What we have learned, written down.

Notes on running events, activations and campaigns in India — costs, timelines, what goes wrong, and what we would do differently. Written because clients keep asking the same questions, and the answers deserve better than a sales call.

• Audience Building

  The audience you build before you need it

  The cheapest campaign you will ever run is the one aimed at people who already know who you are. That audience takes months to build and about a week to wish you had.

  6 min read

• Google Ads

  Should you pay Google for your own name?

  Somebody types your company name into Google. You already rank first. So why is there an ad above it, and why are you paying for the click?

  6 min read

• Brand Activation

  How do you prove an activation worked?

  The event went well. Everyone says so. There are good photographs. Now finance wants to know what it returned, and nobody wrote down the one number that would have answered them.

  6 min read

• Performance Marketing

  Performance marketing cannot sell what nobody wants

  A performance campaign is a very good net. It is not a very good reason. If nobody wants the thing, a better net just proves it faster and more expensively.

  6 min read

• Branding

  The brand guideline nobody on your team has opened

  Somewhere in a shared drive is a PDF with your logo's exact clear space, in millimetres, on four different backgrounds. Nobody making tomorrow's banner has ever opened it.

  6 min read

• Google Ads

  The one Google Ads report almost nobody reads

  You chose the keywords. Google chose who actually saw the ad. The search terms report is the only place that shows the gap between the two — and the gap is usually where the budget goes.

  6 min read