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Objective, audience, channel
In that order, every time, so a channel never arrives before the problem it's meant to solve.
Strategy is the decision about what you’re trying to change, and who has to behave differently for that to happen. Channels, budget, creative and measurement come after it. They’re execution. Get it wrong and no amount of optimisation rescues it.
We work in a fixed order, whether it’s a full marketing strategy or a media strategy: the business objective, then the audience, then the channel. Every strategy is built on your own performance data, and the plan is yours to take anywhere.
Objective, audience, channel In that order, every time, so a channel never arrives before the problem it's meant to solve.
Every strategy starts from your own performance data. Sector benchmarks add context; they don't set the plan.
No commercial bias Independent and employee-owned, so nothing in our commercial structure prefers one answer over another.
A plan you can take anywhere Clear enough to hand to another agency, not a document only we can interpret.
Most media strategies start in the wrong place because the brief arrives channel-first. “We need a social campaign.” “Should we be doing connected TV?” Those are answers dressed up as questions, and an agency set up to sell that channel has no reason to point it out.
Starting from the objective changes what gets asked. What has to be true in twelve months for this to have worked? Who doesn’t know you exist yet, and who knows you but keeps choosing someone else? Those are different problems, and they need different money.
Sometimes the honest answer is that media isn’t the constraint at all, and the budget would do more on the website or the proposition. We’d rather say that in week one than bill for a year of activity that was never going to move the number.
A strategy engagement with us runs in five stages, and each one ends with something you can use. The order matters: nobody talks about channels until the objective and the audience are agreed.
Three things take most of the guesswork out of a plan before any money moves: your own results, a fair comparison with your peers, and a definition of success that’s fixed before launch.
Total Intelligence, our in-house data platform, holds every channel's performance together. A new plan starts from what worked for you, not from what the last agency said worked.
Within each of our sectors we've built data pools from the campaigns we run, so your performance sits against genuine peers. That shows whether a conversion rate is a real problem or normal for your category, which is usually the difference between fixing the right thing and the wrong one.
The measures of success are set before anything goes live, so nobody can reinterpret them afterwards to make a result look better than it was.
Agency ownership decides whether a strategy recommendation can be neutral. Most agencies recommend what they're built to deliver.
We’re majority owned by our Employee Trust, and there’s no holding group upstairs with volume commitments to hit. We have no stake in whether your budget goes to paid or organic, or to one channel over another, so whichever suits your objective is the one we’ll recommend.
That’s why “spend less here” is a conversation we can have.
Strategy gets talked about more than it gets defined. Here’s what clients ask us most about media strategy, planning and where to start.
A media strategy sets out which audiences you need to reach, what each channel is there to do, and how success will be measured. It sits above the media plan, which handles the detail of what runs, when, and at what cost.
A media strategy sets out which audiences you need to reach, what each channel is there to do, and how success will be measured. It sits above the media plan, which handles the detail of what runs, when, and at what cost.
Marketing strategy decides what you’re trying to change and whose behaviour needs to change. Media planning works out which channels deliver that and how the budget splits between them. Strategy answers why; planning answers where and when.
Possibly not. If the objective is clear and the channels are proven, go straight to planning. A strategy earns its place when performance has plateaued, when you’re entering a new market, or when nobody in the room can explain why the current mix looks the way it does.
A strategy engagement’s length depends on two things: how much usable data already exists and how many audiences are involved. The one part we won’t compress is the audience work, because everything else stands on it.
Tell us what you’re trying to grow. We’ll tell you which one it is, and whether we’re the right agency to fix it.
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