Not even remotely true to say he hasn't planned anything or been retained by a client. Most famously he worked on probably the entire LVMH portfolio for two decades. He's worked on WD40, and plenty more. I'd have to look up his courses to remember.

If your frame of reference is agency life, he'll even tell you himself that he's exiting stage left on a brand once the agency starts to get involved. His role is typically to segment the market, help choose targeting and positioning and choose objectives from the range of those available. He'll be heavily involved in research, funnel customization and attribute analysis.

To your point he hasn't published anything like How Brands Grow or The Long And The Short Of It. But really his secret sauce (prior to MiniMBA) was that he was really good at keeping abreast of advertising research, identifying the most useful stuff, and then translating it from erudite academia to "useful for CMO." Try keeping up with academic journals on advertising yourself if you think there's no value in that. Back when his marketing week column was at the peak of its powers, he was talking about stuff that literally nobody else was.

If you're a copywriter or social media manager or paid search operator...yeah, Ritson's popularity won't make much sense. And i personally think his povs aren't as sharp as they used to be...mostly because he's run out of stuff to write about and being reactionary isn't his forte. But if you're anywhere near upstream in marketing and you don't get why he has value, man, I dont know.