Anna
Kapliienko.

The practice

I have spent five years on both sides of the table — inside a brand trying to grow and inside the agency world that sells growth to brands. That split is the whole of my perspective. Agencies are rewarded for activity and in-house teams are rewarded for outcomes, and a great deal of wasted marketing spend lives in the gap between those two incentives.

My work sits at the point where brand strategy and performance marketing stop being separate departments. In practice that means I am usually hired for one and end up fixing the other: the paid account that will not scale because the positioning is generic, or the beautiful rebrand that never reached anyone because nobody built the distribution.

I work almost exclusively with premium and design-led brands, which is a preference rather than a specialism. These businesses have the hardest version of the problem — they cannot buy growth with discounting without dismantling the thing that makes them valuable, so every point of growth has to come from being genuinely better understood. That constraint produces better marketing.

I take on a small number of engagements at a time, based in Los Angeles and across California, and I do the work myself. There is no team behind me presenting someone else's thinking.