TALKS & PRESENTATIONS
Speaking
I’ve spent much of my career figuring out what makes people stop, pay attention, trust a business, and eventually decide to buy something. Sometimes the answer involves a complicated marketing strategy. Sometimes it’s as simple as putting a diamond ring inside an old jewelry box.
More recently, I’ve become interested in what happens when artificial intelligence begins changing the way businesses operate, how people make decisions, and what it means to be an expert in the first place.
During more than a decade directing marketing and digital strategy at Levy’s Fine Jewelry, I experimented with consumer psychology, developed scalable organic marketing strategies, and helped turn a Birmingham jewelry store into a nationally recognized online business. Today, I’m developing Aurithmic, an AI-assisted software platform designed around the operational challenges of independent jewelers.
My presentations draw on that experience, original research, and the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I enjoy challenging conventional assumptions, explaining why things work, and occasionally pointing out why something everyone seems to be doing makes absolutely no sense.
If people are going to give me an hour of their attention, I intend to make it worth their while.
Presentation Topics
The Business of Being Interesting
Consumer Psychology, Creative Strategy & Organic Social Media
The algorithm isn’t working against you. Most people scrolling through Instagram aren’t looking to buy jewelry. They aren’t looking to buy anything, and they definitely don’t want to be sold to. The solution is building enough value and trust over time that these people on the internet make the decision on their own that you are the jeweler they trust.
When I started experimenting with short videos at Levy’s, I discovered something interesting. Showing someone a beautiful diamond ring immediately caused nearly half the audience to scroll away within a fraction of a second. Show them a closed jewelry box instead, and those same viewers suddenly wanted to know what was inside.
That small observation became part of a repeatable creative strategy that helped build audiences of more than 70,000 Instagram followers and 78,000 TikTok followers, with videos reaching millions of people without relying on paid advertising. More important than impressive vanity numbers, these followers actively wanted to spend money with our store, without a sales pitch.
This presentation examines the psychology behind those results, from curiosity and anticipation to editing, humor, emotional responses, and the relationship between attention and actual sales.
What attendees will learn:
- How to make people interested in a business long before they’re interested in buying its products.
- Why small decisions involving presentation, pacing, and audience expectations can dramatically influence engagement.
- How to develop a recognizable brand personality and distinguish meaningful commercial results from impressive but ultimately meaningless metrics.
- What makes people shift from a social media follower to an active purchaser.
Ideal for: Retailers, business owners, marketing professionals, and organizations interested in organic growth and consumer behavior.
AI Is Changing the Jewelry Business. Are We Looking in the Right Places?
Artificial Intelligence, Business Operations & the Future of the Jewelry Industry
Ask most jewelers how AI might affect their businesses, and the conversation usually turns to writing product descriptions, creating marketing materials, or generating jewelry designs.
Those applications are useful, but some of the most consequential changes are happening elsewhere.
Artificial intelligence is reshaping the economics of diamond production, introducing new challenges to traditional grading and identification methods, and raising difficult questions about provenance, expertise, and customer trust.
Inside the retail store, the opportunities are often considerably less glamorous: inconsistent inventory records, cumbersome reporting, repetitive administrative work, and valuable information buried inside systems that don’t communicate particularly well.
Drawing on my research for Gem-A’s Gems & Jewellery and my experience developing Aurithmic, this presentation examines where AI can create meaningful business value, where it introduces risks, and how jewelers can evaluate new technology without getting distracted by impressive demonstrations.
The goal isn’t to convince every jeweler to become a software developer. It’s to help them recognize opportunities, ask better questions, and understand what they’re actually trusting a machine to do.
What attendees will learn:
- Where AI offers practical opportunities to improve efficiency, reporting, customer relationships, and business operations.
- Why inaccurate data, unchecked automation, and misplaced confidence in AI can create expensive problems.
- How to evaluate AI tools and implementation opportunities based on business value, reliability, and the judgment that should remain in human hands.
Ideal for: Jewelry retailers, manufacturers, industry associations, technology conferences, and business leaders considering AI adoption.
Beyond Rankings: Building a Business Worth Finding
SEO, AI Search, Digital Authority & Sustainable Organic Growth
An SEO audit can identify a hundred things wrong with your website. Fixing them doesn’t necessarily give anyone a reason to visit it.
At Levy’s Fine Jewelry, improving organic search visibility required looking beyond the usual technical checklist. We reorganized product collections around how customers actually shopped, improved navigation and site performance, developed original historical research, and built relationships with publications whose audiences had genuine reasons to be interested in our business.
Between March 2023 and October 2025, Semrush estimated that monthly organic search traffic increased from 7,597 to 49,271 visits.
These results didn’t come from discovering a secret trick. They came from a collection of deliberate decisions, some more successful than others, supported by years of learning about the business and its customers.
This presentation examines those decisions, the reasoning behind them, and the relationship between technical SEO, editorial authority, customer experience, and commercial opportunity. It also considers how AI-powered search is changing the way businesses are discovered.
What attendees will learn:
- How to organize a website around customer intent rather than internal business conventions.
- Why original research, editorial relationships, and a credible reputation can be more valuable than mechanically producing more content. Better content is more valuable than more content.
- How to prioritize SEO improvements and evaluate results without assuming that every ranking change has a simple explanation.
Ideal for: Ecommerce businesses, retailers, marketing professionals, and business owners interested in sustainable organic visibility.
About Joseph
Joseph Denaburg is a Birmingham-based marketing strategist, writer, and founder of Aurithmic, an AI-assisted software platform being developed for independent jewelry retailers.
He previously served as Marketing Director and Digital Strategist at Levy’s Fine Jewelry, where he spent more than twelve years developing the company’s digital presence, original content, organic search strategy, and social media presence.
Joseph served as President of the Alabama Jewelers Association from 2025 to 2026 and is a contributor to Gem-A’s international publication, Gems & Jewellery. His writing includes Mastering Metal - A History of Filigree in Jewelry and Diamonds Are Forever, Probably: AI’s Impact on the Future of the Jewellery Industry.
His professional interests range from the psychology of consumer behavior and organic marketing to the practical opportunities and complications introduced by artificial intelligence.
Something Else in Mind?
My experience is rooted in the jewelry industry, but the questions that interest me aren’t exclusive to jewelry. Businesses everywhere are trying to understand their customers, distinguish themselves from competitors, and make better use of rapidly changing technology.
I’m happy to tailor presentations to the experience and interests of a particular audience, whether that’s a room full of independent jewelers, ecommerce professionals, business owners, or students.
I’m available to discuss conference presentations, industry association meetings, educational sessions, panels, and guest lectures.
Planning an event?
Tell me a little about your audience, the subject you’re interested in, and what you’d like people to take away from the presentation.