for the way my brain naturally worked. This presentation isn't about curing ADHD or criticizing medication. It's about learning who you are beneath both.

Through stories about school, athletics, medication, public speaking, failure, relationships, creativity and eventually leadership, I share the long journey of discovering that many of the qualities I once viewed as weaknesses — curiosity, energy, unconventional thinking and seeing stories hidden inside data — ultimately became the foundation of my career. It's less a talk about ADHD than it is a talk about identity.

45–60 min · Personal Keynote

• Why traits that struggle inside rigid systems can thrive outside them
• How curiosity and energy become professional assets, not liabilities
• The difference between managing a condition and understanding yourself
• What it takes to build a career around how your attention actually works