Why I Launched Content Connection. Enterprise-level content marketing without the enterprise-level pricing.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) builds on the foundations of SEO, reflecting a shift from ranking in search to shaping how brands are understood and surfaced by AI.

After more than 20 years working inside some of the world’s leading media organizations, I’ve decided to step out on my own and build something new. My decision didn’t come from a single thought or moment. It’s been building over time, shaped by what I’ve seen change across the industry, the way brands operate today, and where content is heading next.

For most of my career, I’ve played a big part in the rise of content marketing, having a front row seat at The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and most recently People Inc, I worked with brands across finance, healthcare, retail, and technology to build large-scale content programs designed to engage audiences and drive real business outcomes. These were often complex ecosystems, bringing together editorial, video, design, and distribution across multiple channels.

At that point, brands needed partners who could do everything. Agencies and publishers stepped in to provide that scale and capability, and for a long time, that model worked incredibly well. But over the past few years, something important has shifted.

Many of the brands I work with have built those capabilities in-house. They have strong internal teams, access to better data, and the ability to produce content consistently and at a high standard. In many cases, they don’t need an external partner to create more content. They’re already doing that themselves. What they often don’t have is the strategic plan that connects it all together.

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen teams producing a high volume of content across multiple channels, with clear effort and investment behind it, but without a clear answer to simple questions: what is this actually designed to do? Where in the funnel are we using content and how are we holding it accountable?

Not in a vague sense, but in a way that connects directly to audience needs, business goals, and how content performs in today’s environment. That’s where I believe the gap is.

Content strategy has always been important, but it’s become more critical, and more complex, at exactly the same time that organizations are less likely to have it as a dedicated, senior capability internally. It’s not something most companies need full-time, but it is something they need at key moments, when they’re setting direction, rethinking their approach, or trying to connect content more directly to growth.

At the same time, the environment that content operates in is changing faster than at any point I can remember. Search is no longer just a list of links. Increasingly, it’s a set of answers. AI systems are interpreting, summarizing, and deciding what gets surfaced, often before a user ever clicks through to a website. In that world, content isn’t just written for an audience. It’s also being read, understood, and ranked by machines. That has real implications for how content needs to be created.

It’s no longer enough to produce a high volume of articles or assets and hope they perform. Content needs to be structured in a way that AI systems can understand, grounded in genuine expertise, and clear enough to be surfaced and trusted in environments where brands have less direct control over how they appear.

In many ways, we’re moving from a world of optimizing for search engines to one of shaping how your brand is represented in generative systems. Most organizations aren’t set up for that yet. Not because they’re behind, but because the rules are still being written.

When you combine that shift with the fact that so much capability now sits in-house, it creates a very specific kind of need. Not for another large agency engagement, and not for more content for the sake of it, but for focused, senior-level strategic thinking that can help organizations step back, reassess, and build the right foundation.

That’s the thinking behind Content Connection.

I didn’t set out to build another agency. I set out to create something more focused. A consultancy designed to help organizations define the role content should play in their business today, and how it needs to evolve as AI-driven discovery becomes more dominant.

That means helping teams connect storytelling with data, aligning content with search and emerging AI systems, and building strategies that internal teams can actually execute against. It also means supporting go-to-market efforts, from shaping the narrative behind RFP responses to developing proactive content-led sales propositions.

It’s about bringing clarity to an area that has become increasingly complex.

It feels to me like we are at an inflection point for the industry. The tools have changed, the platforms have changed, and the way audiences discover and engage with content is changing in real time. That combination creates both a challenge and an opportunity.

The brands that succeed will be the ones that can balance creativity with structure, storytelling with data, and human insight with machine readability. They’ll be the ones that don’t just produce content, but understand how it works in the systems that now shape visibility and trust.

That’s the work I want to be doing.

And that’s why I’ve launched Content Connection. Enterprise-level content marketing without the enterprise-level pricing.

If any of that resonates, I’d love to talk.