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For most of my career, marketing has been sold and bought in one of two ways. Either a flat retainer that has no real connection to results, or a fully performance based fee that puts an agency's income at the mercy of variables well outside their control. Neither has ever sat entirely comfortably with me, which is why we are building something different at Method and Worth. The problem with a straight day rate A day rate is honest and straightforward, and it will always be t

Most brand work still gets treated as a project with a start date and an end date. You do the strategy, you do the rollout, and then everyone moves on to the next thing until something clearly stops working. After twenty five years of watching that pattern play out, I think it is one of the more expensive habits in marketing. Marketing that stops learning stops working A brand is not a fixed asset. It sits inside a market that keeps moving, competitors that keep repositioning

Every brand I have ever worked with has had access to more data than it knows what to do with. Website analytics, campaign platforms, CRM reports, social insights, review data, competitor movements. The problem was never a shortage of information. It was knowing which signals actually mattered and having the discipline to let them change a decision. Data is not the same as direction A dashboard full of green metrics feels reassuring, but it rarely tells you what to do next. I

Over twenty five years in this industry, working across luxury marine, high end property, hospitality and leisure brands, I have watched marketing splinter into more specialisms than any one founder can reasonably hold together. SEO sits with one agency. Paid media sits with another. Social has its own team. PR sits somewhere else entirely. And in the middle of it all is a founder or marketing lead trying to make sense of whether any of it is actually pulling in the same dire

Ask a founder what their marketing is returning and you will usually get one of three answers. Some talk about reach or impressions. Some say things feel like they are working. And some, to their credit, admit they are not entirely sure. That last answer is more honest than it might sound. Most marketing runs without a proper financial framework. Not because founders do not care about return on investment, but because nobody has ever sat down with them and built one properly.

It's the thing I say most often in first conversations. And it's the thing that most reliably makes a founder pause. Your marketing problem is probably not a marketing problem. I don't say it to be contrary. I say it because after more than 24 years working with businesses across brand, digital, content and campaign strategy, I've seen the same pattern repeat so consistently that I'd be doing founders a disservice if I didn't name it early. What the problem usually looks like

There is a lot of noise around fractional marketing right now. More providers, more LinkedIn posts, more claims of transformation through part-time senior thinking. Which makes it harder, not easier, to understand what a fractional marketing director actually does and whether it is the right thing for your business. So here is an honest answer. The role in plain terms A fractional marketing director is a senior marketing professional who works with your business on a part-tim

Ask most founders what their marketing is actually returning and the honest answer is: they are not entirely sure. Here is what a proper financial baseline looks like, why most businesses operate without one, and what changes when it is in place.

Brand drift rarely announces itself. It starts with a missed deadline, a campaign that felt slightly off, a tone that shifted just enough to go unnoticed. By the time most founders spot it, it has been going on for longer than they think.

Most founders trying to fix their marketing are solving the wrong problem. More spend, more content, more channels — none of it sticks when something at the foundation is not right. Here is what is usually really going on.