Performance Advertising
Advertising,engineered.
Buying held to a claim about what would have happened otherwise.
Slide 1 of 6: Performance Advertising
The Performance & AI Company
Performance is not a channel. It is a standard of proof: every meaningful spend decision carries a claim about what would have happened otherwise, and that claim is testable.
We are a boutique. The people who pitch the work do the work, we take fewer clients than we could, and we are paid in fees rather than a share of your media. So the advice you get does not depend on how much you spend.
Solutions
Six capabilities, run as one engagement
Media, data, measurement and applied AI under one roof, because the handoffs between them are where most performance is lost.
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Performance Advertising
Buying held to a claim about what would have happened otherwise.
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Data & Audiences
First-party signal modelled into audiences you can actually act on.
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Measurement & Analytics
Experiments, mix modelling and attribution, run as one loop.
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AI Creative Studio
Images, video and versioning produced at platform scale, inside the brand rules.
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AI Analytics & Decision Systems
Dashboards that surface the three things that changed, not the four hundred that did not.
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Media Strategy
Where to spend, in what order, and what to stop doing.
Our Projects
With some businesses we go beyond the agency role
Two businesses we are part of as owners, not only as an agency. Living with them from the inside teaches things a case study cannot, and it is why we can be specific about what works.
The market we plan against
Three numbers that set the agenda
Not our figures; everybody's. Each is from a primary report, linked, and each changes what a sensible 2026 plan looks like.
$294.6bn
US digital ad revenue in 2025, up 13.9% with no Olympics, World Cup or election to inflate it.
15.2%
Retail media's forecast share of all worldwide ad investment by 2027, one pound in seven, spent inside somebody else's shop.
9.8%
Retail media growth in 2027 with Amazon excluded: the slowest since WARC began tracking the channel.
How we work
Two quarters to build the foundations. After that it moves much faster.
The sequence matters more than the tooling. We work through them in order, and we would rather not skip the first one: it is what makes the rest reliable.
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Diagnose the constraint
Two weeks inside the measurement setup, the spend split and the creative pipeline. The deliverable is a statement of what is actually limiting growth, and it is frequently not the thing the brief named.
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Build the evidence layer
Before we change the media, we make it possible to know whether the change worked. Clean tracking, a first holdout, and a measurement frame every dashboard reads from.
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Reallocate against proof
Move budget on the strength of causal estimates rather than platform reporting. This is where the uncomfortable recommendations appear, and where the money is.
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Compound it
Quarterly decisions, weekly reviews, and a test roadmap where each result feeds the next allocation. The advantage is cumulative, which is why the first two steps cannot be skipped.
Industries
The method travels. The constraints do not.
We learn a category's economics before touching its media plan, and we say so when a sector is new to us.
Work
Selected engagements
Client names withheld until each is cleared for publication. The shape of the work is accurate.
Insights
Where the growth actually was
US digital advertising grew 13.9% in 2025 without an Olympics, a World Cup or an election to inflate it. Underneath the total, the mix moved sharply, and search is no longer the largest line.
Year-on-year growth by format
Full year 2025, % change against 2024
- Social32.6%
- Digital video25.4%
- Commerce media18%
- Podcast17.6%
- Search11%
- Display9.8%
The market grew 13.9% overall. Everything below that line, search and display, lost share in a year with no Olympics, no World Cup and no election to distort it.
Source: IAB/PwC Internet Advertising Revenue Report, April 2026
Latest thinking
Perspectives
- Research
Everyone is using AI. Almost nobody is banking it.
Adoption is close to universal and impact is close to absent. The gap between the two is the most useful thing in marketing right now, because it tells you exactly where the work is.
- Research
Commerce media is growing up, which means it is slowing down
Retail media passes $200 billion globally in 2026. The interesting number is not the total; it is what the growth rate does once you take Amazon out of it.
- Research
Where the growth actually was in 2025
US digital advertising reached $294.6 billion, up 13.9%, in a year with no Olympics, no World Cup and no election. Underneath the total, the mix moved sharply.
Careers
Fewer people, further in
In a small team you work close together, and that goes both ways. You will own work that at a larger agency would be three levels above you, with someone alongside you rather than above.
Open rolesLet's build what's next.
Tell us what a good customer costs you today, and how confident you are in that number. That conversation goes somewhere useful within twenty minutes.
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