About Jaap Willem

I'm Jaap Willem van de Plasse, a senior marketing strategy consultant based in Breda. I've been doing this for 19+ years, mostly across Germany, Belgium, UK, USA and the Netherlands.
Studio Curious is the studio I've been running independently since 2015

Driven by passion

How I got here

I started my career at Group M, a Spanish agency where I handled the Dutch market campaigns. Cross-border work from day one. Netherlands is a demanding context to start in, with high consumer scepticism and strict platform norms, and you either learn rigour or you fail.

From Group M and Netbooster in Madrid I moved to Belgium, joining OMCollective in Sint Niklaas as Senior Online Marketing Consultant. From there I came back into the Netherlands, first at Drogisterij.net, and then at Envoker Internet Marketing as Senior Consultant.

That trajectory adds up to 19+ years of cross-border paid and brand work inside markets that are adjacent without being interchangeable.

The same ad that converts in the Netherlands can fall flat in Germany. The same keyword architecture that works in Belgium misses in a Dutch context. These distinctions matter commercially, and most agencies flatten them.

I founded Studio Curious in 2015. The reason was deliberate. I wanted to work at senior level with fewer clients, at greater depth, and without the account-management overhead that larger agencies tend to put between the strategist and the work.

What I work on

I work across paid media, brand strategy, and international expansion. The clients are mostly D2C founders scaling across European markets, enterprise marketing teams hiring senior resource for a defined project, and in-house marketing leads at scale-up companies who want a strategic counterpart without the headcount.

Quality over quantity. At any given time I carry a small number of retained clients and I intend to keep it that way. The depth of engagement I offer is only possible because I do not scale it.

Current clients include a $20M+ US D2C brand (six-year retained relationship, daily ROAS routinely in the 400 to 633% range across five paid platforms), a German ISO certification body, a Dutch e-commerce drugstore I have supported for more than twelve years, and a Fuerteventura watersports school running multi-language SEO across six European markets.

How I work

I do not send decks and disappear. I work inside the client's team, in the data, in the weekly meetings, on the live decisions. I call this the Embedded Senior Model. The methodology and the IP stay inside your organisation when the engagement ends, which is the point of working this way.

Five named methodologies organise how I approach the work:

  • The Embedded Senior Model — senior resource that integrates inside your team rather than operating as an external vendor.

  • The Channel Mix Compass — a framework for making paid, organic, and brand investment decisions at each growth stage.

  • The Cross-Border Brand-Performance Stack — how I approach international expansion without losing channel efficiency.

  • GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) — structuring content so AI engines cite your brand.

  • Maintenance as SEO — treating technical security and page speed as the foundation of search authority.

Studio Curious and Envoker

In parallel to Studio Curious, I work as Senior Consultant at Envoker Internet Marketing, also based in Breda. The two are deliberately complementary.

Envoker is where I work on enterprise-scale paid media engagements within a team context. Studio Curious is the studio I run independently for D2C founders, scale-ups, and project-based enterprise clients who want senior-level work without a network agency structure. The dual role sharpens both. What I learn at scale inside Envoker makes me a better independent consultant. What I build and test inside Studio Curious feeds back into how I think at enterprise level.

I disclose this straightforwardly because it is relevant to any client engagement. If you want to understand which context is the right fit for your work, that is a useful conversation to have on a discovery call.

Based in Breda

Studio Curious is based in Breda, Netherlands. I work with clients across Europe and the US, and engagements are remote by default. Where it makes sense to be in the room with the team, I am.

Book a call

If the work I have described fits the problem you are looking at, send me a note or book a discovery call. Thirty minutes is usually enough to know whether the engagement makes sense, and I'll tell you straight if it doesn't.