Joe,EasterCreatives,andDowntoTwo

Bank holiday weekend. Four days to do five days of work. The usual drill: tighter mornings, longer to-do lists, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing the whole team just gets on with it without anyone needing to be told.

Welcome, Joe

The big news this week: Joe Williams has officially joined the team. We teased this at the end of last week's entry, and now he's here. We're genuinely excited to have him on board. Joe brings a depth of experience that's going to strengthen everything we do, and the early conversations have already been sharp, challenging, and exactly what we want from someone joining at this level.

More on Joe soon. For now, welcome to JudeLuxe.

A skincare brand, cannibalisation, and POAS

We met with a huge skincare brand this week. The kind of brand where the name alone would make most agency owners sit up a little straighter. The conversation centred on three things: their brand strategy, how to stop cannibalisation across campaigns, and what shifting to a POAS model actually looks like in practice.

Cannibalisation is one of those problems that hides in plain sight. You're running brand, non-brand, Shopping, and Performance Max simultaneously, and they're all claiming credit for the same conversions. The platform tells you everything's working. The P&L tells you otherwise. Unpicking that requires a proper understanding of incrementality, not just switching off campaigns and hoping for the best.

We'll see where it goes. But the fact that brands of this size are actively exploring POAS tells you everything about where the market is heading.

Down to the final two

We heard back from a brand we'd pitched to earlier in March. They started with four agencies. They've whittled it down to two. We're one of the two.

We don't do dog-and-pony shows. We don't wheel out a senior team for the pitch and then hand the account to a junior. What we presented is what they'd get. That's either a strength or a weakness depending on who's judging, but we'd rather lose being honest than win pretending to be something we're not.

Fingers crossed. But either way, we're proud of how we showed up.

A client departure

A client handed in their notice this week. It happens. Not every relationship lasts forever, and not every departure is a failure. Sometimes priorities shift, budgets change, or the timing just isn't right any more.

We wish them all the best. Genuinely. We'll make sure the handover is clean and the data is in order. That's the professional thing to do, and it's what we'd want if the roles were reversed.

Easter creatives, refreshed

Across a number of client accounts, we've refreshed Easter creatives this week. New ad copy, updated promotion assets, seasonal imagery swapped in. It sounds routine because it is routine: the kind of detail-level work that separates accounts that are "managed" from accounts that are actively worked on.

If your agency isn't updating your creatives around key seasonal moments, ask yourself what they're actually doing between monthly reports.

A new fashion client, finally

We've onboarded a new fashion client this week. This one has been in the wings for a while: conversations started months ago, timelines shifted, and now we're live. We'll announce them properly shortly, but for now the onboarding is underway and we're already deep into feed structure, campaign architecture, and margin data.

Fashion is one of those verticals where the difference between a generic Google Ads setup and a properly structured Shopping campaign is enormous. Size variants, colour variants, seasonal collections: if your feed doesn't reflect the commercial reality of your catalogue, your ads won't either.

Five into four

The bank holiday compression is always an interesting test of how a team operates. You can't just work 20% faster. You have to prioritise harder, communicate tighter, and accept that some things will carry into the following week. The team handled it well. No drama, no missed deadlines, no panicked Slack messages at 6pm on Thursday.

That's the culture we've built. It doesn't need managing. It just works.

Chris