Joe Carter, Strategic Agency Lead at brand tracking company Tracksuit, discusses how real-time brand tracking can revolutionize marketing strategies, improve agency-client collaboration, and drive long-term business growth.
We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a “beauty parade” or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth.
But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and toward a shared understanding of market reality.
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What gets measured gets managed. You know, it’s become almost a cliche.
But the more important part of that is measuring the right things.
Transcription (Edited):
Darren Woolley: Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners. If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing podcast, please like, review, or share this episode to help spread the wisdom from our guests each week.
We often discuss how the agency pitch process is, in many ways, where strategy goes to die. Too often, the process is reduced to a beauty parade or a race to the bottom on price, leaving little room for the deep, evidence-based strategic thinking that actually drives business growth. When agencies are forced to guess at brand health or rely on an outdated snapshot of consumer sentiment, the resulting strategy is often little more than a creative leap of faith.
But what if the pitch could be the place where strategy is actually born? By integrating real-time, longitudinal brand tracking into the process, we can move away from subjective debates and towards a shared understanding of market reality. Today, we’re exploring how consistent brand tracking research doesn’t just measure the past; it enables and empowers agencies to build strategies that are anchored in truth, allowing for smarter experimentation and a much clearer path to providing ROI. To help us understand the role of brand health data in the agency-client relationship, please welcome to the podcast the strategic agency lead at brand tracking company Tracksuit, Joe Carter. Welcome, Joe.
Joe Carter: Hi Darren. Great to be here. How’s things?
Darren Woolley: Very good. Now look, let’s get this out of the way. When we talk about Tracksuit, we’re not talking Adidas and Nike here, are we? Tracksuit is a brand tracking company, but what does that actually mean for marketers and their agencies?
Joe Carter: Yeah, good question. We do have an array of beautiful retro tracksuits as well, but that is purely merch. Tracksuit is always-on, radically affordable, and beautiful brand tracking for marketers and agencies to demonstrate the impact of brand investment over time. Typically, market research has been done at a point in time, delivered in a PDF report, and accessible only to the Unilevers and the P&Gs of the world. We wanted to lower the barrier to standardise it and make it accessible to everyone, deliver it in a dashboard so that everyone can access it at a price point and in an always-on fashion that makes sense for everyone. The company’s been going for about five years, I’ve been here for about a year and a half, and I love nerding out on all things brand every day.
Democratising Access to Shared Truth
Darren Woolley: What I was really interested in is the fact that often when you talk about brand tracking, you then immediately go to the marketer side. That’s where the brand manager and the brand reside. But of course, agencies have an important role in this, and I love that Tracksuit is very proactive in helping to make that accessible to both the agency and the marketer.
We run a lot of pitches, and when we run them, clients will always say to us that strategic thinking is so important, and yet so little time is often spent testing it or looking at strategy. When it is done, it’s often in quite a haphazard way because of this lack of shared knowledge or shared truth. That’s why I felt like pitching is where strategy goes to die. What’s your experience talking to agencies? What do they see as the empowerment that having access to this brand tracking data gives them?
Joe Carter: It’s been super interesting over the last 18 months. We’ve gone from a team of three or four in our agency partnerships team to a team of 12, which gives you an indication of how rapidly agencies are adopting Tracksuit and always-on brand tracking. We’ve been involved in the last 18 months—across the US, the UK, New Zealand, and Australia—in around seven or eight hundred pitches where we’ve delivered funnel metrics and brand perception.
Essentially, we just create a bit of a baseline and level the playing field for any strategist in the room to either create or evidence a narrative, or to approve or disprove a hypothesis. Ultimately, the premium that we’re paying for is the strategy; it is the very humanness behind the pitch. It’s been really enjoyable creating that more accessible layer of data because it shines a light on the strategist responding. I’ve experienced this on every side of the fence previously—client side, agency side, and publisher side—so it’s interesting being at a technology company that partners with media, comms, and digital strategists to inform their work.
