Most strategy decks die in a drawer because they were built backward: channels first, business second. I start from the other end. Before anyone says Meta or programmatic or connected TV, I want your contribution margin, your payback window, your retention curve, and the number your CFO actually watches. The media plan is downstream of that math or it is decoration.
This is the discipline I used to build a paid digital practice from under one million dollars to more than fifty million in annual client spend, running as many as 3,400 campaigns at once across nearly every major vertical and 56 countries. What scale teaches is that every category has its own physics and the planning questions never change. What does a customer contribute? How long can you wait to be paid back? What happens to the whole system when one channel is cut? The answer to that last one is almost never what the spreadsheet says, which is why strategy here includes designing the tests that find out.
A strategy engagement with me is a series of working sessions on your real numbers. We interrogate the unit economics until the media budget stops being a percentage someone inherited and becomes a number derived from margin. We map demand honestly, including the demand you cannot buy because a competitor owns it or a season withholds it. We set the measurement plan before the media plan, because deciding how you will know it worked is harder and more valuable than deciding where to run it. The deliverable is an operating plan with numbers you will be judged on, and so will I.
What you will not get: a channel recommendation dressed as a strategy, a persona document with stock photos, or hedge language engineered so nobody can be wrong later. Senior work means someone puts their name on a forecast. I have been doing that for two decades, in rooms from startup boards to the largest advertisers in the country, and the forecasts that survive are the ones built from the business math up.
If your plan cannot answer the question "what is this worth in margin," that is the first conversation, and it starts at the contact form.
Start with the margin math
One working session against your real unit economics usually redraws the plan.
Start the conversationQuick answers
Where does a digital strategy engagement start?
With the business math: contribution margin, the payback window, the retention curve, and the number your CFO watches. Channels get chosen after that, and the media budget becomes a number derived from margin.
When should the measurement plan be written?
Before the media plan. Deciding how you will know the work succeeded, including the tests that show what happens when a channel is cut, shapes where the money goes.
What does a strategy engagement deliver?
An operating plan with forecasts and the numbers you will be judged on, built from your unit economics. I put my name on those forecasts too.
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