You spend significantly on marketing. Whether it is producing the best possible return is a question most companies find difficult to answer with certainty.

Not because anyone has failed. But because the structures around marketing were not designed to make the answer easy to establish.

⅓

of marketing budgets go to work that was never properly directedBetterBriefs Project

51p

in the pound reaches publishers in programmatic. 15% is entirely unaccounted forISBA / PwC

⅔

of British marketers cannot pass a basic test on the fundamentals of their disciplineIpsos / Ritson

Measurement methods that are standard practice across the industry have been tested in peer-reviewed research and found to routinely overstate what advertising actually contributes. Agency remuneration models have shifted over the past decade toward revenue streams that are less visible to the client.

The split between long-term brand building and short-term activation matters enormously — research across nearly a thousand case studies makes that clear. Most companies have never assessed their allocation against it. And marketing itself covers product, pricing, distribution and communications, but in most companies the focus is biased towards communications.

None of this requires bad intent. It is simply how the industry has developed. But the cumulative effect is that most boards are making significant spending decisions without a clear picture of what that spend is producing.

That is the question we answer.

What we assess

We work with CEOs, CFOs and boards who want a clear answer to what their marketing spend is producing. The engagement runs over four to six weeks and covers four areas.

Spend allocation

We map every pound of marketing budget across channels, agencies, production, technology and media — and benchmark the allocation against published evidence on what drives growth. Most companies have never assessed the long-term/short-term split against the research.

Commercial reality check

We assess whether the business challenge is actually a communications problem, or whether the real constraint sits in product, pricing or distribution. If advertising is being used to solve a problem that is not an advertising problem, that is worth knowing before spending more.

Agency value

We assess whether the agency relationship is producing commercial value — contract structures, incentive models, transparency arrangements. Not whether people enjoy working together, but whether interests are aligned. Benchmarked against ISBA and IPA frameworks.

Measurement and return

We assess whether the measurement in place can reliably connect spend to commercial outcomes. Where the data supports it, we run an independent analysis using the same open-source modelling tools used by Google and Meta. A defensible range — the kind of evidence a CFO can work with.

The engagement happens once. Every marketing decision made after it is better informed than every one that came before.

The output is a detailed report. It answers these questions, sets out what should change, and the evidence behind it.

The cost of the engagement is small relative to the budget it examines. The cost of not doing it is whatever that budget could be producing but currently isn't.

Background

We have worked client-side, in creative agencies, and inside one of the big five media agency networks — across brands including Vodafone, Unilever, Diageo, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Centre Parcs and Holland & Barrett. We have built and run agencies and managed the P&L.

The problems in this system sit in the gaps between the different parts. In most organisations, nobody's role is to join those things together and give the board a clear answer. That is what we do.

Get in touch

If this is a question you have been trying to answer, we would love to have a conversation about it.

[email protected]