While many chase trend-led channel hacks, British entrepreneur, and founder of performance marketing agency Dominate Online Matt Haycox focuses on revenue clarity. Across portfolio reviews and founder mentoring, he argues that most agencies are doing marketing wrong by confusing activity with impact. His view is blunt: plans must trade at market speed, and every pound spent should connect to cash, not theatre.
As an entrepreneur and investor, he has watched budgets tighten as AI reshapes media buying, retail media fragments attention, and privacy rules disrupt measurement. From a board-level seat, he outlines a trading-desk approach in this News analysis.
Agency Playbooks Lag Current Market Reality
Haycox argues many agencies sell static strategies while platforms keep shifting formats, attribution and pricing. Signals across Meta Advantage+, retail media growth and TikTok’s uncertain regulatory horizon show rigidity is costly. From an investor’s seat, he prefers adaptable trading rhythms over 12-month roadmaps. In UK privacy turbulence, plans must update at market speed with commercial consequences explicit.
Vanity Metrics Distort Real Boardroom Decisions
Impressions, CTRs and share-of-voice can look tidy but are weak proxies for cash, a point he says CFOs now challenge. He favours revenue-linked KPIs that survive scrutiny: payback windows, contribution margin and incremental lift over last-click. With cookie deprecation, he backs experiments, holdouts and lightweight MMM.
What Haycox Tracks Instead Of Vanity
To replace vanity, Haycox tracks operational economics that inform boardroom decisions and budget resets. He wants metrics that hold up in investor packs and weekly trading meetings, not just campaign reports. The focus is on causality, speed and cash discipline across cohorts. These are the signals he argues should govern planning, scaling and creative decisions.
- CAC payback period by channel and cohort.
- Rolling MER blended across brand and performance.
- Lead-to-sale velocity and sales-assisted win rates.
- First-order contribution margin versus discounting effects.
- Incremental lift from creatives, offers and placements.
Creative Testing Beats Constant Channel Shuffling
Haycox sees agencies rotate channels when creative and offers are the bigger conversion levers. With short-form saturation and creator-led feeds, he calls for hypothesis-led sprints that stress-test angles quickly. Messaging should link to page speed and checkout friction. A small testing budget often beats broad reallocations.
Through his performance marketing agency, Dominate Online, Haycox applies the same ‘test fast, prove value’ mindset for brands looking to scale with measurable efficiency. The agency builds systems where creative insight meets commercial accountability, blending data-driven strategy with trading discipline.
A Lightweight Test And Learn Loop
Haycox formalises testing into a lightweight loop that any growth team can run without bloated overhead. The loop creates attribution clarity by isolating change, speeds decision cycles and protects cash by pre-agreeing thresholds. It also bakes in qualitative feedback from frontline conversations, a step many agencies skip when dashboards replace real customer insight.
- Weekly batches: angles, hooks, formats, offers.
- Isolate one variable per test to attribute lift.
- Pre-set kill/scale thresholds tied to payback.
- Fold qualitative feedback from comments and calls.
- Refresh winners before fatigue erodes efficiency.
AI Hype Without Real Commercial Accountability
Haycox warns that AI-generated volume can inflate activity while depressing conversion and trust. He backs AI for research, feed optimisation and QA, not as licence for content factories. With search generative experiences and automated creative, he demands incrementality proof. Through The Matt Haycox Group, he funds and advises startups on governance, with one test: improve revenue efficiency or roll back.
Integrating Sales And Marketing Pipelines Properly
Marketing that stops at MQLs is half-finished in his playbook. He demands CRM hygiene, speed-to-lead, call listening and pipeline stage integrity. In B2B, SDR alignment and clear ownership from first touch to closed-won are required; in ecommerce, stock and cashflow visibility matter. Daily trading stand-ups reallocate spend on live conversion data. Through Funding Guru’s UK network, he supports over 400 SMEs annually.
What Clients Should Demand From Agencies
Clients, he says, should insist on performance-linked fees tied to agreed commercial metrics, not activity milestones. Demand transparent data access, clean taxonomies and auditable experiment logs. Require an always-on experimentation roadmap with weekly learnings and decisive reallocations. Push for on-site days with sales and operations, and flex clauses to pivot fast on policy shifts, retail media openings and creator partnerships.
The Bigger Picture
Haycox’s critique is less anti-agency than pro-accountability. Marketing, he argues, should operate like a trading desk – fast cycles, clear hypotheses and revenue-first reporting. Drawn from investing and mentoring across sectors, his stance is consistent: retire theatre, close the loop with sales and measure what pays back, not what merely looks busy.
He brings that standard to his portfolio companies and founder clients alike, from early-stage fintech to service operators. For businesses wanting to audit or rebuild their own marketing strategy, Haycox offers direct marketing consulting support grounded in these same commercial principles. The expectation is discipline under volatility, not bravado under slides and that’s exactly why he believes most agencies are still doing marketing wrong.