Looking back to our Year in Review 2023, here is what we set out to achieve for 2024:

• • Grow revenue by 50% YoY 🟢
  • Expand the company to 42 team members 🟢
  • Deliver impactful and relevant training to all our team members 🟠
  • Publish 4 new exciting case studies 🟢
  • Expand our network with more events, content and showcases 🟢
  • Double our charitable donations vs 2023 🟢
  • Introduce ‘training’ as a new service for our clients and non-clients alike 🔴
  • Double our Paid Social footprint (team size and revenue) 🟢

Most goals were achieved, but there were areas where we excelled and others where we fell short. Let’s examine some of these in more detail.

The success we have as an agency comes down to the people who work here – that has always been the case and will always continue to be true. We’ve always said that we want to create an environment where people get to do the best work of their careers.

In 2024, we have been incredibly successful in our hiring. From sourcing to interviewing and onboarding, it’s been a good year. This hiring has enabled the scaling we’ve achieved from a client and project perspective throughout the year.

It’s useful to think about the conditions that made hiring particularly successful this year:

• A bigger brand: We have released more case studies, more projects, and more insights into how we work as a company, which has attracted more incredibly talented people.
• Internal referrals: Continuing to create an environment where people actively bring great talent into the business has been an incredible cheat code.
• Internal experience: We are getting very good at identifying high performers early in the interview process, helping us hire well (this could be its own blog topic!).

We have always had a high-pitch win record. Since the early days, it’s been around 80%-90% and hasn’t changed much outside of that range. The difference, however, between the first couple of years and now is the mix of pitches we participate in and how new clients find us.

For example, it’s easier to have an 80% win record when the new client knows you, and you’re one of the only agencies in the pitch process. It’s much more difficult when there are 10 other agencies in a formal RFP process.

Over the last year, we have done more pitches than ever before, and the makeup of those has been drastically different. We’ve maintained our 80%-90% win record even in more competitive scenarios. Here’s why:

• Unique Offering: Our combination of technology and performance marketing services is truly unique in the market and undeniably a key factor in how we deliver impactful solutions for our partner brands.
• Continuous iteration: We routinely rework our pitching process, taking lessons from previous pitches and feedback. In the summer, we completely revamped how we approach pitching and the information we present.
• Significant time investment: A typical pitch can take 100-400 collective hours to complete, which is a substantial investment for us, but it does reflect in our win record.
• Alignment with client objectives: We ensure all recommendations align with the client’s business goals, avoiding irrelevant additions.
• Pitch doctors: We regularly use external folks to challenge us, provide feedback, and refine our approach.

This year, the quality and innovation of our client projects have reached new heights. From custom demand and supply models to propensity models, geo-radius technology, advanced seasonality product predictions, incrementality tests, custom attribution models, and much more – our work has delivered record-breaking performance for many clients.

The impact of our innovation has been so significant that we established a dedicated team within WeDiscover to focus exclusively on these initiatives. This team’s mission is to develop cutting-edge standalone technology products to benefit both our clients and our internal teams.

A key initiative for 2024 was to launch training as a new service for clients and external parties. This initiative did not succeed. We failed to prioritise it, and with a lack of focus, it remained on the to-do list and ultimately did not happen.

A key learning emerged: while we started the year with the best intentions, the priority list was too long, and some initiatives were inevitably destined to be left incomplete.

Since then, we have revised our approach to planning and priorities. For example, we now focus on no more than one or two major projects (“big bets”) per quarter. It’s far more effective to focus on fewer projects and ensure they are delivered, rather than juggling multiple initiatives that drag on for months.

A new training scheme is prioritised for next year, primarily focusing on internal development. Offering training as a service remains a goal for us, but it may be realised towards the end of next year or in 2026.

WeDiscover has always aimed to bring together media and technology to drive performance, but ultimately the convergence of these two sectors, and how brands leverage them together, is still developing. Over the past year more than ever, we’ve seen that the brands best positioned for sustainable growth are those that can effectively harness their data and use it to influence platforms strategically.

It’s never been easier for a brand to go from 0 to 1, but scaling from 1 to 10 has become significantly more challenging. And so we’ve explored diverse solutions to meet our clients’ evolving needs. For some, this means providing full-service strategic management across performance media and technology. For others, it’s about delivering focused support, whether through technology solutions or consulting arrangements. As we continue to grow, we see a place for all these approaches – and more – within our expanding service offerings.

AI has also been a transformative force for us this year. It has allowed us to accelerate the deployment of products and services, unlocking opportunities we could only dream of a few years ago. However, embracing AI presents its own set of challenges. Unlike developers, AI doesn’t push back or question your requests – it simply tries to execute them. While this can inspire creative problem-solving, it also requires careful oversight to avoid pursuing impractical or overly ambitious ideas. Striking the right balance has been key to harnessing AI’s potential in impactful and innovative ways.

This year, we launched a new internal product team. Their role is to accelerate the development of innovative products for both us and our clients. Some of these products will be integrated into our existing media teams, while others will be standalone technologies designed for independent use by our consulting teams and clients.

For us as an agency, this represents a pivotal moment as we enter our next era – one where we harness technology more efficiently than ever before to benefit our clients. The key challenge ahead will be prioritisation and focus, as the possibilities before us are virtually limitless.