# Playhouse Digital

> Marketing strategy and research for owner-managed services businesses. Agency thinking, without the agency: Mark Brownlie shows you exactly what your competitors are doing, where you blend in, and what to do about it - then builds the fixes. Research, strategy and execution, joined up by one expert, at a price an owner-managed business can start with.

## What Playhouse does

One proposition, not a menu of disconnected services: a complete read on your market, benchmarked against your direct competitors, turned into judgement calls and next steps - then the doing that follows.

- See the landscape - the RISE Report: five competitors analysed alongside your own business; three headline findings; two positioning maps with the white space named; three strategic moves tagged by impact and effort; five thirty-day quick wins with the exact copy to put live. Delivered as an interactive web report.
- Find the problem - conversion and landing-page audits of the pages your traffic actually lands on, grounded in that competitive read.
- Fix it - sharper messaging, landing pages that earn their keep, and the campaigns to feed them. The thinking and the delivery stay in the same hands, so one piece leads to the next.

The model: the conductor. Not the agency (full capability, but the cost and lead time of a traditional engagement). Not the freelancer (affordable, but everyone executes their bit and hands off, so nothing joins up). One expert directs and interprets while AI does the heavy lifting - which is what compresses weeks of consultant time into days.

## Who it's for

Owner-managed services businesses: a solo decision maker, no committee, whose website copy is their main differentiator, and who are figuring out how to stand out from competitors they currently size up by gut feel.

## How it works

Direct, one-to-one, and transparent. A hard line is drawn between what the evidence shows and what is judgement, and every recommendation traces back to something you can check. Fifteen years in digital marketing. It is all built in public: the tools, the thinking and the proof, warts and all.

## Pages

- [Home](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/index.md): What Playhouse does and why.
- [Services](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/services.md): The proposition - the RISE Report and the connected work that follows it.
- [Resources](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/resources.md): Practical reference sheets and guides, kept current and free to use.
- [Blog](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/blog.md): Build-in-public notes and work in progress.
- [Contact](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/contact.md): Write to Mark and Mark replies - no sales sequence.

## Resources

- [Ad Assets Cheat Sheet](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/resources/ad-assets-cheat-sheet.md): Which image and video assets each Google Ads and LinkedIn campaign type needs, at what spec, and where each one can run. A working reference for anyone briefing, uploading, or building paid ad creative.
- [Capture, Distil, Decide](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/resources/capture-distil-decide.md): How the work compounds: capture your site and your rivals' into the lake, grow one foundation of what's known, and turn it into a plan that ships. The whole system, chapter by chapter.
- [Your Next Visitor Is a Machine](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/resources/your-next-visitor-is-a-machine.md): A growing share of the visits to your website aren't people - they're AI systems reading on a buyer's behalf. What they can't read, they can't recommend. What machine-readability means in practice, shown live on this site, in six chapters.

## Posts

- [A self documenting wiki where the difference is the gold](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/blog/a-self-documenting-wiki-where-the-difference-is-the-gold.md): Karpathy's LLM-wiki pattern ends in a tidy encyclopedia. The gold is the difference: tensions held open until they yield a condition, pages that grade their own evidence, and your ruling on top.
- [The site is live, and it's AI-native by default](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/blog/ai-native-by-default.md): The site is live. Underneath it is the quiet infrastructure that makes it readable by machines: a markdown twin for every page, an llms.txt, structured data. None of which you have to think about.
- [Building Playhouse in public](https://backstage.playhouse.digital/blog/building-in-public.md): Why this site exists, the engine underneath it, and what comes next - written as I build it.