Two problems I could not stop seeing.

I spent most of my career in house, running performance marketing and analytics inside large consumer businesses, the last of them as SVP of performance marketing and analytics, managing managers and teams.

Two things happened often enough that they stopped being anecdotes.

The first was that good work would not move. I would build a case, substantiate it, and present it, and the answer was rarely a disagreement with the analysis. It was usually some version of "great idea, maybe next year." Do that for enough years running and you stop believing that being right is the hard part.

The second was more specific, and more fixable. Companies would fix on the visible thing, the campaign, the video, the app, and put real money behind it with none of the infrastructure underneath to say whether any of it worked. I watched serious budget go out against numbers nobody had checked. And when we went outside for help, the proposals came back priced high against what actually came back, with several layers of people standing between the work and whoever was doing it.

The space between those two problems is what Two-Dot Vision is.

What you get is me

No account layer, no junior team learning on your budget, no engagement you cannot picture before it starts. The person who scopes the work is the person who does the work. If you cannot repeat back to someone else what I told you, I have not done the job.

Narrow subject, wide range

Paid media, test design, measurement. Not brand, not creative, not a full service anything. But inside that, I work at whatever altitude the problem actually sits at. Some engagements are a room, a whiteboard and a decision nobody has been able to make. Some are a test plan. Some are me in the ad account on a Sunday. What flexes is the altitude, not the subject, and the honest answer to which of those you need is often not the one you arrived with.

How far that goes

Years ago I was running performance marketing for a consumer app launch built around athletes and influencers. Getting the contracted content out of one of the athletes we had signed meant two of us driving to his house at half past eleven on a Tuesday night, after he had finished his own day, and shooting it ourselves in his home gym with no crew and no producer. Those ads went on to drive more installs than anything else we ran for that product.

I am a media and numbers person. That is the work I am actually good at. But the shoot was the thing standing between the plan and the result, so we went and did the shoot. That is more or less the whole operating principle.

Measurement first, and I mean before the recommendation

Before I will tell you what to do, I want to know that what you are counting is real. It is unglamorous work and it is where nearly all of the surprises live. It is also why the people I work with can explain to someone else what they are getting for their money. That should not be a distinguishing feature in this industry. It is.

Regulated categories

Insurance especially, where the platforms restrict what you are allowed to target and measure and most of the usual shortcuts are not available to you. Constraints like that tend to reward whoever planned for them.

The name

People ask. There is a real answer, it is a play on words, and it comes from a lyric. That is all you are getting. Work it out and I will confirm it.