By – Graeme Stiles – CEO at Algorithm
In a commoditised world, the only real differentiators are strategic clarity, proven systems, and real partnership. And those don’t get built overnight.
Lately, there’s been a flurry of announcements about new ventures entering the performance marketing space with some coming from big agency pedigrees, repositioning themselves with new names and narratives and positioning themselves as focused, specialist, and performance-led.
It’s no surprise. The market has shifted. Brands want accountability. They want measurable impact. And they’re rightly sceptical of bloated structures, generalist teams, and flashy creds with little depth.
But while the headlines may have changed, the hard part hasn’t.
Performance Marketing is Not a Pivot - It’s a Discipline
MIt’s easy to talk about performance. It’s hard to build the systems, teams, and thinking that actually deliver it.
What most don’t see is how long it takes to do this well. Years of refining processes. Years of hiring (and keeping) the right specialists. Years of building proprietary tools and creating operational rigour. And underneath it all - a business model built not around hours or outputs, but around outcomes.
In performance, there’s nowhere to hide. You can’t pitch your way out of poor results. Every click, every conversion, every customer journey leaves a trail. And it all points to whether your team is built to deliver or not.
You Don’t Build Depth Overnight
At Algorithm, we didn’t stumble into this model. We’ve spent nearly a decade obsessing over how to make performance marketing more strategic, more integrated, and more valuable to our clients. That means deep technical expertise across all performance disciplines. But it also means something more important: the structure and culture to connect these pieces into a single, coherent strategy.
This is where many new players will struggle. Because performance is not just about talent. It’s about orchestration. And orchestration only works when you’ve built the mechanisms, the rituals, and the discipline to make it repeatable, at scale.
Extreme Partnership: What Makes It Work
We’ve built our business on what we call Extreme Partnership. It’s more than a value. It’s a model. One that demands shared goals, mutual accountability, and a willingness to challenge each other - client and partner alike - in pursuit of what’s best.
In a space where services can be commoditised and platforms can be automated, relationship becomes the multiplier. But not relationship in the soft, superficial sense. We mean relationship built on strategic clarity, operational transparency, and commercial alignment. When you work this way, you stop being a service provider. You become a growth partner.
And that’s the part you can’t fake.
Not Just Delivering - But Belonging
A major inspiration for how we work came from an unlikely source: the restaurant world. In Unreasonable Hospitality, Will Guidara talks about the difference between simply serving someone and making them feel like they belong. That idea stuck with us - because we believe the best performance marketing doesn’t just happen behind dashboards. It happens when you’re in the room, at the table, helping your clients make difficult calls and unlock meaningful growth.
I remember sitting in a client’s boardroom as they debated a complete repositioning of their business. We weren’t there to optimise a media plan. We were there to help them rethink how they speak to their customers. That’s the shift. That’s the seat you want to earn - and it only comes when you’ve moved beyond vendor to become a trusted advisor.
Extreme partnership isn’t about doing more. It’s about going deeper. It’s about helping clients navigate ambiguity, ask better questions, and make braver decisions. And when you show up like that consistently, you stop being another agency. You become part of the business.
AI is a massive Threat (If you are average or not strategic)
This isn’t negative It’s the Catalyst to real change.
AI is not just another tool in the stack - it’s a seismic shift that’s already changing the performance marketing landscape. From media planning and forecasting to content creation and reporting, AI is automating tasks that used to take hours, sometimes days. It’s speeding up workflows, reducing production time, and making it easier than ever to execute at scale.
But here’s the truth no one wants to admit: it’s now easier than ever to deliver average work.
With a few prompts and the right automation layers, even a junior team can produce outputs that, on the surface, look impressive. Well-designed dashboards, polished copy, neat strategy decks - it’s all accessible.
And that’s the problem. The signal is getting drowned in the noise.
The real challenge now is not execution - it’s discernment. It’s knowing what actually matters. It’s being able to cut through the output and find the insight. To take what AI can produce and layer in human judgment, experience, and commercial thinking to make it truly valuable.
Because performance marketing is no longer about executing tactics in isolation. That game is over. AI has commoditised the baseline. The barrier to entry is lower, but the bar for impact is higher.
The difference now comes down to depth.
True performance partners don’t just plug in tools. They bring decades of subject matter expertise, commercial acumen, and strategic discipline - and combine that with AI to unlock something far more powerful. They know when to trust the data and when to challenge it. They know which levers to pull, when to push back, and how to architect a strategy that drives long-term value - not just short-term wins.
That’s the difference between looking good and being good.
In this new world, anyone can talk the talk. But not everyone has the depth to deliver. And as AI continues to evolve, that depth - that ability to interpret, challenge, guide, and lead - will become the only real differentiator.
This Isn’t a Trend. It’s a Test.
The modern CMO must move beyond vanity metrics. By implementing advanced tracking, clear ROI mAI is changing everything. It’s forcing the entire marketing ecosystem to confront a hard truth: being OK at everything is no longer enough. For years, big multi-service agencies could hide behind scale, reputation, and generalist delivery. That’s over. AI will eat that space alive.
We’re now seeing a wave of players repositioning themselves as “specialist agencies”. But the risk for clients is real. Because this space is unforgiving. You can’t spin up a few AI tools and a performance tagline and expect to deliver impact.
Performance takes more than automation. It takes a true methodology, baked into the DNA of your business. It takes a data-first mentality, where insights lead strategy - not the other way around. It takes a dedicated data team building out models, interrogating signals, and translating noise into action. It takes subject matter experts who’ve spent years on platforms, not just reading about them. It takes deep tech integration and platform partnerships earned through execution, not marketing.
And most of all, it takes Extreme Partnership - the kind we’ve lived and breathed in the Algorithm Kitchen and our Front of House team for nearly a decade. Like a world-class restaurant, we’ve designed every part of our operation to deliver more than service. We deliver strategic hospitality. Precision in the back of house. Empathy and clarity in the front. Always aligned. Always accountable. Always in pursuit of something bigger than the brief.
If you’re ready to go beyond performance talk and build with true strategic depth, let’s talk
Graeme Stiles – CEO at Algorithm
