ВЫПУСК / Issue 11
Million Digital Media
// Waterlooville · Hampshire · MMXVIII —
// AGITPROP FOR THE PERFORMANCE AGENCY //

Marketing
at the millionth
impression.

Million is a Waterlooville performance agency running paid acquisition programmes at the volumes where the unit economics actually matter. Twenty-two operators. Eleven engagements. £38m+ in annualised spend across the roster.

EST.
2018 · PO8
OPERATORS
22 in-house
ACTIVE ENGAGEMENTS
11
ANNUALISED SPEND
£38m+/yr
№ 01MANIFESTO / FOUR CLAUSES

Four clauses,
kept since 2018.

The operating discipline of the firm, set down when it was founded and unchanged for eight years. Hire against. Refer against. Charge against.

CLAUSE01

The unit is the iteration.

Not the campaign. Not the launch. Not the quarter. The unit of work at this firm is the iteration — measured in days, shipped on a Friday, reviewed on a Monday. The cadence is the deliverable.

CLAUSE02

One operator per engagement.

One named principal at the top of every email thread. No account-management layer. No pods. The person who designs the programme is the person who ships it.

CLAUSE03

The runbook is the asset.

Every process this firm builds is documented in your tools, not ours. The four-page operating runbook handed at the end of phase two is the asset we consider our actual deliverable.

CLAUSE04

Bill against unit economics.

If we are not improving the unit economics quarter-on-quarter, you should not be paying us. The retainer is front-loaded; the math is set up so we are worse off if we slow-walk.

№ 02PROGRAMMES / FIVE MODULES

Five programmes.
One operating stack.

No "starting from" pricing. No "contact for quote." Each programme has a floor, a minimum term, and a named principal at the top of every brief.

01

Paid acquisition

Meta, Google, TikTok, second-tier channels. Account architecture, weekly creative testing roster, monthly performance review. Operated by a single named principal — not a pod, not a pyramid.

£14k / mo
6-month minimum
30-day clean break
02

Creative operations

Static, motion, UGC. The pipeline that feeds the paid programme. Three creative leads in-house. Briefs written by the same operators who run the spend.

£9k / mo
Runs alongside paid
50–80 statics / mo
03

Lifecycle & CRM

Email, SMS, on-site. Mid-funnel work where 60% of mature D2C programmes make their money. Direct ESP access. Klaviyo, Attentive, Iterable, Customer.io, Postscript.

£7k / mo
3-month minimum
04

Analytics build

GA4, server-side tagging via Stape, CAPI alternatives, attribution modelling, weekly board dashboards. 6-week build sprint + ongoing care-and-feeding.

£22k flat
+ £3.5k / mo maintenance
05

Fractional growth direction

For founders between full-time CMO and single agency contract. Sits on weekly leadership call, owns marketing P&L, runs vendor stack. 9–14 month engagements.

£15k / mo
9-month minimum
№ 03THESIS / FROM THE OPERATING BRIEF

The programmes that compound are the programmes that are operated.

Most agencies are organised around campaigns. We are organised around operations.

A campaign starts and stops. An operation runs every week, on a published cadence, for as long as it continues to earn its keep. We staff for the second model; the contract is built that way on purpose.

"The cadence is the deliverable. Everything else — the creative, the dashboards, the runbook — is downstream of the discipline to ship on the same day every week for two years."
— FROM THE OPERATING BRIEF · 2018, REVISED 2024
№ 04REACH / OPERATING NUMBERS

The operating numbers,
plain.

A snapshot of the active roster, as of this issue. The numbers we hire and price against — and the numbers any client should be allowed to ask about on the first call.

Annualised spend managed
£38m+

Across the eleven active engagements. Smallest is £14k/mo; largest is £640k/mo.

Creative drops, 2025
2,840

Statics, motion, UGC. Roughly 55 per week across the operating team.

Average client tenure
31 mo

On the active roster. Programmes that don't earn their keep don't see month nine.

Median CAC reduction, yr 1
−28%

Versus the benchmark inherited at engagement start. Outliers are programmes where we rebuilt the analytics layer first.

№ 05THE FIRM / IN PARTICULARS

Twenty-two operators,
one office, Hampshire.

Million Digital Media was founded in 2018 by three operators who had spent the prior decade running paid programmes for venture-backed D2C brands. We have always been small on purpose, always been in Hampshire, and always charged for the discipline of the cadence rather than the bill of hours.

The firm is twenty-two people on the Highcroft Industrial Estate, twenty minutes from Portsmouth and ninety from London. We have never opened a satellite office and have no plans to.

The roster is eleven active engagements. We take new work in monthly cohorts of two — meaning we have, at most, two clients in onboarding at any given moment. That cadence is what allows us to operate the way the four clauses say we do.

The clients we keep tend to be founder-led businesses between £4m and £40m, mostly D2C or digital-first retail, with at least one senior operator on the leadership team who can read the analytics with us in the room. We say no to three quarters of inbound — usually because the fit is wrong, occasionally because we are simply full.

The firm at a glance

established
2018 · Waterlooville
operators
22 · in-house
active roster
11 engagements
avg. tenure
31 months
spend managed
£38m+ / yr
floor
£14k / mo
min. term
6 months
sectors
D2C · retail · sub.
№ 06CONTACT / BEGIN

Tell us about the programme you want to scale.

A short paragraph is enough. If it is a fit, we reply within two business days, in writing, with a sensible first conversation. If it isn't a fit, we tell you and pass you on to the best firm we know for the work.

// WRITE TO THE PRINCIPAL DIRECT
daniel.osei@milliondigitalmedia.com
// OFFICE · HAMPSHIRE

Million Digital Media

Unit 29, Highcroft Industrial Estate

Enterprise Road

Waterlooville PO8 0BT, England