Most digital marketers sell advertising. Nguyen Khai My sells something far more valuable: the systems that make advertising actually work.

The difference matters more than you think. Anyone can teach you to set up Facebook campaigns or optimize TikTok ads. But if your customer understanding is shallow, your messaging is weak, and your conversion journey is broken, no amount of advertising optimization will save you. You’ll just burn money faster.

This is what Nguyen Khai My understood after participating in over 90 projects across seven years. Advertising is a door that opens quickly to reach the right customers. But long-term growth comes from content strategy, conversion pathways, and lasting customer relationships. Master those foundations, and advertising becomes easy. Skip them, and every campaign is a gamble.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth he embodies: the businesses that need advertising help the most are usually the ones who shouldn’t be advertising yet. They need to fix their foundations first. And Nguyen Khai My is one of the few professionals honest enough to tell them that.

The Profession That Chose Him

Nguyen Khai My never planned to be in marketing. He studied Valuation—a finance and banking discipline. At the time, marketing wasn’t the popular field it is today. So he chose something “hot” with clearer career prospects. During his studies, some professors commented that he had natural marketing talent. He didn’t believe them. He was convinced he’d become a valuation specialist.

Then reality intervened. He took a digital marketing internship because he needed income. That practical necessity became a career pivot. He started learning content creation, expanding his professional network, accumulating skills. By graduation, he had over a year of experience and found himself genuinely drawn to the work.

Sometimes the profession chooses you rather than the reverse. That’s exactly what happened with Nguyen Khai My. The “temporary” internship became permanent because he discovered something important: he was good at understanding what customers actually needed, not just what businesses wanted to sell them.

That customer-first orientation would become his competitive advantage.

The Four-Layer Framework

After seven years participating in 90+ projects, Nguyen Khai My distilled his approach into a four-layer framework that explains why most advertising fails and how to fix it.

Layer one is target customers. Who actually buys? What do they want, fear, and need? Most businesses skip this completely or work from assumptions rather than research. They build campaigns for imaginary customers who don’t exist.

Layer two is messaging and content. What does the business say to help customers understand and trust them? This requires deep knowledge from layer one. If you don’t understand your customers, you can’t craft messages that resonate. You’re just guessing with better design software.

Layer three is the conversion journey—from awareness to interest to trust to purchase to repeat business. Each stage requires different content, different messaging, different touchpoints. Most businesses treat this as a single step (buy now!) rather than a journey that takes time and nurture.

Layer four is sustainable operations thinking. How do you build a business that doesn’t depend on constantly increasing ad budgets? How do you create loyalty that reduces acquisition costs over time? How do you systematize so growth doesn’t require proportional increases in manual work?

This framework makes advertising the smallest part of the equation. Layer four depends on three. Three depends on two. Two depends on one. Skip the foundation work, and your ad campaigns become expensive experiments that rarely deliver sustainable results.

The Businesses He Serves

Nguyen Khai My focuses on a specific type of client that might seem counterintuitive. He works with business owners who already have digital marketing teams—Content people, Media people (design and production), and Ads people.

Why would businesses with existing teams need outside help? Because having people isn’t the same as having a system. When companies lack systems, their teams fall into predictable problems.

They work hard but get inconsistent results. Content feels scattered and campaigns lose coherence. Ad costs creep up over time because there’s no nurturing strategy. There’s no shared standard for how Content, Media, and Ads should coordinate.

Nguyen Khai My helps transform these collections of talented individuals into integrated, functioning systems. He doesn’t add more people. He adds the operating framework that makes existing people dramatically more effective.

This positioning is smart. Businesses that already have teams have demonstrated commitment and budget. They’re ready to invest in systems. They just need someone who can see what they’re missing. That’s where he creates value.

The SEIMY Transformation

One project that stands out is his work training the SEIMY team. This wasn’t simple consulting—it was fundamental business transformation.

SEIMY needed to shift from a systems-based approach to delivering products directly to consumers. The leadership team had strong product and manufacturing capabilities but lacked marketing knowledge. They’d previously attracted large sales teams but couldn’t retain them due to inexperience and inconsistent strategy.

Nguyen Khai My’s intervention focused on building foundational marketing knowledge for leadership, strengthening customer focus, and developing coherent strategy. The result? The business recovered and has continued growing well since then.

