Paid media has a trust problem, and it did not arrive overnight. It has been earned slowly through misaligned incentives, selective reporting, and a growing distance between what platforms reward and what businesses actually need. The complaints surfacing in public forums are not noise or bitterness. They are patterns, repeated often enough to be taken seriously.

This is not a call to burn the agency model down. It is a statement of what paid media should look like when it is anchored to commercial reality rather than presentation.

We report on profit, not performance theatre

Paid media exists to generate profitable growth, not to produce attractive dashboards. Any reporting framework that does not account for the full cost of delivery is incomplete by definition.

Gross ROAS is easy to sell and easy to defend, but it ignores the realities of agency fees, management overheads, and the operational cost of fulfilment. When those are removed from the conversation, performance looks healthier than it truly is.

We report on net ROAS as standard, calculated after media spend and agency fees, because profitability is the only honest measure of whether paid media is working. It is a harder metric to stand behind and it invites scrutiny, which is precisely the point.

We separate growth from recycling

One of the quiet distortions in paid media reporting is the inclusion of existing customers in prospecting performance. Retargeting is effective and often necessary, but it is not growth, and treating it as such blurs the line between demand creation and demand capture.

Paid media should be accountable for generating new customers, not for repeatedly harvesting those who already exist in a database.

This is why we advocate server-side tracking as a foundation rather than an optional upgrade. It allows us to accurately distinguish between new and existing customers and to actively exclude existing customers from prospecting campaigns, ensuring that performance reflects genuine market expansion rather than attribution sleight of hand.

We optimise for commercial outcomes, not platform approval

Advertising platforms reward activity, volume, and compliance with their internal optimisation signals. Businesses require revenue quality, a qualified pipeline, and incremental growth.

When campaigns are optimised for clicks and impressions rather than revenue contribution, the gap between reported success and lived reality widens quickly. Activity increases while impact stalls.

Our optimisation decisions are driven by commercial outcomes, not by platform scorecards. Campaigns that perform well on platform metrics but fail to move the business forward are not protected by their apparent efficiency. They are challenged, reshaped, or stopped.

We believe transparency is non-negotiable

An agency that restricts access to advertising accounts is not protecting intellectual property. It is creating dependency.

Clients should have full visibility of their data, their spend, and their performance at all times. Ownership of accounts should sit unequivocally with the client, not the supplier.

We provide unrestricted access as standard and use Swydo to report performance in a way that is clear, structured, and easy to interrogate without drowning decision makers in unnecessary detail. Transparency is not a risk when the work stands up to scrutiny.

We value execution over commentary

Meetings are not progress, and reporting is not action. Excessive commentary often fills the space where decisive execution should live.

Paid media works best when testing cycles are short, decisions are clear, and accountability is understood. Meetings exist to remove obstacles and align priorities, not to narrate dashboards that nobody intends to act on.

We are biased toward action because momentum is more valuable than explanation.

We do not outsource experience

The quality of paid media outcomes is directly correlated with the experience of the people making decisions. This is often obscured by layered team structures where senior figures sell the work and junior teams execute it.

SearchUp is made up of three directors who have more than fifteen years of experience in digital marketing. That experience reduces wasted spend, shortens learning curves, and prevents avoidable mistakes that cost clients money long before they show up in reports.

Experience is not a badge. It is a risk reduction mechanism.

We attach accountability to outcomes

When responsibility is diffuse, performance becomes abstract. When nobody owns the result, failure becomes contextual rather than corrective.

We assign clear accountability tied to commercial outcomes rather than activity metrics. If something does not work, it is owned, addressed, or stopped. Accountability is not punitive. It is clarifying.

This is not a differentiator - we think this should be a baseline 

None of these principles are radical. They are what paid media should look like when incentives are aligned and outcomes matter.

The reason they feel distinctive is because the market has drifted toward optimisation theatre, where performance is narrated rather than delivered and trust is replaced by complexity.

This manifesto is not loud because it does not need to be. The numbers either hold up or they do not, everything else is noise.

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