I used to blog. It was nothing fancy with no grand strategy, no content calendar, and no obsessive keyword research, just a person with thoughts and a habit of writing them down. Mostly basketball stuff, back when the Singapore Slingers were playing in the Australian National Basketball League. Then as work got busier and life got fuller, the blog went quiet. Just like a lot of things you mean to return to, the gap between the last post and today unconsciously became years.
Well I’m back, and this time I have more to say and more reason to say it properly.
The itch that wouldn’t go away
I guess I am a curious person by nature and always have been. I try things, read occasionally, and pick up new tools before fully knowing what I am going to do with them. At times, I ask questions in rooms where other people have stopped asking questions, possibly because they are busy being the expert in them.
Over the last few years, that curiosity has landed squarely on artificial intelligence and specifically on what AI means for marketing, for brands, for the way we communicate, and for the professionals who have spent decades building expertise in this field.
I have been using AI tools, testing them, maybe breaking them, and integrating them into real work. At the intergrated marketing agency I co-founded, Bravelight Collective, I have conversations with partners and potential clients who have strong intellectual property and need smart marketing strategy. In the education space, I own and manage a franchise and think constantly about how people learn. And in the lecture theatre at Nanyang Polytechnic, I teach marketing to students who are going to inherit a profession that looks very different from the one I entered twenty-five years ago.
All of that has been happening in my head and in my work, with very little of it written down anywhere a stranger could find it. That felt like a genuine waste.
What this blog is, and isn’t
Curious Dad is not a content machine. I am not going to publish five posts a week and burn out by March (fingers crossed), nor am I chasing viral moments or optimising purely for traffic.
What I am doing is documenting a genuine journey across three areas that take up most of my mental bandwidth right now, covering my thinking, my experiments, and my observations along the way.
- Marketing – I have spent twenty-five years leading brand, marketing and communications across Asia, and I have opinions about what works, what doesn’t, and what the industry gets wrong, alongside a healthy respect for how much things are changing. Both of those will show up here.
- AI and generative intelligence – I am a certified GenAI practitioner, and more importantly, I am someone who uses these tools every day for real work and not just to write about them. I want to document what I am actually seeing, from campaigns to classrooms, from client conversations to the broader shift in how people find and consume information.
- Life. Stoicism, faith, fatherhood, fitness, mental health, leadership and all the stuff that sits underneath the professional activity and shapes how I think and make decisions. I wrote a children’s book in 2025, It’s Okay, You’ve Got This: Finding Calm in Everyday School Life, partly because I wanted my kids to have something from me, and that instinct to document and leave something behind is part of what brought me back to writing.
The experiment within the experiment
Here is the part I want to be honest about, because I think it is actually interesting.
This blog is also a live experiment in something I talk about with partners and students, which is Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO. It is the practice of making your content visible and credible within AI-generated responses. It is not soley on Google, but in the answers that tools like Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews produce when someone asks a question.
I believe GEO matters. I am advising brands on it and teaching the principles of it, so it seemed only right and only honest to build a live test case for myself rather than theorise about it from the sidelines.
Curious Dad is that test case. Every structural decision about this blog, from the way posts are written to the schema markup in the background to the author credentials I make visible, is an attempt to practise what I preach. I will write about what I am learning as I go, including the things that work and the things that don’t, because that seems more useful than presenting a polished theory from a safe distance.
A quiet note about services
One more thing, since I am being candid about why I am here.
I offer marketing consultancy and advisory services covering strategy, brand positioning, marketing, communications, and increasingly, some AI integration for marketing teams. If you are a senior marketing leader or a business owner trying to figure out how to navigate this moment, and something you read here resonates with you, I am open to a conversation.
This blog is not a lead funnel dressed up as content, but I would be pretending if I said my professional work and my writing exist in completely separate boxes. The thinking is connected and always has been.
What to expect
Posts here will be substantive, because I would rather write one good piece than five forgettable ones. I will cover marketing strategy, AI and GEO alongside the occasional piece about the other things that matter, such as leadership, being a dad, and staying grounded when the world moves fast.
I don’t know exactly where this goes, and that is part of the point. I am curious enough to find out, and I am grateful you are here at the beginning of it.
Jason Ho is a marketing strategist and GenAI practitioner based in Singapore, co-founder of Bravelight Collective, Managing Principal of an education franchise, and adjunct lecturer in marketing at Nanyang Polytechnic. His children’s book, It’s Okay, You’ve Got This: Finding Calm in Everyday School Life, is available on Amazon.
