About
A boutique, on purpose
iStudios is small by design. The people who pitch the work do the work, the engagement has a principal on it, and we take on fewer clients than we could, because the alternative is the thing everybody complains about when they leave a network agency.
We started with an empty room and a short list of things we did not want to repeat. Most of what follows is that list, turned into a way of working.
Why the model matters more than the pitch
An agency paid a percentage of media spend has a structural reason not to discover that some of the spend is unnecessary. That is not a character flaw; it is arithmetic. Remove the incentive and the awkward finding becomes the product rather than the risk.
We work on retained fees and project fees. It makes some conversations shorter and it makes one particular conversation possible: the one where we tell a client to spend less.
How an engagement actually runs
A principal stays on the account for its life. There is no handover from the pitch team to a delivery team, because there is no delivery team to hand over to.
Work is planned in quarters and reviewed in weeks. Each quarter has a small number of decisions attached to it (spend more here, stop this, test that), and each decision has the evidence that would change it written down in advance.
What we will not do
We will not report a number we cannot defend. If a channel's performance rests on last-click attribution, we say so in the same sentence as the number.
We will not take an engagement we are not staffed for. Growing headcount to match a brief is how boutiques stop being boutiques.
We will not use a client's data to train anything outside that client's work.
Principles
Evidence before opinion
Every recommendation states what would change our mind. If nothing would, it is a preference, and we label it one.
Small teams, senior hands
Fewer people, further in. The person in the weekly call is the person in the account.
AI in the work, not on the slide
We use generative and agentic systems where they change the economics of production or analysis, and we are specific about where they do not.
Plain language
If a deliverable needs a glossary, it was written for the wrong reader.
The short version
We are a performance marketing and applied-AI partner for organisations that would rather have a defensible answer than a fast one. If that sounds slow: it is, for about two quarters. Then it is considerably faster than the alternative.
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