Darren Woolley: Back in 2007, I went overseas after running Trinity P3 for seven years. I kept thinking that almost every pitch we were running was either creatively or media driven, and strategy was almost like the bit done in the background to present the work. In Amsterdam, I met a pitch consultant who said strategy workshops are much more valuable because you get the marketing team and agencies together to actually talk about strategy.
There’s not necessarily a “right” strategy; there’s good strategy and bad strategy, but there’s not “right” strategy. It’s solving a problem that doesn’t necessarily have only one solution. With creative or media recommendations, it very quickly becomes right or wrong based on subjective opinion—”I like that idea, so I like the agency that came up with it”. That’s incredibly subjective and doesn’t really go to the heart of a long-term relationship.
Joe Carter: Totally. It’s definitely not binary when it comes to strategy. I’ve always seen actual strategy as reducing things to their most simple. That’s why strategists are CMO whisperers; they take what’s often complex or fueled by bias and turn it into something rational and simple for the rest of the team to collaborate on.
I still think strategy is treated as expendable. WARC confirmed that towards the end of last year with their future strategy report, saying that 62% of strategists feel it’s expendable or baked in as a “gift with purchase”. My question is why? If that’s where the value is, why is that the case? Far too often we’re chasing outputs rather than outcomes, which is where strategy becomes a commodity because it’s a billable hour. We place such high value on clear strategic guidance, but we decide to whack it in as a line item.
Strategy and the “Black Box” Problem
Darren Woolley: It’s interesting because a long time ago, I did an analysis of agency fees and found that less than 1% of a marketer’s overall expenditure actually went to creativity and strategy. Agencies are comfortable charging on an hourly basis because it was something measurable. But while the technique for producing ideas can look linear, the actual execution of strategy and creativity is never linear.
Joe Carter: No, absolutely not. The solution becomes obvious once we’ve designed the right problem. I was reading about “Enshittification”—the decay of online platforms—and I wonder if that race to sameness could be said for strategy too. I don’t want to lose the craft of it. When you think about the tools we use today to shape strategy, does that lead to an over-reliance versus leaning into what makes great strategies great?
Darren Woolley: People struggle with strategy; some get strategy and planning mixed up. I asked a client once what their strategy was, and they said, “To be number one in category”. I had to explain that’s the objective; strategy is the way you’re going to get there. The strategic process allows you to work out what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do.
I love the fact that you’ve made Tracksuit available to agencies. We ran a tender last year where the client set a strategic brief. Two of the agencies presented terrific insights, and it wasn’t until afterward I realised they had both accessed Tracksuit data for that category. One problem for a marketer judging strategic capability is that agencies often sell it as a “black box”. Large network agencies have these proprietary solutions that exist in a box, and you’re not sure what data went in or how they got to the solution.
Joe Carter: I’m always curious about what’s in the black box. In school, my teachers would not let me mark my own homework, but we do it all the time in this industry. We define what success looks like and use in-platform reporting from the media platforms eating our lunch to say, “Here’s what these guys are saying”.
Democratising access to ingredients like brand health data levels the playing field. It places a premium on actual insights. Some of the smartest agencies and brand marketers are using brand tracking in diagnosis—to inform segmentation and positioning—rather than just as an evaluation tool to retrofit success afterward. Traditionally, it’s been used so far downstream that the pitch becomes all about comms. We use brand trackers as campaign trackers to justify impact, but the brand is influenced by a lot more than just campaigns.
Always-On Metrics and CFO Alignment
Darren Woolley: So much measurement in marketing is “rear-view mirror,” which is fine for justifying the past, but the real value is in projecting towards the future.
Joe Carter: Totally. I’m seeing the two most hired roles within agencies at the moment are “Head of Product” and “Head of Intelligence”. One to build the infrastructure and make sense of it, and the other to take disparate data points and turn them into something useful for the client. Agencies need to evolve, and the service offering is changing.
Darren Woolley: 15 years ago, brand tracking was only for the biggest companies and they paid a fortune. Now, challenger brands and startups can access that same technology, which helps them be more competitive. It also means indies can access the same data, which helps diversification of thinking.
Joe Carter: Democratising it means it isn’t gate-kept. Having that shared language for what success looks like from day dot is super useful. It allows brands to not just measure the things that are easy to measure.
