Social Media · Creative Strategy · Fort Lauderdale

John Murdock

Creative strategist. Social media practitioner. Recovering Broadway stage manager.

I've spent 15+ years figuring out what makes people stop, care, and act. First backstage on Broadway, then across 250+ accounts at one of the country's largest performance marketing agencies. Now I do it through my own practice, John Murdock Digital, for a small roster of founders and business owners here in South Florida.

John Murdock, creative strategist, Fort Lauderdale

Fort Lauderdale, FL

Most agencies run your ads. I figure out what they should say.

Ads and posts don't fail in the ad account. They fail earlier, when nobody decided what to say, to whom, and why they'd care. That decision is creative strategy, and it's the part of marketing I've built my whole career around. I believe it should be the first call, not the last resort.

From the stage door to the strategy deck.

My first career was in theater. I earned a BFA from Baylor University and went on to stage-manage Broadway productions, where the job is deceptively simple: know your audience, get the message and the timing exactly right, and have everything ready before the lights come up. Every night, live, no second takes.

That discipline translated directly into performance marketing. Over 15+ years I moved from running campaigns to leading the thinking behind them, most recently in a senior creative strategy role at Tinuiti, one of the largest independent performance agencies in the country. There I built the Creative Strategist function from the ground up and ran creative strategy across more than 250 accounts, from first campaigns to national brands.

I started John Murdock Digital to practice that craft at a scale I love: personally, deeply, with a handful of businesses at a time instead of hundreds. The strategy layer that big brands pay six figures for, without the account layers, the junior teams, or the jargon.

"I'd rather be the person doing the work than the person talking about it. Every strategy I recommend is one I've run myself."
Practitioner, Not Pundit
15+ Years in performance marketing, from first campaigns to national accounts
250+ Accounts supported while building the Creative Strategist function at Tinuiti
BFA Baylor University, followed by a career stage-managing Broadway productions
1 Person behind every strategy. No handoffs, no team behind the curtain

What I spend my days on.

Creative Strategy

Audience research, message development, and the angles, hooks, and concepts that decide whether content works before a dollar is spent.

Paid Social

Campaign planning and management where the creative and the media are one conversation, with testing that feeds every result back into the next round.

Social Content Systems

Organic content direction built as a repeatable system, so a brand's presence compounds instead of starting from a blank page every week.

I keep the client roster deliberately small so every engagement gets the practitioner, not a process. If you're curious about the work or just want to talk shop, I'm always up for a good conversation.

Say hello.

The best way to reach me is email. I read everything, and I answer the interesting ones fast.