Two million
dollars a year.
And I know what
it came back as.
Performance, brand, growth, and the systems underneath all three.
is what I have moved through Meta and Google in the last twelve months.
Every figure here is defined on the numbers page: what it measures, over what window, and where it comes from.
Nine brands. Six categories. OTT and entertainment, securities markets, ed tech, heritage retail, QSR and AI tooling.
Performance Marketing
Meta and Google end to end. Around $2M a year in paid media, $6.7M returned against it, and the decisions that sit between the two.
$2M / yrBrand Management
Owning what a company is allowed to say, and holding it across five surfaces that each break it differently.
Five surfacesGrowth & Strategy
The part of acquisition you do not buy, and the allocation decision that sits above every channel.
AllocationAI Architecture
Four internal tools in production over the ad accounts: reporting, creative pipeline, asset level attribution, and a competitive read.
4 livePersonal Finance
How I reason about capital, which is the same way I reason about a media budget. This is not investment advice.
Not advicePersonal Brand
What the auction does when a company puts a person on screen instead of a product, argued from around $2M a year of live media.
ReadFour steps, run on every account.
Read it before touching it
The first pass is spend against revenue, account by account, as far back as the data goes. Nothing gets changed in that window, because a change made before the baseline is known removes your ability to read it.
Take the money off what is not returning
Most of the early gain is subtraction. Budget sitting on things that have not returned in weeks comes off before anything new goes on.
Write the next set against the auction
Targeting is largely settled by the platform now, so the lever left is what the creative says and where it runs. Briefs get written against what that account has actually been paying for, not against a category playbook.
Let it resolve
Daily numbers are for catching failures, not for making decisions. A change gets a fortnight before it is judged, unless spend is running away, in which case it gets an hour.
Four things I turn down.
Promise a number the auction sets
I will not commit to a revenue figure, before seeing an account or after. What I will commit to is where the money goes, why it went there, and what it returned.
Run a channel I cannot measure
If spend cannot be tied back to revenue with something better than a guess, it does not get budget. That rules out a few line items people expect to see on a plan, and it is better said at the start.
Put spend behind a product with no demand
Paid media finds demand. It does not create it, and if nobody is looking for what you sell, spend makes that arrive faster and more expensively.
Hold your accounts
Everything runs inside your ad accounts, your billing and your pixels. If we stop, you keep the accounts, the history and the reporting.
Money is relative. It is relative to time.
A small return that closes every month does more than a big one that takes a year. Most of what I am paid for is shortening the gap between a decision and its answer.
I have been doing a version of this since I was fifteen.
Stock market first, because it was the only place a teenager could watch a decision get marked to market the same day. A fragrance business at nineteen. An agency at twenty with three friends that closed an international client and fell apart over ownership. None of it was a plan. All of it was the same question asked with more money each time: what did that actually return, and how fast did it come back.
Before a call.
How do you charge?
There is no rate card. It depends on the size of the budget and how much of the operation sits with me, and I would rather price it against what the account needs than quote before I have seen one.
What does the first month look like?
Reading the account is the fast part. Moving spend takes longer, because access, billing and tracking have to be correct first, and starting before they are is how a first month gets wasted.
What do you need from us?
Access to the ad accounts and to the revenue data, and one person who can approve creative without a committee. The last one sets the speed of everything else.
What if it does not work?
You will know early, because spend and return sit in front of you every week and I do not soften them. If an account cannot reach a return that makes sense, I will say so and stop rather than spend another quarter proving it slowly.
Tell me the number you are held to.
Thirty minutes. If I am not the right person for it I will say so on the call and point you at someone who is. No deck, no discovery sequence.