Media Guides is not an agency. It never should have tried to look like one.

Media Guides is repositioning as a strategic advisory practice, not a media agency or an editorial site. Here’s what’s changing, and why.

I want to tell you what’s changing at Media Guides, and why, because the honest version of that story is more useful to you than the polished one.

For a while, this site did what most practice sites do. Blog posts on trending topics. Explainers written to rank rather than to say anything. A glossary entry for every term someone might Google. Some of it was genuinely useful. A fair amount of it, if I’m honest, was filler dressed up as content, the kind of thing any tool can now produce in seconds and nobody particularly needed a human for in the first place.

That was fine when the alternative was silence. It’s not fine anymore, because the alternative now is a flood.

The market got the memo before I did

You’ve felt this even if you haven’t named it. Every feed, every inbox, every “thought leadership” post reads like it came off the same production line, because increasingly it did. Macquarie Dictionary named “slop” its word of the year. Consumer preference for AI-generated content has collapsed from 60% to 26% in two years, the exact opposite direction to where marketing budgets have been moving. The novelty wore off fast, and what’s left behind is a market where volume is worthless and differentiation is scarce.

That’s not a content problem. It’s a trust problem, and it applies just as much to strategic advice as it does to social captions. If everyone can generate a plausible-sounding point of view on retail media or AI governance in thirty seconds, plausible-sounding stops being worth anything. What’s left as valuable is the stuff that can only come from someone who has actually done the work, carried the number, and lived with what happened next.

What I actually have to offer

Fifteen years across property, automotive marketplaces, and financial services and insurance isn’t a broad CV for its own sake. It’s the same structural problems showing up in different sectors, at different times, and I’ve been in the room for enough of them to see the pattern before it’s obvious to everyone else.

I’ve closed attribution gaps that agencies couldn’t see because they didn’t have access to the CRM data that actually proved the ROI. I’ve turned a 25% year-on-year traffic decline into a business case that became one of a company’s five biggest initiatives for the year. I’ve built the governance model that gets a hundred stakeholders rowing in the same direction, and written the data usage guidelines that let a business use AI responsibly instead of nervously. None of that came from a workshop. It came from being accountable for the outcome, not just the plan.

That’s the thing an agency structure quietly gets in the way of. There’s usually a layer of account management between the person who understands your problem and the person who’s accountable for solving it. I’ve removed that layer entirely. When you work with Media Guides, you’re working with the person who scoped it, and the person on the hook for the result, and they’re the same person.

What’s changing

Media Guides is repositioning as a strategic advisory practice, not a media agency or an editorial site. Practically, that means:

• Less content, more substance. I’d rather publish six articles a year that change how you think about a problem than sixty that fill a calendar.
• Every piece tied to a real challenge. Retail media economics, attribution in a cookieless world, AI governance as commercial infrastructure, M&A integration under margin pressure, personalisation versus privacy. The things actually keeping people in property, marketplaces, and insurance up at night, not generic AI trend pieces.
• My voice, my opinions, my track record behind them. Where I have a strong view, I’ll say so, and I’ll show you the work that earned me the right to.

Where this is going

Over the next several months, I’ll be publishing a series working through the big structural pressures facing the industries and functions I work in, and what the current macroeconomic climate is doing to make them sharper. No filler. No content for content’s sake. If a piece doesn’t earn its place, it doesn’t go up.

If that’s useful to you, I’d rather earn five minutes of your genuine attention once a month than compete for your scroll every week.