Letter No. 1 · July 2026
Why we keep the book small.
Every agency says clients get senior attention. Almost none can say it arithmetically. An agency with sixty accounts and eleven senior people is making a promise its calendar cannot cash, and everyone in the industry knows where that goes: juniors run the account, seniors run the pitch.
We keep the book small because that is roughly the number of accounts on which a small senior team can know everything: every live ad, every landing page test, every soft spot in the tracking. Past that, knowledge gets replaced by process, and process is what agencies sell you when they can no longer pay attention.
Staying small costs us money in fat months and protects clients in every month. We would rather turn away a fee than dilute the work. Scarcity is not the marketing here; arithmetic is.
Good Multiple
Letter No. 2 · July 2026
The ad is the strategy.
Paid social auctions no longer reward clever targeting; the platforms automated that advantage away years ago. What the auction rewards now is the advertisement itself: whether a real person stops, watches, and buys. Which means creative is not a deliverable on the media plan. Creative is the plan.
This changes how an account should be run. You do not need one beautiful campaign a quarter; you need a steady volume of distinct arguments for the product, tested against each other with rules for what lives and dies. Some of the best ads we have made were retired in seventy-two hours because well liked and selling are different careers.
When an agency shows you a media plan before it shows you angles, hooks, and scripts, it has told you what it thinks matters. Watch for that.
Good Multiple
Letter No. 3 · July 2026
What a charity should demand from its agency.
Fundraising is the hardest brief in advertising: the product is a moral claim, the deadline is often a holy month or a year-end window, and every wasted pound was given in trust by somebody. Yet charities routinely accept standards from agencies that a mid-sized shoe brand would fire on sight.
Demand three things. First, flat fees. An agency paid a percentage of donations has been handed an incentive problem no code of ethics fully survives; the major fundraising associations agree, and so do we. Second, real creative. Donors are people; the same craft that sells products is owed to causes, and more of it. Third, plain reporting: what was spent, what was raised, what was decided, weekly, in language a trustee can read.
Charities hold a standing place at this firm at a flat, reduced rate. We never take a percentage of donations. Not now, not ever.
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