Good marketing makes a business simple to find, easy to understand, and a delight to choose, again and again.
Hi. I'm Ethan J. Hulbert, a senior marketing strategist, leader, and consultant. I work where brand positioning, organic discovery, artificial intelligence, technology, data, and the customer experience meet—and I believe there is endless possibility to improve.
Supported the recovery and continued development of organic search following a turbulent redesign for a major automotive brand. The work demanded more than resolving individual SEO defects: it meant prioritizing sitewide issues, making technical tradeoffs understandable, aligning with developers, and turning a difficult agency transition into a durable search program.
Contributed to the digital launch supporting the opening of a prominent flagship coffee destination in Milan. Coordinating this web experience with a high-profile physical opening required attention to timing, brand presentation, implementation, and the many teams whose work had to arrive together. Global store presence required intricate synchronization and translation.
Helped a national jewelry retailer rethink the organization and discoverability of their diamond and jewelry categories. The challenge rested at the intersection of product taxonomy, customer language, faceted navigation, search demand, and merchandising: a better structure had to make sense to people as well as to crawlers.
Designed and built Scoper, my own custom analytics platform, to bring different search, discovery, and user behavior signals into the same analytical view. When narratives are obscured by technical limitations that segregate data into closed silos, I go around those limitations and create my own, more optimized solution.
Led an internationally oriented online education community with tens of thousands of members, including staff of volunteer moderators and administrators; contributed pro bono digital advice for an LGBTQ+ organization in a precarious position. Different missions and operating models, but the same underlying need for practical leadership and an understanding of the people being served.
Advised startup founders, CEOs, and CMOs across different industries on the marketing fundamentals that make growth possible. Through individual strategy sessions and business planning, I helped emerging companies think through audiences, positioning, search visibility, paid advertising, and the systems needed to scale. Beyond day-to-day tactics, I helped lay the foundations that made future campaigns work.
Created a “Future-Proof” framework for anticipating where Google Search, AI-driven discovery, and general human search behavior were headed. Instead of reacting to every algorithm announcement after the fact, I used emerging patterns to guide technical, content, and UX priorities in advance. The aim is to position a brand for where search is heading before it gets there—so when it catches up to us, we’re already winning.
Led and shaped organic-search initiatives for a national automotive brand across established search engines and emerging AI-driven discovery. Work included content and technical strategy, measurement, experimentation, vendor scouting, and collaboration with the wider marketing organization. Organic visibility was one factor in a media strategy that set multiple revenue records.
Technical SEO, content, information architecture, international search, app store visibility, and new AI search experiences. Discoverability should be designed into the product, not taped on afterward.
Audience understanding, differentiated messages, customer language, and the consistency of a brand across channels. Strong positioning makes every downstream marketing decision easier.
Navigation, accessibility, usability, conversion paths, migrations, and redesigns. Search performance and good UX almost always want the same thing: a clearer, more useful website.
Analytics, experimentation, audits, business context, and executive-ready reporting. Every metric is important, but you have to know which to pay attention to and when.
Strategy works better when teams work together. I connect organic search with paid media, social, PR, content and copy, creative, development, analytics, legal, and client leadership. We find the shared wins, and we take the wins as a team.
Customers don't separate a brand's website from its real-world experience. Brick & mortar store locators, Google Maps and local listings, and consistent product presentation—from online browsing to packaging and unboxing—are part of the same customer journey.
I do a great deal of my own analysis and reporting. But the most important part happens after the analysis: helping clients and colleagues see the through-line, understand any uncertainty, and develop their own confidence in the data.
A useful report connects business conditions, marketing activity, technical events, search behavior, and customer response. It distinguishes a likely explanation from a proven cause. And it ends with a recommendation, not just a chart.
“a brilliant storyteller... Ethan sets himself apart as someone who can weave those threads into something meaningful, valuable, and useful.”
I created Scoper to view the signals that traditional platforms keep separate: bots and crawling, search impressions and clicks, AI citations, and other performance measures. Putting them together makes relationships and inflection points easier to see, explain, and investigate.
A private demonstration is available by request.
