The Power of No
John Karl is a performance marketing veteran who spent most of his career at Catalyst, the specialist GroupM agency founded the same year as Google, and now leads growth at the independent agency Wpromote. He has watched the discipline evolve from pure SEO into a sprawl of channels, and his counsel has stayed consistent: focus beats spread. He is happy to tell an emerging brand no, that splitting a budget across six platforms will dilute it, and that growth comes from winning one or two channels first. Underneath sits a simple rule he applies to every client: ring-fence 10% for experimentation, because that is the only way to find real scale.
We were established as an SEO agency the same year Google was established.
John Karl is Senior Director, Growth at Wpromote, the independent digital marketing agency. He is a veteran of digital performance marketing with deep expertise across search, social, programmatic, e-commerce, and CTV, having spent the majority of his career at Catalyst, a specialist digital performance agency within WPP's GroupM network.
John spent most of his career at Catalyst, a digital performance agency established the same year as Google that grew from a pure SEO shop into a full-service digital performance marketing operation spanning both B2B and B2C. As Head of Client Development and Growth, he led conversations across all verticals and company sizes, drawing on GroupM's global footprint for larger global campaigns while maintaining the entrepreneurial spirit of a specialist agency. One of his proudest client relationships was National Geographic, where he drove subscriptions and revamped their online presence over five years before the brand was acquired by Disney.
His philosophy centres on the idea that complexity is rewarded by strategy. He has seen too many emerging brands dilute their media spend across five or six channels when they would be better served focusing on one or two, growing those, and then testing into new platforms from a position of strength. He is a vocal advocate for dedicating 10% of every media budget to pure experimentation with no expectations baked into forecasts, believing it is the only way to achieve meaningful scale. He has since brought that same approach to Wpromote, where he continues to focus on client growth.
Across his career, John has been at the forefront of cross-channel integration, starting with how SEO and paid search work together and extending into how social, programmatic, and e-commerce channels influence one another through the consumer journey. He pushes clients to think beyond the traditional funnel toward a bowtie model, where post-conversion loyalty and lifetime value receive as much strategic attention as awareness and acquisition. He is technology agnostic by principle, believing the right stack should be tailored to each brand rather than defaulting to a single partner, and he encourages his teams to listen to the people on the ground who are closest to what is working.
We are technology agnostic, and I don't say that lightly.
For the last 20 years, every couple of years, you hear SEO is dead. That's simply not the case. It really comes down to user experience and aligning what your content is and how it's optimised to best meet consumer needs. That SEO component to e-commerce is even more critical today than it ever has been.
Every couple of years for two decades, John has heard that SEO is finished. He does not buy it. SEO, in his telling, is really about user experience, about matching content to what people are searching for, and that has only grown more important as commerce moved online. He points to a fashion brand selling handbags on Amazon that was not getting results; once the team rebuilt its product-page strategy to align with how the sponsored ads were structured, return on investment rose three and a half times. Too many brands and agencies, he argues, treat SEO and product-page optimisation as an afterthought rather than the high-leverage channel it remains.
Complexity is rewarded by strategy. Get the right people at the table to put the right plan together. Create the swim lanes so everyone knows where they're operating. Creative, your media agency, your social team knows what your search team is doing. Take what is highly complex and put it into a linear plan.
Omni-channel marketing, John says, is genuinely hard: e-commerce, retail, social shopping and direct-to-consumer all at once, with rivals bidding on the same keywords and every chance to cannibalise your own message. His answer is not to simplify the work but to plan it. Get the right people around the table, draw clear swim lanes so the creative, media, social and search teams each know what the others are doing, and turn something highly complex into a linear plan. Complexity, in his phrase, is rewarded by strategy. The agencies that do this well are the ones that turn fragmentation into an advantage rather than a liability.
We highly recommend any brand apply approximately 10% of their budget solely to experimentation. It's the only way to achieve meaningful scale. You can't be afraid of risk and you can't be afraid to fail. Just fail fast. Make sure the plan always results in learnings. That's powerful whether it works or doesn't work.
John gives every client the same instruction: ring-fence roughly ten per cent of the media budget purely for experimentation, with no return baked into the forecast. It is, he argues, the only route to meaningful scale, because growth depends on finding what works and what does not, and that means tolerating risk and failing fast. The discipline is that every test must produce a learning, whether it succeeds or not. At Catalyst the habit was formalised: every quarterly business review proposed a fresh slate of test-and-learn opportunities, so the question was never what to try next. A brand that stops experimenting, in his view, is a brand going stale.
I don't really see the traditional funnel existing as much today. It's almost more of a bowtie, where the entire post-conversion goes into repeat purchase and lifetime value and building loyalty. That's where the pot of gold is. Too often we're thinking about getting word out there and not about how much value we're providing post-purchase.
The traditional marketing funnel, John argues, barely describes how buying works now. He prefers a bowtie: the funnel narrows to the conversion at the centre, then widens again into everything that happens after the sale, repeat purchase, lifetime value, loyalty. Most marketing attention, and most budget, still clusters before the sale, on getting the word out. The real prize, he says, sits on the other side, in the value a brand delivers post-purchase and the first-party data and trust that come with it. Win the repeat customer, and you have the thing every brand is chasing.
Stay close to the conversation.
New leaders and insights. No noise.
Thanks, you're subscribed.
Look out for the next edition in your inbox.