Ten years of
scar tissue, applied.
Most performance accounts I audit have the same disease: nobody agreed what winning means. So the agency optimises for what's easy to show — clicks, CPMs, 'engagement' — while the business quietly wonders why revenue is flat. The first thing we do on any account is force one uncomfortable conversation: what is a customer worth, and what will we pay to get one? Everything else is derived from that.
The second disease is treating brand and performance as enemies. Cold audiences convert badly for brands nobody recognises — so pure performance shops just buy more traffic, and CACs climb every quarter. We run them as one system: brand work makes the clicks cheaper; performance work makes the brand pay. That's not philosophy, it's arithmetic you can watch in the dashboard.