I'm Mike
I live in Tampa. I have been in advertising since 2007, back when it mostly meant television. These days I am a digital strategist at Mediagistic, a Tampa agency that markets home services companies, and I take on a few clients of my own on the side.
How I Got Here
I started at WKMG in Orlando, building online advertising programs back when online advertising was still something you had to explain to people. Six years of making commercials and working out what actually moves a local business.
Then I spent most of a decade running an investment real estate firm in Central Florida. I managed the sales team and handled the website and the digital marketing myself. Hedge funds down to first-time buyers, short sales, foreclosures, auctions.
Marketing for people whose income depends on the leads you hand them teaches you quickly which leads are worth anything. If the phone rang and the call was junk, I heard about it that afternoon. I have never really shaken the habit of judging a campaign by what the sales side says about it rather than what the dashboard says.
In 2019 I moved to Tampa and took over marketing for a solar and building performance company. Ads, analytics, social, and I built and maintained the website myself. That is where the technical side got real.
Since 2022 I have been at Mediagistic, planning and running digital strategy for home services brands. HVAC, plumbing, outdoor power equipment. Nineteen years in, and the fundamentals have barely moved.
What I Do All Day
At the agency I sit across search, paid media, content and analytics. A lot of the job is pulling people out of Slack threads and into the same room, sales and PPC and design and data, and getting them talking to each other. Most of what goes wrong in marketing is not strategy. It is five people solving the same problem separately.
The rest of it is watching real budgets get spent well or badly across more accounts than any one business owner will ever see. That is the part I can give you that an agency brochure cannot.
What I'm Best At
Three things, and they have collapsed into each other over the last two years.
AI, and the automations around it
I build the systems, not just use the tools. Pipelines that draft and format and publish. Workflows that route a lead to the right person before anyone has opened a laptop. The tedious middle of a technical audit handed to a machine so the hours go to the part that needs judgment. Most people using AI are typing into a box. I am wiring it into the plumbing.
Search, in all three flavours now
Ordinary SEO still matters and I still do it. But a growing share of people asking about your service never see a list of links any more, they get an answer. Getting named in that answer is a different job with different rules: GEO for generative engines, AEO for answer engines. Most agencies have not caught up to it. It is where I have spent most of my thinking for two years, and it is why one of my clients says she is showing up in AI results.
Why I Take On Clients
I do not need the work. I take it because the businesses I market at the agency are big enough to afford an agency, and the ones down the road from me are not. Same problems, same fixes, no budget for the account layer that comes with them.
Having run a small business myself, I know what it feels like when the marketing spend is your money and not a line item. I keep the list short so I can actually answer the phone.
When I'm Not Working
I have kids, which is how I ended up writing a guide to keeping children safe on Roblox and Fortnite. Not my usual lane, but it is the one I actually needed.
I write. When my dad had Alzheimer’s, my therapist told me to put it somewhere, and the long goodbye came out of those months. A collection, 7 Stories That Linger, came after it. I wrote both of them myself, without AI. More about the books here.
And I run a publishing experiment called Oliver Ahn, where I taught myself what AI content production looks like at full volume. Most people selling AI marketing have run it across a handful of blog posts. I ran it to destruction on my own money, and I write up what I found.
Tell me what is not working
Send me your site and what you wish it did. I will look at it myself and tell you straight whether I can help.