I've led SEO and development teams, hired and coached practitioners, managed vendors, trained sales teams, worked with executives, and built repeatable processes for complex programs. I've managed groups of 20+ people across multiple disciplines. I know when the useful thing is to open a code editor myself, write a development ticket, or sit with someone and solve the problem together.
Mentorship is especially meaningful to me. Former colleagues still write years later about what they learned and how it shaped their careers. I've developed training programs, guided new hires through advanced technical subjects, advised colleagues in other disciplines, and mentored an AdSchool team, receiving the program's Mentor of the Year award.
Good leadership also means translating between perspectives. I can talk through a business decision with executives, work with developers on the implementation details, and help client teams understand the reasoning behind a recommendation. I want to build high-EQ teams that can make confident decisions without depending on any one person to supply every answer.
I've created classes and multi-session training programs for new and experienced SEOs, developers, copywriters, and other departments. Topics range from technical and international SEO to UX, content, AI discovery, and highly-advanced audits. My goal is to make they "why" of complex work understandable, and help people grow confident doing it themselves.
Across a decade and a half in marketing, I've worked across a lot of different industries—from familiar consumer categories to highly specialized and regulated fields, often learning a whole new business from the inside out.
Automotive OEMs · Dealers & dealer associations · Transportation & mobility · Logistics & supply chain
Banking · Financial services · Mutual funds · Insurance · Accountants · Venture capital, incubators & accelerators
Consumer packaged goods (CPG/FMCG) · Consumer products · Convenience retail · Ecommerce & DTC · Subscription businesses
Coffee · Food & beverage products · Restaurants & dining · Fast-food franchises & chains
Luxury goods · Handbags & luggage · Jewelry & diamonds · Watches · Footwear & shoes · Luxury experiences
Travel & tourism · Hospitality & lodging · Cruise lines · Casinos, gaming & integrated resorts · Leisure & entertainment infrastructure
Entertainment · Online streaming services · Sports & fitness · Events, halls & venues · Live theater & performance companies
Software & digital products · Apps & app store optimization · Barcoding & automatic identification · Premium domain consulting
Healthcare & medical services and products · Pharmaceuticals · Biotechnology & R&D
Real estate & property · Luxury & premium real estate · Manufacturing · Energy & utilities · Agriculture · Home services
Book publishing · Colleges, universities & educational institutions · Online education apps & communities
Law & legal services · Political campaigns, public affairs & advocacy · Charities, nonprofits & NGOs
There is a temptation in marketing to become too impressed with one's own cleverness. The elaborate campaigns, the new features, the complicated updated interfaces, the sophisticated wordplay. None of that helps if the customer is left wondering what the product actually does or why they should care in the first place.
I have always been fascinated in the legacies of people like Claude Hopkins, David Ogilvy, and Edward Bernays (and his wife, Doris Fleischman)—not because they were some infallible past sages, but because they wrestled with evidence, persuasion, audiences, and real bare-bones foundational advertising. Put yourself in the customer's position. Speak plainly. Make the product useful and make the experience of choosing it straightforward, even delightful.
Marketing belongs in product development, information architecture, and customer experience, not just in campaigns assembled after the fact. The lessons I learn from these giants give me an advantage that I think is missing in many other professionals today.
“The man who wins out and survives does so only because of superior science and strategy.”
Conversational, contextual search is in many ways more natural than reducing a complex need to a few keywords for Google. People have always asked trusted friends for recommendations, giving them context and expecting a meaningful answer. Search tools are increasingly able to accommodate something closer to that interaction. So of course personalized AI search is going to grow—it's what search naturally is.
The fundamentals still matter. AI-driven discovery will keep changing the mechanics of visibility, yes—but scale, trust, adoption, and skepticism are all worthy opponents in this realm. Google remains immense. And at the end of the day, it doesn't even matter, because however dramatically interfaces evolve, organizations will still need clear positioning, useful information, credible reputations, and experiences that earn customers' confidence—no matter the search discovery source.
I'm available for select consulting, advisory, fractional leadership, and strategy engagements. I'm especially interested in work where brand, search, digital experience, and organizational decision-making intersect. I also welcome conversations about leadership roles, teaching, mentoring, or speaking. Say hello.