About David Estrada
Sixteen years of watching what breaks.
I grew up in the Rio Grande Valley and studied at UT Rio Grande Valley. My first marketing job was at the American Heart Association in Dallas in 2008. Then Verizon. Then five years inside The Dallas Morning News and Al Día, watching how media actually gets made, measured, and sold. Then agency life. Then Axer Strategies, because I kept seeing the same pattern from every seat: companies spending more on marketing while the system underneath it stayed broken, and the people they paid had no reason to point out the real problem.
Read my full history on LinkedIn →That pattern is the business. Axer exists to name what is actually broken, and to prove it with evidence.
The methodology, in one story
The only advantage that compounds
Every project, every pitch, every win and loss for sixteen years went into a file. Not a portfolio. A working knowledge base of what actually happened and why. When a new problem shows up, I am not guessing. I am retrieving.
The file is also why a pitch that fails can still be a win. I once pitched an emergency-services company a full recruiting strategy built on cultural fluency no competitor had: a childhood in the Rio Grande Valley plus five years inside Spanish-language media. Mid-pitch, a senior director stopped me: “Go back to the spreadsheet. Give us the bottom number.” The pitch was a chapter-seven vision in a chapter-three room. The file caught the mismatch in one meeting instead of twelve months. That lesson is now part of the methodology.
The direct line
The most expensive thing in marketing is the layer between the person who knows and the person who decides. I have watched organizational layers quietly destroy feedback loops that took years to build. So Axer stays deliberately small: you talk to the person doing the thinking. Capped scopes, direct access, documentation you keep. No account managers translating your business through a game of telephone.