Darren Woolley: There was always a gap inside organisations between marketers’ metrics and the business’s metrics. But on the financial side, there’s a growing recognition that there are correlations between brand equity and growth.
Joe Carter: “What gets measured gets managed”. For too long, we’ve easily been able to measure clicks, impressions, and ROAS—short-term indicators that are addictive. But does that excite a CFO? Probably not. We want to prove that great brands build great businesses. Every year for 20 years, Kantar’s BrandZ global brands have consistently outperformed the S&P 500. Brand outcomes translate into commercial outcomes.
We need a common language for growth. Are we talking profit margins? A decrease in customer acquisition costs? Marketers need that seat at the board table, and common language gives them a much louder voice.
Darren Woolley: Most brand tracking was traditionally done six-monthly or quarterly. But the idea of “always-on” data is important, because a CFO would struggle with having only one data point a year for the brand.
Joe Carter: Can you imagine having one commercial data point a year? You’d find out just before the end of the financial year how much money you made, but during the year—nothing. We have always-on indicators for everything else; we’ve just never really had it for brand. The market moves faster than that.
I’m working on a pitch in Australia right now where the category data is from 2023. Would you use sales data from three years ago to brief a sizable pitch? Always-on data just makes more sense.
Skin in the Game and Long-Term Investment
Darren Woolley: For years, agencies went from commission to hourly rates, and we’ve been advocates of performance or output-based pricing. But performance was often measured once a year. If you have a continuum of brand tracking data, you can do incremental performance payments.
Joe Carter: Some of the best agencies I work with make strategy hours “over the top” with brand tracking as a service. Success is being measured on outcomes rather than outputs. I’d love to see more agencies putting skin in the game. One indie partner said Tracksuit gives them the opportunity to pitch performance-based incentives based on awareness growth or shifts in perception. You’re putting income on the line to back the work and validating it through a platform.
Darren Woolley: The trouble is many deals were set up based on immediate revenue, which drives short-termism. Brand growth today impacts revenue in six months or even three years in some categories. Having something you can measure as regularly as sales makes it easier to build a financial model that rewards agencies for the value they contribute.
Joe Carter: The first thing you’re going to see is a movement in brand health; sales come off the back of growing brand. For those that don’t adopt this, it’s still a race to the bottom. The dollars we invest in brand actually enhance performance too—it makes conversion more effective.
Darren Woolley: The Bellwether report in the UK recently showed that despite a tightening economy, marketers are predicting budget growth next year. Finally, the message may have got through that investing when everything else is tightening pays off big when the market returns.
Joe Carter: Invest more in brand and you’ll gain more extra share of voice.
Darren Woolley: But you have to measure the right things. Vanity metrics don’t stack up at the board level. You need trend lines showing the relationship between revenue and investment. Short-termism often looks at revenue but ignores profit because the campaign often involves discounting. Growth can also be making more money out of every dollar earned.
Joe Carter: We are too far up the P&L often. Look at Ferrari; it took Enzo Ferrari 40 years to sell a car to Everyday Joes. He just made supercars for racing. That is the strategy of sacrifice. Today they sell 14,000 cars a year and 80% are repeat buyers.
Darren Woolley: Ferrari’s strategy was clear: perform well in Formula One, reinforce the mythology of hand-built cars, and drive margin. Clarity of strategic focus is often missing in marketing, comms, or media strategies.
Joe Carter: An agency needs to be oriented around creating a return on investment. In today’s world, that looks like senior advisory consultancy and good judgment. Executional elements might be automated, but the role of a strategist is innately human. We looked at every statement driver across 1,000 categories in Tracksuit, and the top driver for moving people from awareness to consideration was the statement: “It’s for people like me”. That is so human.
Darren Woolley: AI tools are fine for productivity. But making things faster and cheaper without making them more effective is still a race to the bottom.
Joe Carter, thank you so much for taking the time to having this chat today. I’ve really enjoyed it.
I do have a question for you before we finish up, and that is, you know, what’s your favourite brand, and do you regularly check out how it’s performing on Tracksuit?
