Award-winning craft, commercially invisible.McLaren race weekends.Coca-Cola global briefings.LadBible at 100M+.America's Cup broadcast.Award-winning craft, commercially invisible.McLaren race weekends.Coca-Cola global briefings.LadBible at 100M+.America's Cup broadcast.
Strategy comes before production.They all started with why.The biggest brands on earth.Everyone else was guessing.No commercial outcome to show for most of it.Strategy comes before production.They all started with why.The biggest brands on earth.Everyone else was guessing.No commercial outcome to show for most of it.
I had the metrics.I was missing the
mission.
My own career is the thesis: award-winning work for the biggest brands on earth - and no commercial outcome to show for most of it.
Grateful for the experience - and the painful lessons it taught me.
Twenty years in the best rooms in the business.One expensive lesson.
I spent two decades making video at the very top end. McLaren race weekends, embedded with the team where milliseconds and millions ride on the same lap. Coca-Cola global briefings, where the brief travels to a hundred markets before a frame is shot. LadBible through its scale phase, publishing into an audience of 100M+. America's Cup broadcast, sending one race around the world live.
The craft was never the problem. The work won awards. It was beautifully shot, expensively produced, technically flawless. And I watched most of it achieve almost nothing commercially — gorgeous content that disappeared the week it shipped.
It took me years to see why. The rooms were full of talent and budget and taste, and almost no one could answer the one question that mattered: why are we making this, and who is it supposed to move? The strategy step kept getting skipped, because production is the part that feels like progress.
Everyone else was guessing. Expensive, well-produced, beautifully shot guessing.
I'm grateful for those rooms — they're where I learned the craft and earned the right to an opinion. But I'm ruthless about what they taught me. The guessing wasn't a budget problem or a talent problem. It was a strategy problem. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
FounderAdam Birley
Big brands can absorb a wasted video budget. A 20-person firm cannot.
That single sentence rewrote who I work with. A global brand can write off a film that lands on no one — it's a rounding error. For an established-but-nimble company, the same wasted spend is a quarter of the year gone. So now I work exclusively with the committed middle: the businesses where strategy is not a luxury, it's the difference between content that compounds and content that quietly vanishes.
Award-winning work.Commercially invisible.
I always assumed the big brands had it all figured out. They didn't. The same patterns kept emerging.
Goals
Don't try and fix the wrong problem. I spent 18 months building a YouTube channel to attract new customers. The business didn't need new customers. Its problem was keeping hold of the ones it already had.
FOMO
Don't copy what you don't actually need. Viral trends are tempting. They often seem the obvious tactic. But just because it feels like everyone else is doing it, that doesn't mean it's right for you.
Distribution
Know where it's going right from the start. Videos perform best when they're designed to work on the channel they're published to. All too often this only gets thought about after production; when it's too late.
Magpies
Shiny Object Syndrome is real. You're under pressure to impress - your client, your CEO, your new team. Super slo-mo video art dazzles; polished podcasts excite; AI-creations wow. But are they right for you?
Metrics
All anyone cares about is views. Vanity metrics may make you feel good, but 100 ICPs watching your whole video then clicking the link is worth more than 10,000 random viewers watching 10 seconds then leaving.
Targeting
Know your audience; make it for them. The videos you're making are for your audience; not you. Who they are, where they hang out, what they consume and why - ignore these and you've failed before you've begun.
The Brands
The rooms I've been in.
Two decades of work for the biggest brands on earth.
Established-but-nimble B2B companies — roughly 10 to 40 people — with a genuine mission and the budget to fund both strategy and execution. Big enough to have something real to say. Small enough that the right strategy changes the trajectory.
Who I don't
Two honest no's
Not big corporates with structural content problems — that's an org chart fix, not a strategy one. And not cash-strapped solopreneurs — without budget to fund execution, even the right strategy stays on the page. The honest no is part of the work.
Stop guessing.Start with why.
If you're in the committed middle, I'd like to hear what you're trying to move. Book a free 30-minute intro call.