Digital Clubhouse: The Marketing Advice I Wish I’d Had Ten Years Ago
Tony Conte
Founder
Sadly, I couldn’t be at March’s episode in person. A scheduling conflict, that I am still quietly bitter about, put a stop to my gleaming 100% attendance record. But, thankfully, every talk is up on the Digital Clubhouse YouTube channel, so I could binge watch them all in one sitting; devouring each insight with even more vigor than the last. In fact, I might have enjoyed it more than the seventh season of Virgin River! Have you seen it? Sorry, I digress. Anyway… consider this your seamless reminder to subscribe.
March gave us three speakers, a panel that turned into a proper debate, a room full of agency owners, eCommerce founders and operators, and a set of conversations that kept looping back to the same uncomfortable truth: most of us already know what we should be doing. We just keep not doing it.
That tension — between knowing and doing — ran like a thread through the whole day. It showed up in Dan’s talk on B2B marketing, in Ian’s story of building brands from a lock-up in Notting Hill, in Jemima’s refreshingly unvarnished account of running a clothing brand at 28, and in a panel discussion on retention that got progressively more honest as it went on.
A first-timer at Digital Clubhouse, Dan is nine months into his own business, with 20 years of marketing experience behind him — from radio scheduling at Galaxy in Newcastle through to training agencies on how to market themselves.
His talk with fellow Digital Clubhouse co-founder, Mat O’Connor (Actuate), had the easy chemistry of two people who don’t need prepared questions to get somewhere interesting. What Dan gave the room was practical, direct, and grounded in something that I find refreshing: the acknowledgement that marketing, especially for agencies, is not a switch you flip when the pipeline dries up.
He called it the sine wave problem. Agencies get quiet, panic, go hard on outreach, fill the studio, get busy, let marketing slide, get quiet again, panic. The cycle repeats. “It’s really exhausting,” he said, “and it’s much easier to build and maintain than it is to constantly be trying to turn it on and off.” He’s right, and it’s something I see repeatedly, and have been guilty of in the past — the businesses that treat marketing as a continuous investment rather than emergency defibrillation are the ones that grow with something resembling momentum.
The concept he kept returning to was the marketing fingerprint. The idea that every business has a unique combination of factors — proposition clarity, budget, personality, audience, channel mix — and the job is to find the version of marketing that fits those factors, not to copy what everyone else is doing because it looks like it’s working. He was particularly pointed on podcasts. If nobody internally is the right personality for it, just don’t. Trying to be authentic in a format that doesn’t suit you produces the opposite of authenticity. The audience felt that one.
He also shared the data. Research across nearly 400 agencies showed that the highest-performing pipelines came from a combination of the top five tactics working together, not from any single channel. “When anyone asks me what the one thing I recommend is, I tell them: there isn’t one.” Straightforward, but it still needs saying. Loudly. Repeatedly.
The biggest unlock for me personally in Dan’s talk was around niching — specifically his assertion that it’s more important now than it has ever been. “Agencies who are generalists will start to fall through the gaps,” he said. “The specialist agencies with a very clear niche will be the ones providing the most value.” I think that’s true, and I think the window to make that decision is getting shorter.
Ian Rabbidge is the co-founder of Alvio, a tech plugin that connects Shopify and WooCommerce stores to share inventory and build new digital distribution channels. But before any of that, he was three Australians in a transit van with a lock-up in Notting Hill, cold samples in a backpack, and an A-to-Z of London in his hands.
He compressed 35 years into 20 minutes with the confidence of someone who has genuinely lived it, and the thread through all of it was the same: if the product can’t be found, it doesn’t matter how good it is.
The story of Canadian mineral water in the early nineties is one I never get tired of hearing in a room full of marketers because it strips away every assumption about budget, strategy and channel. Three guys, no contract, no money — knocking on the doors of sandwich bars between Piccadilly Circus and the city, building a billboard effect by dominating every fridge in a given street before moving to the next one. Sainsbury’s noticed. That’s the distribution thesis in its purest form: make your product impossible to miss within a defined territory.
The Snapple chapter scaled that playbook with actual resources — white vans, a proper sales team, replicating the New York street model in London until their per capita distribution matched Manhattan. Then Red Bull, which required a different kind of work entirely. The early Red Bull problem was one of context. It had become a vodka mixer in student bars, which wasn’t wrong exactly, but it was limiting. Ian’s job was repositioning it into a daytime energy product, working with Loughborough University on sleep research, timing a push into petrol stations to coincide with a government campaign around tired drivers. Twelve months after zero distribution in that channel, Red Bull was outselling Coca-Cola in value terms. Twelve months after that, in unit terms. When the product delivers and the timing is right, distribution does the rest.
What he brought forward for the room was the e-commerce translation of all of this. Too many digital-native brands build one Shopify store, spend on Meta, and treat that as a complete strategy. “To get to that next level,” he said, “you’ve got to also be thinking about B2B.” Not necessarily major retail listings on day one, but smart collaboration: place your brand where the consumer for your product is already shopping. Alvio exists to make that easier, but the thinking applies regardless. Single-channel reliance is a structural fragility, not a growth strategy.
