About — Hey, It's Rouk

Everyone kept asking me the same question. Friends, former colleagues, clients — "What should I do about AI?" Not in a curious way. In a slightly panicked way. And every time I answered, I realized I was giving them something they couldn't get anywhere else: a real marketing perspective on what actually mattered, from someone who had spent over a decade doing the work at places like Ogilvy and Havas. Not a tech take. A marketing take.

At some point the question stopped feeling like small talk and started feeling like a signal. The people asking weren't beginners. They were experienced marketers and business owners who understood their craft but felt like the ground was shifting under them. They needed someone they trusted to tell them what was real and what was noise. And I kept being that person — informally, for free, one conversation at a time. But that didn't scale. And it wasn't helping nearly enough people.

I realized I could build something that did — but getting there meant making a decision I'd been putting off for a while.

"I kept being that person — informally, for free, one conversation at a time. But that didn't scale."

The Background

The honest version of my career is that I spent over a decade being really good at marketing inside other people's businesses. Ogilvy. Havas. Fintech. I learned what good strategy looks like, what actually moves people to buy, and where most marketing quietly breaks down. I was the person in the room who connected the dots between the brand, the audience, and the execution. I loved the work.

What I didn't love was the ceiling. Not a financial ceiling — a creative one. Working inside large organizations means your best ideas often get diluted, delayed, or killed by committee. The closer I got to AI, the more I could see a different way to work: faster, more direct, with the kind of impact you can actually trace back to a decision you made. But leaving the structure of a full-time engagement to build something independently isn't a decision you make once. You make it every day for a while before it sticks.

The speed bump was exactly that. There were months where the path wasn't clear — where I was doing enough consulting work to stay busy but hadn't yet committed to building something with a longer arc. The turning point wasn't dramatic. It was just the accumulation of enough conversations where I gave someone a real answer about AI and marketing and watched it change how they thought about their work. That kept happening. Eventually it felt irresponsible not to build around it.

So I did. In Practice is the result — a community, a set of tools, and a set of services built around one idea: that AI is only as good as the marketing thinking behind it. The tools are encoded with real expertise. The community is filtered for people who already know their craft. The weekly calls are just an honest hour with someone paying close attention to a space most people find overwhelming.

Ogilvy & Mather Havas Worldwide Fintech 11+ Years Marketing

Outside the Work

Three years ago I started learning Spanish. Not with an app, not with a tutor twice a week — with full immersion. I spent close to a year traveling through Latin America, living in places where English wasn't an option and discomfort was the curriculum. I'm at an intermediate level now, which sounds modest until you understand what it took to get there: showing up every day to something you're genuinely bad at, staying in the conversation past the point where it's comfortable, and trusting that the compound interest of consistent effort eventually produces something real.

That experience changed how I think about learning anything. The people who get good at hard things aren't the ones who find a shortcut. They're the ones who stay in it long enough for the reps to add up. That's true for Spanish. It's true for marketing. And it's true for figuring out AI — which is exactly why I built something designed for people willing to do the actual work, not just watch someone else do it.

I spent 11 years learning what actually moves people to buy. Then AI changed everything. So I built something around both.

Ready to work together?