Dustin Gladwell's Linkedin Analytics

Most marketing and creative professionals learn strategy in conference rooms. I learned it on battlefields. Military service teaches you things design school and agencies never will: attention to detail that can mean life or death, solutions-oriented thinking under impossible pressure, and the discipline to execute when others fall apart. You learn that conventional wisdom gets people killed, and lazy thinking loses wars. Branding, marketing, and advertising are about problem solving. These kinds of problems require strategy, critical thinking, and creativity. It's creating a solution to a challenge, and then developing relevant ways to communicate the message. In a world where the average person sees thousands of brand messages every day, it's more important than ever to be memorable. To be memorable, we must cut through the clutter and find new ways to stand out from the rest… I've spent nearly two decades bringing that battlefield-forged perspective to award winning, Fortune 500 creative challenges. From Apple's demanding standards to Norwegian Cruise Line's multi-million dollar campaigns and Maserati's brand positioning - I've learned that the best creative strategies come from the same place as successful military operations: seeing what others miss, questioning every assumption, and executing with precision while competitors stumble through committee decisions. The brands that dominate markets think like winning armies. They don't follow playbooks - they write new ones. Because one thing you learn in combat: the plan goes out the window the second the first shot is fired. And the enemy always gets a vote. Beyond corporate creative battles, I co-founded Charlie Mike, a nonprofit using unconventional approaches to save the lives of Military Veterans and First Responders. When traditional methods fail the warriors who served us, we build solutions that work. The problems that matter most are always the ones everyone else has given up on. I bring more discipline to creative strategy than most in this field are comfortable with. (Sorry, guys.) When everyone else is brainstorming, I'm already three moves ahead. Something new is coming soon that's going to challenge how marketing strategy actually gets done. The status quo has had its day. Connect with me if you're building something that rewrites the rules.