Why Anton · Founder and strategic advisor
Better decisions start with better questions.
My job isn't to tell you what you want to hear. It's to help you work out what's actually going on.
- 2009
- Founded in Sydney
- 300+
- Strategic projects
- APAC
- Local to global brands
Twenty years of being in the room for the decision.
Billions
Customer interactions personally assessed across Australia and APAC.
Up to 22:1
Return on one campaign, on incremental marginal return.
Some clients call me The ROI Guy. I'll take it, as long as it comes with the caveat below.
Returns like that are marginal, not typical, and they only make sense against a long-term view of what marketing actually pays back. The definitive work on that is the IPA effectiveness research by Les Binet and Peter Field, which is where I'd send anyone arguing about brand versus performance budget splits.
How I think
I don't believe marketing needs more activity. It needs better decisions. I start with the commercial problem, not the marketing solution. I ask uncomfortable questions, challenge assumptions, follow the evidence and focus on what will actually change the economics of the business.
Background
I work as an independent marketing consultant and advisor, called in when a marketing decision is significant enough to need outside judgement. My career has spanned advertising, direct response and digital agencies, and marketing management consultancies. That mix matters: I've sat on the side that sells the work, the side that buys it, and the side that has to justify it commercially.
I founded Front Foot Marketing in Sydney in 2009. Since then I've delivered over 300 strategic marketing projects and personally assessed billions of customer interactions, working with organisations from local start-ups to global brands across Australia and the APAC region.
The pattern I keep seeing is not a shortage of marketing activity. It's a shortage of clarity about which decisions matter and what the evidence actually says.
Customer value work specifically runs on a proprietary framework, the Front Foot Customer Value Model, built around margin rather than revenue.
I’m also a frequent podcaster for TrinityP3’s Managing Marketing series. Listen to me interview Jon Wild about how to create a growth engine for a business, Dan Ferguson on the secrets behind scaling e-commerce, and The Laptop Initiative on giving laptops to people in desperate need, a charity I later repositioned, in Selected Work.
I also curate TrinityP3’s monthly M3 Report on marketing, measurement and martech, and guest-curate and contribute to their weekly FIVE newsletter. Subscribe to the TrinityP3 newsletters.
Browse more episodes of Managing Marketing.
Also featured in LBB Online’s Off My Chest series, on why marketers have gotten better at measuring activity than proving commercial impact.
Connect on LinkedIn.
For longer thinking on marketing, measurement and the decisions behind the numbers, you can read more from me on Substack.
A Few Things I Know About Marketing
I've been doing this for more than 30 years. These are some of the things experience has taught me.
Revenue isn't customer value.
A customer who generates $1m in revenue isn't necessarily more valuable than one generating $500k. Margin, behaviour, retention and future potential matter more than the top line.
Measurable isn't necessarily incremental.
If the sale would have happened anyway, marketing didn't create the return.
More marketing isn't always the answer.
Sometimes the smartest marketing decision is to spend more. Sometimes it's to stop.
Start with the decision.
Don't commission research because you have a data problem. Start by asking what decision the evidence needs to help you make.
If everything is a priority, nothing is.
Strategy is as much about deciding what not to do as deciding what to do.
A dashboard isn't a strategy.
More numbers don't create better decisions. Better questions do.
Don't confuse activity with progress.
Campaigns launched, impressions delivered and leads generated are activity. Commercial value is the point.
The presenting problem isn't always the real problem.
“We need more customers” might actually mean “we aren't retaining the customers we already have.”
Don't ask the data to make the decision.
Data informs judgement. It doesn't replace it.
Independent advice should sometimes tell you not to hire me.
If I'm not the right person to solve the problem, I'll say so.
Marketing should survive the CFO's questions.
If you can't explain where the money goes, what it creates and how you know, you don't have a commercial marketing strategy.
Good marketing advice makes things clearer.
If the recommendation leaves everyone with more complexity, more initiatives and more meetings, it probably isn't advice.
What I don't believe
Which also means there's a shortlist of things I don't believe, no matter how often I hear them repeated.
- I don't believe marketing is a communications problem.
- I don't believe independence means being anti-agency.
- I don't believe strategy is a list of initiatives.
- I don't believe AI removes the need for judgement.
Independence is part of how I work, not just how I'm engaged, and here's more on what that means.
In their words
Anton has a clear and methodical approach to discussing strategic layers, which are vital for both strategic and commercial success. His ability to dissect the different segments in sales and marketing funnels, with simplicity and clarity, is a rare skill.
What clients have said
Anton and Ian led a very considered approach to our customer loyalty review. Their data-led insights helped to prioritise areas of focus and clearly articulated the value this would create for the business.
Anton guided us through a thought provoking, and at times challenging, process that resulted in a very clear strategy and marketing plan for the next steps of our project.