HIGH SALIENCE / ABOUT
Senior strategy doesn't get delegated.
High Salience is a principal-led practice. Every engagement is strategy-led at principal level; specialists are brought in where execution requires them, and strategy is never handed to a junior account manager.
01The Operator
You work with the person who answers for the results.
High Salience is run by Mike Hawley, its founder and principal: the operator who builds the commercial query maps, runs the AI-surface measurement and directs the source campaigns on every engagement.
The background is operator-side, not agency-side: more than a decade spent building, ranking and running a portfolio of owned e-commerce and lead-generation properties, where the search strategy and the revenue lived in the same P&L. When your own money depends on your own rankings, you learn what actually moves them and stop paying attention to what doesn't. That's the lens High Salience applies to client categories: search as a commercial system to be measured and engineered, not a report to subscribe to.
The methodology evolves from live market analysis, direct testing and what survives measurement. The research program exists to pressure-test those assumptions in public.
What I'm unusually good at: seeing the whole information environment around a category, and knowing which single intervention moves it.
At this price point you should be able to verify who you're hiring: Mike Hawley on LinkedIn.
02Philosophy
How we think.
Evidence before opinion
Every strategy starts with a measured map of the market. When the evidence changes, the strategy changes. Clients who want their assumptions confirmed should hire someone cheaper.
Revenue defines the KPI
First-party revenue data defines what success means, not agency-invented vanity metrics. A mention that never becomes pipeline is a decoration.
The whole environment, not the website
Rankings, answers and recommendations are produced by an ecosystem: your domain, the sources that corroborate it and the entity machines understand you to be. We work on all of it.
Few clients, deep work
The practice stays small on purpose. Depth beats headcount, and the application process exists to protect that.
The edge is decision latency
Firms relying on public consensus learn what happened after everyone else has read the same analysis. We monitor markets, preserve historical evidence, compare winners against losers and test hypotheses to reach the correct commercial decision earlier.