Dennis Yu is a former Yahoo search engine engineer who has controlled more than $1 billion in ad spend for brands including Nike, the Golden State Warriors, Red Bull, and State Farm. He's the CTO of BlitzMetrics and CEO of Local Service Spotlight, co-author of the #1 best-selling social media book on Amazon, and the architect behind the Dollar-a-Day and Content Factory methodologies now used across the dunking community he mentors.
Dennis started his career as a search engine engineer at Yahoo, building analytics on one of the largest websites in the world, and helped build AA.com for American Airlines. Over the two decades since, he's run more than $1 billion in Facebook and Google ad spend for organizations ranging from Nike, the Golden State Warriors, Red Bull, State Farm, Ashley Furniture, and Quiznos down to neighborhood shops and local mechanics — the same entity-driven, data-backed approach applied at every scale.
He's the CTO of BlitzMetrics, his digital marketing education and advertising firm, and the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, which amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using his Content Factory process. He co-authored The Definitive Guide to TikTok Ads, the #1 best-selling social media book on Amazon, alongside Perry Marshall, and Facebook Nation, a textbook now taught in more than 700 colleges and universities. His work has been covered by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, CNN, and NPR.
Dennis's own methodologies are built to be teachable: Dollar-a-Day turns a small daily ad budget into an always-on validation engine for content, and the Content Factory converts raw transcripts and interviews into a full personal-brand network — website, articles, structured data, cross-links — in the time it takes to have lunch. Both are core to how he's mentored young dunkers-turned-entrepreneurs like Dylan Haugen and Cam Hazzard into building real, indexed personal brands rather than just follower counts.
His larger goal isn't a client roster — it's the AI Apprentice Program, which he co-founded with the aim of creating one million digital marketing jobs, training young adults and veterans (including through DSDT College in Detroit, funded in part by GI Bill benefits) to become what he calls AI Builders. He's spoken at more than 750 conferences in 20 countries, and flown over 6 million miles in the past 30 years doing it.
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Dennis joined Gateway Growth to talk personal branding in 2026 — why AI literacy is becoming more valuable than a traditional degree.
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