Cross-channel integration is not a tactic. It is how performance compounds.

Catalyst is twenty-five years old. We were established as an SEO agency the year Google was established, and the evolution over those twenty-five years to become the full digital performance marketing agency we are today has been substantial. We span B2B and B2C, covering programmatic, search, social, CTV, and e-commerce. From an execution standpoint we draw on the GroupM footprint for larger global campaigns. The single thread through the whole period has been cross-channel integration. We were on the forefront of that early. Starting in SEO and then watching paid search arrive, the question was always how the channels work together rather than how each performs in isolation. When social arrived, the same question. When a consumer interacts with an ad, does it matter that they saw it on social before they saw it in search? That analytical posture on what the consumer experience really looks like has held its value as the industry has become more performance-oriented.

Every couple of years for the last twenty years, you hear SEO is dead. It is simply not the case. It comes down to user experience and aligning what your content is and how it's optimised to best meet what the consumer is looking for. In e-commerce, the product detail page and the SEO component of it is more critical now than it has ever been, because the consumer is looking for very specific alignment between what they want and what the brand is putting into the marketplace. We had a fashion client with handbags targeted at women, working on Amazon and not getting the results they expected. We took apart their naming conventions, redesigned the PDP strategy to match what they were doing on sponsored ads, and saw a 3.5x increase in their ROI from the optimisation alone. Too many brands and agencies skip past SEO and PDP optimisation as a serious lever of media. It earns the investment.

The field of play is much smaller. That has a direct effect on media cost, which is much higher than B2C. You have to be smart about how you spend. You also have to understand who your target audience genuinely is, because B2B has more influencer-style stakeholders inside a buying decision than B2C does, and those influencers are not always the decision-maker. So you're messaging influencers in the hope that they shape the decision, while also reaching the decision-maker directly. From a platform perspective, LinkedIn is the obvious one, but more buyers are also being reached through social commerce environments and other places where business audiences spend time.

It's closer to a bowtie. The traditional funnel narrows toward conversion and stops. The bowtie keeps going on the other side, into the post-purchase work that builds lifetime value: loyalty, repeat purchase, the brand trust that drives the next order. That's the pot of gold. First-party data sits there. It applies in both B2B and B2C. Marketing teams still spend too much of their thinking on the awareness side and too little on the value they create after the sale. Where we see the strongest results in CPG, for instance, we're building a direct-to-consumer environment while also simplifying the retailer-network execution, capturing first-party data, and feeding that back into off-site media. Complexity rewards strategy.

Harder. I feel for the agency teams on this. Brands are constantly asking to see new cuts of the data because the C-suite now wants this view, this benchmark. Our job as specialists is to educate the brand stakeholders, and increasingly the C-suite, on what they should be looking at. You can also fall into paralysis from analysis. Aligning to a small number of clear KPRs, hard and soft, will go a long way. The hard metrics, ROAS, conversion, reach, frequency, give you the direction. The soft metrics tell you what the hard numbers don't. Are consumers spending time engaging with the message, or are they clicking through and you're spending too much trying to reach them in the first place? Both matter. The cookie-less future is going to make this harder before it gets easier; the question is no longer engagements and likes, it's overall brand performance against the spend.

We build cross-channel analytics environments for our brands that pull every retail site, every social and search channel, into one view, and drill down to keyword-level performance. The point is information you can manipulate, not information you can only watch. That is what allows the right modelling work to happen on top of it. None of this stands still.

We recommend approximately ten percent of any brand's budget is set aside solely for experimentation. It's part of the programme; it isn't an afterthought. The reason is that experimentation is the only way to achieve meaningful scale. You can't grow without finding what's working and what isn't, and you can't find that without taking risk. Fail fast. The plan needs to produce learnings whether it works or doesn't. It is a fundamental part of media planning; I don't see a way around it.

Every account has a group director who is looking at where the brand is going and what alpha and beta opportunities are available. Through GroupM and our technology partnerships we are often first in market on those opportunities. At every quarterly business review the team brings a quarter's worth of experiments to the table. Nobody is sitting at the meeting wondering what to try.

We say internally that Catalyst has the spirit of small but the power to scale. We are not the biggest agency. We're a niche, specialist agency that only handles digital performance marketing, which sets us apart within the WPP and GroupM structure. We've maintained an entrepreneurial spirit. We are not chasing only the Fortune 50. We're interested in brands willing to give us a seat at the table and to bring their plans to life with us, rather than handing us a finished plan to execute.

Smaller brands are more open to experimentation. They are not as afraid of failing as long as the investment in what's proven is also there. That's how they compete with bigger brands. They have to find their own swim lane. The trade-off is they often arrive with two million dollars saying they want to be in programmatic, search, SEO, and five social platforms. You never want to say no to a brand. I find myself always saying no. You're diluting the spend. You will not have the impact of focusing on one or two channels, growing those, getting the return on your spend, then scaling into other platforms. That is one of the bigger mistakes emerging brands make.

National Geographic. We worked with them for five years on subscription growth and online presence before Disney acquired the broader portfolio. An iconic brand to work on.