About Mike Millett
The biography of Mike Millett: founder of Digilu, creator of MarketingOB1, developer of the Marketing Helix, and author of Elevate or Vanish.
Mike Millett has spent more than thirty years on one problem: how a business is understood, found and trusted, and what happens to it when the way people find things changes. He founded Digilu in 1999. He publishes and teaches as MarketingOB1. He developed the Marketing Helix, authored Adaptive Brand Management: Foundations, and wrote Elevate or Vanish.
In formal and documentary contexts his name appears as Michael Millett or Michael C. Millett. Professionally and publicly he goes by Mike Millett.
Where it started
His father was one of the country's top Yellow Pages salesmen for decades. They wrote ad copy together at home. Then the internet arrived, and rather than learn to build ads on a computer, he retired. Being the best at it did not save him.
His son was, at the same time, going the other way. In 1988, in high school, he produced an entire newspaper on a Macintosh. By 1989 he owned a business built on a Mac SE and a laser printer.
One family. One of them elevated, one of them vanished. That is not an anecdote he tells for effect. It is why he does not treat adaptation as a strategy topic, and why Elevate or Vanish reads as a warning rather than a slogan.
The through line
He has personally worked through every platform shift from desktop publishing to AI search: desktop publishing, the web, search, social, AI visibility. The pattern repeats. The tool gets cheap, the skill stops being the moat, and the businesses that survive are the ones people still understand and trust.
That is a longer baseline than most people writing about AI search have. Most of them arrived after search. It is the reason his claim that execution commoditises is an observation rather than a prediction.
- 1988Desktop publishing
- The web
- Search
- Social
- AI visibility
Digilu
He founded Digilu in 1999. It operates as an Adaptive Brand Management company: ongoing responsibility for a business's trust, visibility and relevance, rather than a project that finishes. Digilu is the commercial company. It is not a synonym for Mike.
StratusClean
As VP of Marketing at Stratus Building Solutions he led a multi-year repositioning that ended in the rename to StratusClean. The market had been reading a commercial cleaning company as construction or facilities buildout, and categorising it wrongly before any conversation began. The rename was a clarity decision, not an aesthetic one.
It took four years, and almost none of that was design work. It was getting the organisation to accept the change. He designed the identity himself and a professional designer refined it; StratusClean went live in April 2026.
The average Google rating rose from 3.4 to 4.7. Revenue roughly doubled. Across the same period Stratus Building Solutions took the number one place on Entrepreneur's Fastest-Growing Franchises list four years running, 2023 through 2026, which Entrepreneur records as a first in the history of that list. Those rankings were won under the old name; StratusClean went live in April 2026.
Teaching and credentials
He taught marketing at Pepperdine University: SEO and AI optimisation, e-commerce optimisation, and how infrastructure kills a site's speed and costs a business its results. He was teaching the technical half of the AI-visibility argument in a university classroom before it was a product anyone sold.
He holds a Master of Divinity from Pepperdine and a Bachelor of Arts in Speech Communications. He is a retired Protestant pastor, which is where the speaking came from long before any of the marketing did.
He has contributed to Entrepreneur Magazine and Authority Magazine, and is a Boston Scientific Patient Ambassador.
How he works
The consistent thread across thirty years, three industries and five platform shifts is helping businesses and people work out who they are, say it plainly, and build enough trust that the market keeps choosing them when conditions move. The tools have changed completely. The problem has not changed at all.