I asked myself after Ian’s talk: how many brands in the room are genuinely multi-channel, and how many just think they are because they have an Instagram account? The honest answer is probably uncomfortable.
Jemima Gray is 28, runs Cotswold Fox — an equestrian-inspired lifestyle clothing brand she started as a university assignment during Covid — and spent her talk being relentlessly honest about things that most founders keep very quiet.
She didn’t know what she was doing when she started. Her first product was a Fruit of the Loom cord zip with an embroidered logo. She spent £15,000 on a photoshoot in Morocco that “just wasn’t on brand.” She had a stock shipment of adult jodhpurs arrive from China sized for children. She had £150,000 of stock stuck in Bahrain for two weeks because of the war. She tried Debenhams. She had taxis branded up with Cotswold Fox driving round London before clocking that a countryside brand probably shouldn’t be advertising in central London.
All of it was told with the kind of direct candour that makes an audience lean forward, partly because it’s funny, and partly because every single person in that room has a version of the Morocco photoshoot in their own history, even if they’ve never described it that way.
What makes Jemima genuinely interesting to listen to, and genuinely interesting as a case study, is the gap between how the brand looks from the outside and how it actually operates. People think Cotswold Fox is bigger than it is. That perception is partly engineered — the brand looks polished, shows up at events, posts consistently — but it is, in her words, “pretty much just me.” The misconception is functional. She is aware of it. She leans into it where it helps and is private about the rest.
The marketing insight that I think landed hardest was simple: the content that performs best is her on her phone, talking about a product she loves. Not the expensive campaign imagery. Not the Morocco shoot. A founder in a field, on an iPhone. “People love seeing the behind the scenes,” she said. “People buy from people.” Meta ads built around UGC, authenticity over production value, founder visibility as a strategic asset rather than a vanity exercise. These aren’t new ideas, but seeing them demonstrated live — especially by someone who openly dislikes being the face of the brand but does it anyway because it works — gives them proper weight.
She’s bootstrapped until recently, when she brought on an investor who gave her a rolling credit facility for stock. Cash flow, specifically stock financing, has been the limiting factor on her growth throughout. The business is profitable. She treats profitability as a sanity requirement, not a nice-to-have. “You need a bit of both. Otherwise I go insane.” I think that’s the right frame for any founder at her stage.
What she has that many larger brands don’t is community gravity. Her customers come to pop-up events and talk to her. They buy because they know the story behind the product. The collection builds on what has already sold, creating continuity of relationship rather than constant reinvention. Email marketing — three campaigns a week, Klaviyo flows, personal discount codes for strong customers — is her best channel. Not TikTok. Not the Morocco shoot. Email.
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Alan Pilkington opened the panel with the central contradiction: if everyone agrees retention is more profitable than acquisition, why does acquisition still get most of the budget, the creative energy and the attention? The panel included Dan, Ian, Jemima and Oscar from Brightpearl, and the conversation was the kind where the best moments come from disagreement rather than consensus.
Jemima’s position was pragmatic — you always need new customers, acquisition is harder, so it probably deserves more investment. Ian pushed back: retention requires more sophistication, and the return on investment favours loyalty over acquisition when you are genuinely delivering on the brand promise. Dan took the B2B angle that I found most resonant for an agency-heavy room: agencies are structurally terrible at retaining existing clients because net new is more exciting. “Most marketing plans are 95% focused on the external. It should probably be more like 60/40 in favour of retention.”
Oscar landed the operational point, and it’s one that doesn’t get nearly enough air time. Around 77% of negative reviews on Trustpilot are operationally focused. The reason customers leave is not usually because the marketing stopped, but because something behind the scenes — fulfilment, communication, process — broke down. The lovely manor house analogy was well deployed: beautiful from the outside, an absolute state inside. Fix the inside first. Then focus on growth.
The loyalty programme debate was particularly good. Dan’s view was that within agency world, loyalty programmes are almost impossible to execute without eroding margin, and the more useful frame is advocacy and referrals — building clients who will recommend you, not clients who get a 5% discount on their next brief. Ian extended this with the concept of exclusivity: limited product drops for loyal customers create FOMO, which creates organic acquisition, which is retention working as a growth driver rather than just a defensive metric.
Alan’s own contribution at the end cut to the real issue, and I think it’s the one the industry has been dancing around for years: customer service. Not the strategy, not the loyalty mechanic, not the lifetime value calculation. Customer service. When something goes wrong and the response is poor, the customer doesn’t come back. It’s that basic.
The final quick-fire answers from the panel were consistent enough to feel like a verdict. Know your audience. Invest in data. Keep it fresh. Communicate better. Don’t discount your way to retention.
March’s event, for me, did what the best events do. They take what you already know and make you feel the weight of it properly.
The question the day left open for me — and I’m genuinely not sure of the answer — is whether the industry is ready to rebalance. The incentives still flow towards acquisition. The metrics that get celebrated are still new customers, new reach, new revenue. Until the measurement shifts, the behaviour probably won’t. And the brands that are already thinking differently — and there were several in that room — are quietly building an advantage that’s going to be very difficult to close.
