An age of ash and shadow.
Our namesake
This agency takes its name from Petrarch: Francesco Petrarca, the scholar and poet who, six centuries ago, showed what it can mean to find a way forward by looking back.In 1348 the plague reached Italy; his friends, his family, and Laura, the subject of his life’s poetry, were among the dead. He lived through what the historian Ada Palmer calls an age of ash and shadow. He refused the belief those around him held: that the dying was a punishment to be endured. He turned back instead: to the ancients who had built things worth remembering, to Cicero and the Romans, and to the classical wisdom and beauty of their words.
How did they do it? And how had the world fallen so far from their greatness? The questions sent him hunting their lost words across Europe. In a cathedral library in Verona he found what would change the course of history: the letters of Cicero that scholarship had given up for gone. In that moment a conviction took hold that never left him: wisdom and truth were within reach of anyone willing to study the classical world while enduring the hardship of the present. That conviction became a method of recovery, and the method became the movement we now call the Renaissance.
“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
— Gustav Mahler
The founder
The practitioner behind the name.
Justin C. Laffer came to Petrarch long before there was an agency to name. He studied Renaissance literature and the classics, taught Shakespeare, and returned to his early education in Latin, translating Cicero and Virgil. That veneration for the wisdom of the past never left him. Years later, reading Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, he met Petrarch again and recognized the man behind the recovery the story above describes.
The name took on its full weight during a dark night of his own. In Nashville, struggling with a set of marketing problems the field’s usual instruments could not solve, he came back to Petrarch, and to the phrase that has stayed with him since: an age of ash and shadow. He recognized it. Marketing was living through one.
He knew because he had lived it. The work wasn't working. Worse, it subjected buyers to tactics he would never have accepted himself, a violation of the discipline and of basic decency at once. Like everyone around him, he knew the leads and the dashboards were not the value marketing created; the charade continued because measurement meant certainty, and certainty meant employment. A profession that once required theory, skepticism, and judgment had traded its education for vendor certifications and its name for a rotating set of job titles, and called the bargain progress. The faith even had a creed: right message, right person, right time.
Beneath the recognition was exhaustion. Tired of the act. Tired of being ashamed of his profession, of getting worse at a craft he loved, of doing what was safe instead of what was right for the company and its customers. Tired of watching marketing be dismissed as inherently deceitful, of how powerless the function had become, of seeing the academic discipline and the professional practice drift so far apart they could barely speak the same language. That exhaustion hardened into a dedication: to the restoration of the discipline, and to an uncompromising commitment to practice only what evidence, theory, skepticism, and formal training would allow.
“Not nostalgia. Recovery: of evidence, of judgment, of the patience to build something that lasts, and of the conviction that marketing belongs at the center of every business decision. There are no shortcuts here. There is only the work. And that is beautiful.”
— Justin C. Laffer
Justin has spent more than fifteen years in healthcare marketing, in-house and as a consultant. At HCA Healthcare he worked on the brand-transformation team, then led clinical communications and physician marketing for the system's clinical excellence and provider relations organizations. At Qualifacts he led content marketing and built a program instrumental to the company’s value for its private-equity investors. At League, he built the marketing program and growth strategy that enabled venture investment valuing the company at over $1.4 billion. His experience spans many of the industry’s most successful technology, provider, pharmaceutical, operations, and data players, along with the agencies, media groups, and consultancies that serve them.
That breadth showed him the gap the agency exists to close: the most rigorous thinking in B2B healthcare is reserved for the boardroom, while the teams who carry the work day to day rarely have a partner operating at that level. It also taught him how investors read the work: which marketing creates enterprise value, and which merely performs it. Petrarch Strategy was built to close the gap from both sides. That caliber of thinking for the teams doing the work, and investment intelligence for the capital behind them.
Justin holds a dual degree from Vanderbilt University in English literature and art history, a master’s in literary theory and linguistics from Kent State University, and an MBA in marketing and healthcare economics from Belmont University.
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