Copyright Forbes
Elisa Hauser is the Founding Director of Client Success at TubeScience, helping brands turn strategy into scalable creative & media. Enterprise marketing teams rarely fail because of bad ideas. They fail because the strategy never survives the handoff. A bold vision gets signed off on in the boardroom, but then it loses fidelity as it moves through briefs, calendars and channels—disconnected from funnel dynamics, customer insights and the weekly reality of execution. In a market where CFOs scrutinize every dollar, that gap is expensive. My agency has spent years building an operating model to close it. The premise is simple: Don’t stop at defining strategy—wire it into how work gets done. C-suite goals should cascade into weekly testing cycles so every ad, asset and allocation connects to a measurable business outcome. Decks Plus Operating Models (Not Either/Or) The slide deck isn’t the enemy. PowerPoints set direction; an operating model makes it durable. Quarterly, the deck aligns leadership; clarifies outcomes like lifetime value and incremental demand; and sets guardrails and resourcing. Weekly, the operating model creates a repeatable creative-media loop where teams choose what to test, produce and launch the ads, read results and reallocate budget based on what worked. To make that loop reliable, teams use fixed ceremonies—standing meetings with a purpose and an owner (e.g., Monday prioritize, Wednesday launch, Friday read results). The two artifacts feed each other: Strategy becomes a 13-week road map, and weekly learnings roll up into the next deck, so strategy compounds rather than resets. How To Build The Loop In 90 Days You don’t need a reorganization to start; you need a cadence you can run. • Days 0 to 30: Establish the spine. By “spine,” I mean the backbone of the system: the two business outcomes you’ll optimize for (e.g., incremental new customers and LTV growth), the one attribution standard you’ll use to judge results and the few operating key performance indicators that will govern weekly calls. Put those in writing and make them non-negotiable for decision making. • Days 31 to 60: Stand up the sprint. Shift all testing into one cross-functional backlog—a single, prioritized to-do list—so creative, audience, offer and landing-page ideas compete on equal footing. Treat each item as a hypothesis: Include a specific, testable statement about what you expect to change and why. Sequence by funnel intent: Start with attention-winning ideas (create demand), show proof (earn belief) and then present the offer (earn action). Run the ceremonies: Monday prioritization and allocation; Wednesday creative commit and launch; Friday read results (what ran, what won, the measured “lift" and what you’ll scale or stop). • Days 61 to 90: Scale what works, and retire what doesn’t. Let 70% to 80% of spend follow proven themes, and keep 20% to 30% for exploration. Tilt budget toward higher-LTV SKUs, bundles or customer cohorts where incremental lift is strongest. Maintain a “stop list” of patterns that create noise or cannibalize base revenue. The goal is consistency: a loop that moves money every week and compounds learning. The Weekly Cadence, In Practice Great loops have clear owners. A growth lead runs the backlog and the go/no-go calls—they keep the list prioritized and make launch/stop decisions based on the evidence. A creative lead commits assets to the prioritized hypotheses. A media lead translates decisions into pacing and channel mix. An analyst maintains a single source of truth and ships the weekly lift readout on time—this should be a standard, one-page summary that quantifies incremental impact and recommends what to scale or stop. Keep governance simple. Use one scorecard (incremental return on ad spending, LTV ROAS, first-purchase ROAS) so meetings debate choices, not conflicting dashboards. Use one taxonomy so tests are searchable and reusable. And change only one thing per hypothesis; testing many changes at once makes results unreadable—you won’t know which change drove the outcome. What Will Get In Your Way Conflicting metrics will stall decisions. Solve this by selecting a decision framework and retiring the rest from weekly use. “Too many tests, not enough reach” will dilute power. Run fewer tests and give each enough budget to detect a real effect. Creative debt—falling behind on needed ad variations—will slow the loop; templatize winning patterns and build variations in batches. Cannibalization—shifting sales you’d have gotten anyway—will mask progress; set guardrails for which products and customer groups you target, and measure net-new impact across the whole program, not ad by ad. The biggest risk is analysis lag. Agree ahead of time on the math (what “significant” means), the report template and the Friday deadline so the readout always ships and money moves on Monday. Case In Point A late-stage, pre-initial public offering fashion brand asked us to convert board-level goals—prove incrementality, tilt acquisition toward higher-LTV customers, scale efficiently—into a weekly operating rhythm across creative, media and measurement. We shifted decisioning to incremental attribution, rebalanced prospecting toward premium SKUs and bundles that historically delivered two to three times the LTV of entry products, and focused creative on older, higher-value cohorts. Within the first quarter, lifetime return on ad spend (ROAS) ran roughly 31% higher versus benchmark; first-purchase ROAS averaged about 44% higher, a strong signal of improved customer quality; and paid-social returns, measured under the new attribution standard, trended 7% to 15% higher. Importantly, gains held: Incremental ROAS stayed between 1.7 times and 1.8 times the investment for several months—meaning each additional $1 in spend drove about $1.70 to $1.80 in net new revenue above baseline. The operating model scaled as well—more than 900 ads across 29 productions supported over $10 million in managed spend and roughly 182,000 conversions—giving the team surface area to learn fast and redeploy capital weekly. The lesson wasn’t “make more ads”; it was “install the loop.” Strategy became a system. The CEO Perspective Executives don’t want prettier decks; they want learning velocity and proof that marketing compounds week after week. Growth has shifted from plans to operating models—systems that reallocate weekly, aim creative by intent and prove impact through LTV and incremental lift. Static playbooks alone can’t do that. The deck plus a live operating model can.
