Alec Celestin is building EMM Consulting around the work that happens before a customer makes a decision: finding a brand, understanding its offer and comparing it with alternatives. His approach brings together search engine optimization, visibility in AI-generated answers and public relations, drawing on an earlier career in brand management and creator marketing.
The work has produced concrete campaign examples in very different markets. Golf apparel brand Haven has appeared alongside established competitors in captured ChatGPT recommendations. Real estate technology company Goliath Data has recorded gains in both AI visibility and Google organic clicks. Those projects give Celestin's broader marketing background a specific business application: helping a company become part of the research its potential customers are already doing.
EMM's work sits at the intersection of marketing strategy and execution. The company focuses on how businesses reach an audience, how they explain what they offer and where a prospective customer might encounter that information. Search is an important part of that practice, alongside PR and the experience Celestin brings from working with brands and talent.
A background in getting brands in front of audiences
Celestin's professional background includes brand management at Flighthouse and content creation and artist promotion at Universal Music Group. His IdeaMensch profile also describes work at Afterparty involving community building and experiential marketing. Together, those roles span content, creator relationships and the practical coordination behind campaigns.
That background helps explain his interest in the point where attention becomes a business opportunity. In creator marketing, a campaign needs a connection between the brand's objectives and the audience a creator has built. In search, a business needs a connection between what it sells and the question a potential customer is asking. The settings differ, but both require understanding why the audience would care.
Celestin has described his career as a sequence of opportunities that build on one another. Photography created reasons to meet people and contribute to their work. Content and events expanded the relationships and commercial responsibilities he could take on. Developing new skills gave him more ways to be useful in the next role.
At EMM, that experience is being applied to a different kind of discovery. A shopper comparing products or a business owner researching software is expressing a need. The marketing task is to understand that need well enough to put relevant information in front of them.
EMM starts with the customer's decision
For EMM Consulting, a useful search campaign begins with the questions surrounding a purchase. A company might have a strong product and a clear idea of its audience, yet still provide little information about the comparisons that audience wants to make. Those missing answers are a practical place to start.
In Celestin's campaign work, research into customer questions and competing content informs the articles a team produces. Comparisons, buying guides and product-focused explanations serve different purposes. A customer choosing a material needs a different answer from someone evaluating alternatives to a familiar brand.
The same distinction matters for distribution. Information published on a company's own website can answer detailed questions about its products. Relevant external coverage can introduce the business in another setting and give readers a route to learn more. Coordinating those pieces gives a campaign a clearer purpose than treating every article or mention as an isolated deliverable.
This makes specificity a useful test of the work. Does a page address an actual buying question? Does the comparison explain a meaningful difference? Can the reader understand where the product fits? Those questions make a campaign easier to assess at the level of a customer decision, rather than only by the amount of content produced.
The client examples also call for careful measurement. A brand recommendation, a source citation and a click each record a different interaction. Evaluating them separately helps show what a campaign has actually delivered and which questions still need work.
Haven Golf puts that approach into a shopping context
Haven Golf provides an example of how a smaller brand can enter a comparison with familiar names. Campaign captures show Haven appearing above Nike Dri-FIT Victory in one ChatGPT answer comparing moisture-wicking golf polos. Another captured answer about college-themed golf polos listed Haven ahead of Peter Millar and Johnnie-O.
Those examples concern particular shopping questions. A golfer seeking a shirt for hot weather is asking about a use case. Someone looking for a college-themed polo has another requirement. Each question creates a different opening for a brand that can explain why its product belongs in the selection.
Celestin's team has produced more than 300 articles for Haven, including competitor reviews, comparisons and buying guides. Public relations and backlink work supported the content campaign. The effort combined research into those shopping questions with information that could introduce Haven while a customer was considering options.
The captures demonstrate appearances in individual answers, rather than a permanent ranking for every shopper. Their value as examples comes from the specificity of the situation: an emerging apparel brand was included in a discussion that also contained established competitors. They show where a campaign can look for opportunities beyond a broad brand-name search.
Goliath Data brings the work into business software
Goliath Data presents a different buying decision. Its customers are evaluating real estate software, including property intelligence and lead generation tools. Search content in that market needs to address how a product fits into a business workflow and how it compares with tools a prospective customer already knows.
An October 2026 Programming Insider report on Celestin's work with Goliath described a 933% increase in the company's recorded AI visibility score between its first saved April 2026 report and its best August report. It also reported a 75% increase in Google organic clicks across comparable four-week periods through September. The coverage included appearances in answers about alternatives to PropStream and Batch Leads.
The figures measure different parts of discovery. One concerns a recorded AI visibility score; the other concerns clicks from Google organic search. Keeping those measures distinct makes the case more useful when assessing where prospective customers encountered the business.
The comparison with Haven illustrates why understanding the product category matters. An apparel campaign needs information relevant to choosing clothing. A software campaign needs information relevant to evaluating a tool for work. A marketing approach can carry across industries while the substance of the content changes.
SEO, AI search and PR meet at the same business question
Celestin's work connects different routes through which people can discover a business. SEO concerns a website's presence in search. AI-search visibility concerns whether a business or its content appears in generated answers. PR introduces another set of opportunities for coverage and explanation. Each can contribute to discovery without being interchangeable with the others.
Google's guidance for AI features is useful context here. It says established SEO practices remain relevant to AI Overviews and AI Mode, with no special optimization required for those features. Eligibility does not guarantee that a page will be selected. Clear, accessible information remains a practical foundation for a business seeking visibility.
For EMM, the commercial question is what happens when a customer starts researching. Which alternatives do they recognize? Which details might help them evaluate an unfamiliar company? Where does the available information leave something unanswered? Those are decisions a campaign can work on directly, even as platforms change how they present results.
PR fits into that discussion through the context it can provide around a business and its work. Useful coverage gives readers something to understand or evaluate. Its contribution is strongest when the story contains substance that supports the company's positioning.
Building capabilities that carry into the next business
Celestin sees his growing range of skills as useful beyond any single campaign. Explaining that ambition, he said: “Any other company I make in the future will have great SEO, AEO, and PR.” It is a statement about the capabilities he wants to bring to future projects, rather than a prediction of how a particular company will perform.
That longer view connects the earlier brand and creator work with his current focus. Each move has added experience he can draw on when taking on another problem. Relationships, content production and commercial work have given him different perspectives on how businesses attract attention and turn an opportunity into ongoing work.
Search is one part of that broader ambition. Learning how customers research a market can inform the content a business needs, the way it describes its offer and the questions it should be prepared to answer. Those capabilities can remain useful as an entrepreneur moves between industries.
Looking ahead
Alec Celestin's work at EMM Consulting brings an audience-focused marketing background into a period of change in business discovery. The Haven and Goliath campaigns give that direction concrete examples, across consumer products and business software. The next chapter is how he develops that practice while continuing to build the range of skills he values. His progress will be most interesting in the work itself: the customer questions a campaign addresses and the results it can document.
Keep up to date with Alec Celestin on Strikingly.