About L.E.N.
I’ve spent much of my career working for independent marketing agencies that challenged the big networks.
At The Search Works and later Forward3D, we competed against agencies with considerably greater resources, established global relationships and entire networks of offices behind them.
And we won business from some of the world’s biggest brands.
Chanel. Nike. Hilton Hotels. Debenhams. VisitBritain. British Airways.
We didn’t have the infrastructure of a global holding company. But we understood the value of data, technology and knowing more about a client’s business than the competition.
That approach helped independent agencies compete for work they weren’t necessarily expected to win.
What I learned
Good agencies accumulate an extraordinary amount of knowledge.
Every campaign, report, pitch, experiment and client conversation adds something.
But much of that knowledge remains with individual people and teams. It disappears into old presentations, forgotten spreadsheets and email conversations.
Someone leaves. An account changes hands. Another office starts working on a similar problem.
And the organisation ends up paying to learn something it may already know.
I’ve heard the same conclusions repeated throughout my career.
“We tried that. It didn’t work.”
Maybe. But what did we actually try? What were the circumstances? What did the numbers show?
Quite often, nobody could find the answer.
Why I built L.E.N.
The largest agency groups are now investing heavily in AI platforms, connected data and shared intelligence.
I think independent agencies should be able to benefit from those ideas without needing the resources of a holding company.
That’s part of the thinking behind L.E.N. — Legacy Evidence Network.
It began as a way to connect the evidence behind marketing decisions, activities and outcomes, creating an organisational memory that doesn’t disappear when people or agencies change.
But remembering what happened is only half the point.
The other half is putting that experience to work.
Could an account team spend less time preparing reports and QBRs? Could one office benefit from another’s experience? Could strategists explore options informed by what the agency has already tested and learned? Could agency leadership make better use of the collective knowledge it already possesses?
Those are the capabilities we’re developing L.E.N. around.
Not another database people have to maintain. Not AI replacing the judgement of experienced marketers.
A way to make the knowledge an agency has already earned more useful.
What we believe
AI can help connect information, identify relationships and explore possibilities.
But it shouldn’t get to rewrite history.
L.E.N. is being built around original evidence, human judgement, uncertainty and the ability to correct what it gets wrong.
We also believe that everything is open to challenge, including our own decisions about the product.
If better evidence comes along, we should be prepared to change our minds.
And if the software isn’t making someone’s work better, we should probably question why we’re building it.