Most people in marketing spend their careers on one side of the table.

If you work client-side, you see what the agency presents. You do not see how the work was built, how the media was bought, or what the agency's commercial model actually looks like from the inside.

If you work in an agency, you see what the client asks for. You do not see their board conversations, their margin pressures, or whether the product and pricing are sound before you start promoting them.

If you work in a media network, you see the money move. You do not usually see whether it arrived where it was supposed to, or whether anyone checked.

The founder of Verso Insights has worked in all three.

That combination is why Verso Insights exists. The structural problems in this system are not visible from any single position. They become clear only when you have been in enough of them to see how the parts connect, and how often they do not.

Between the client and the agency. Between the agency and the platforms. Between the strategic decisions made upstream and the activation that happens downstream. Between the metrics marketing uses to report performance and the metrics finance uses to assess any other part of the business. Between the measurement tools and the platforms whose performance they are supposed to measure.

That is where money gets lost, where incentives quietly diverge, and where the question of what the spend actually produced stops being asked.

The closest analogy is commercial due diligence. You would not acquire a business without an independent view of the numbers. Most companies spend significantly on marketing every year without one.

I have spent more than twenty years on three different sides of the marketing industry — as a client, as a creative agency lead, and inside one of the five global media networks. I started in B2B technology, ran the Irish market launch for lastminute.com, then spent the better part of a decade in creative agencies before moving into dentsu, where I eventually ran the Irish operation: a €150M P&L, 200-plus people, with clients ranging from Heineken and Vodafone to Meta and LinkedIn. Before that I built iProspect Dublin from a twenty-person office into a 100-person EMEA hub.

What I kept seeing, from all three vantage points, was the same thing: the problems in this industry sit in the gaps between the parts of it, and nobody's role is to join those gaps up and give the board a clear answer. Verso exists to do that.

Keith Lacy

Verso is the reverse side of a page — the part you have not yet turned over. Most companies have only seen the recto: the dashboards, the reports, the quarterly reviews. Verso Insights shows them what is on the other side.