Cases, patterns and observations from twenty years inside the system.

Every agency reviews its outputs obsessively. The creative gets scrutinised. The media plan gets questioned. The results get analysed. The brief gets treated as given. In a process improvement exercise at a major agency network, 85% of client briefs arriving that quarter were found to be incomplete before anyone assessed whether the thinking was any good.

In a rising mortgage market, applications were up, ROAS was strong, and cost per application was moving in the right direction. The question that rarely gets asked is a simple one — did the market explain it? And in financial services, there is a second problem underneath this one: you know your total drawdown numbers, but not whether the customer who applied was the customer who drew down.

In early 2020, a large health and wellness retailer cut its paid search budget as part of broader cost reductions. The attribution model credited paid search with a material share of online revenue. The expectation was that conversions would fall. They did not.