Principles
These are not values in the poster sense. They are the rules we apply when a decision is genuinely difficult, and the reason some of our advice costs us money.
01
ROAS tells you how much revenue advertising generated. It does not tell you how much of it you kept. Two products can both return £5 for every £1 spent, and one of them can be quietly destroying contribution. We judge the account on what reaches the P&L.
02
Products are not interchangeable units of revenue. Each one has a margin, a stock position, a customer and a moment in its lifecycle. At any point a SKU holds one commercial job: Scale, Profit, Protect, Recovery or Gateway. When the commercial reality changes, the job changes.
03
Average return on spend is a rear-view mirror. The decision in front of you is always marginal: what does the next pound buy, and would it be better spent elsewhere in the account or not spent at all. Budgets are priorities, not settings.
04
Smart Bidding and Performance Max are extremely capable at pursuing an objective. They have no view on whether the objective is the right one. Handing over execution is sensible. Handing over commercial judgement is not.
05
A platform reporting that it caused a sale is not evidence that it did. The only honest answers come from holdouts, experiments and brand decomposition. We would rather report a smaller number we can defend than a larger one we cannot.
06
Rebuilding an account on arrival looks decisive and destroys the evidence needed to know whether the rebuild worked. Structure changes when there is a commercial reason, written down, that survives being questioned.
07
Every change should be explainable to a finance director in one paragraph: what changed, why, what we expected, and what happened. Complexity that cannot be explained is usually complexity that is not understood.
08
Percentage-of-spend pricing pays an agency to recommend growth regardless of whether growth is profitable. We charge a fixed fee, so the advice to spend less costs us nothing and the advice to spend more has to stand on its own.
The people behind them are on About. The system they produce is the methodology.