This case illustrates what he does best. He doesn’t just optimize campaigns. He builds organizational capability. The SEIMY transformation wasn’t about running better ads. It was about teaching leaders how to think about marketing systematically so they could build sustainable competitive advantages.

Two Failures That Built His Philosophy

I respect people who talk openly about failures. Nguyen Khai My has two significant ones that shaped his entire approach.

The first failure came from managing too early. He co-founded a marketing agency when he lacked sufficient knowledge, experience, and maturity. He found himself managing around 40 staff members without the skills to do it well. The inevitable result was failure.

His takeaway: you must develop yourself before your business can develop. There are no shortcuts around personal growth. Trying to scale before you’re ready doesn’t just slow progress—it destroys what you’ve built.

The second failure involved customer relationships. He experienced firsthand what happens when advertising costs keep climbing because there’s no strategy for nurturing customers and building sustainable relationships. Products felt disconnected. There was no system for retention. The business couldn’t sustain itself long-term.

This failure fundamentally shifted his perspective. Advertising became, in his view, a lever for quick access—but the core work is building relationships, serving deeply, and improving service quality over time.

These aren’t abstract lessons. They’re scars that inform everything he teaches now. The failures made him credible in ways success alone could not.

The Man Behind the Methods

What drives Nguyen Khai My? His core value is simple: kindness. He prioritizes win-win collaboration and actively avoids zero-sum thinking where one party’s gain requires another’s loss.

At work, he’s data-driven, decisive, and focused on collective development. But outside work, there’s another side to him. He loves art, the expressiveness of poetry and music, and the energy of dancing.

This combination makes sense. Marketing done well requires both analytical rigor and creative intuition. The data shows what’s happening. The creativity determines what to do about it. Nguyen Khai My seems to embody that duality naturally.

His participation in Eagle Club reflects his commitment to mindset development, environmental influence, and disciplined personal growth in business contexts. He’s not just learning techniques—he’s shaping how he thinks.

Vision: 100 Happy People

When I look at where Nguyen Khai My is heading, his goals reveal priorities that separate him from typical agency operators.

He wants to build a company of about 100 people—and create an environment where those people are happy and fulfilled at work. That’s a specific ambition. Not “scale to maximum revenue” but “build something where people thrive.”

He aims to become a leader not just in advertising expertise but in operational thinking and team development. He wants to deliver clear value to customers by solving real problems, serving better, and building sustainability.

These goals feel coherent with everything else about him. They’re about systems, relationships, and long-term thinking—not quick wins. The 100-person company isn’t a vanity metric. It’s a vision of building something meaningful at human scale rather than chasing infinite growth.

What This Teaches Founders

Nguyen Khai My’s approach offers lessons that apply far beyond digital marketing. First, systems beat tactics every time. Anyone can learn the latest platform trick. Building repeatable, scalable systems is harder and infinitely more valuable. Invest in systems, not just skills.

Second, customer-centricity isn’t a slogan—it’s an operating principle that shapes everything. When you truly understand what customers need, content writes itself, conversion paths become obvious, and advertising gets easier. Skip customer understanding, and everything else becomes harder.

Third, failure teaches what success cannot. His early stumbles with agency management and customer retention gave him insights no training program could provide. Your failures aren’t obstacles to success—they’re ingredients in it if you learn from them properly.

Fourth, kindness is a business strategy. Win-win thinking builds relationships that compound over time. Zero-sum thinking might win individual transactions but loses in the long game. Choose collaboration over competition whenever possible.

The Bottom Line

Nguyen Khai My represents a mature approach to digital marketing—one that acknowledges complexity instead of promising silver bullets. While others sell quick fixes and platform hacks, he sells the un-sexy truth: advertising works when you build proper foundations first.

His four-layer framework isn’t revolutionary. It’s simply honest about what actually drives sustainable growth. Understand customers deeply. Craft messages that resonate. Design conversion journeys that nurture relationships. Build operations that can scale without breaking. Only then does advertising become the amplifier rather than the entire strategy.

For business owners tired of chasing hacks and ready to build something sustainable, his perspective offers a valuable alternative. The path is longer and requires more foundational work. But it leads somewhere that lasts.

As he learned through painful experience: you must develop yourself before your business can develop. There are no shortcuts. The question is whether you’re willing to do the un-sexy work that makes everything else possible.

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Le Duc Anh CEO of OceanLabs – Founder of QVID