Dom Carter

Playbooks

The long versions.

Methods I’ve built and run, written up in full. Each one is a few thousand words, starts with the short version, and ends with the questions people actually ask.

  1. Marketing9 min read

    Reaching the unreachable

    Ad platforms find people who were going to buy anyway. The 4-step method we used to fund and measure the customers they ignore, without missing a revenue target.
    • Most paid media reaches 3 groups: your customers, people already in market, and nobody else. The third group is where growth lives and the platforms won’t show them your ads.
    • Fund it by stripping spend that claims credit for sales that were happening anyway: brand search when you already rank first, and retargeting that has over-indexed.
    • Block invalid clicks. On one account 14.68% of clicks in 30 days were invalid, costing £37,410. That money came back without a single extra pound of budget.
  2. Marketing6 min read

    Paid media as a creative test lab

    How a luxury cycling brand kept its loyal performance audience and won a younger one, using paid campaigns to test creative and judging on resonance, not return.
    • The brief: keep a fiercely loyal, performance-obsessed customer base and attract a younger, more progressive one, without the first group noticing a change they would hate.
    • The old model was a top-down content calendar and one brand voice. The new one was weekly creative drops tested through paid media, with the metric set to resonance rather than sales.
    • Cheapest cost per thousand impressions is the honest signal: the platform charges less for creative people react to. Use that to find the message before you spend on reach.
  3. AI5 min read

    Where AI earns its place in ecommerce content

    Most product pages on a luxury site get no video, no model and no campaign shot. How to tier the catalogue and point AI at the pages production never reaches.
    • Audit the catalogue by content tier. On most large sites a few hero products get video, model shots and campaign imagery, the middle gets product and model stills, and the long tail gets product-only shots.
    • The long tail is where the catalogue’s revenue sits in aggregate and where production never goes, because a shoot per product doesn’t add up.
    • AI earns its place there: model-on-body from a product still, short motion from a flat image, a lifestyle context for a product shot. The hero tier stays human.