The situation
A luxury shopping destination and a global cruise line, two brands whose customers do not click an ad and buy in the same session. A trip to a luxury retail destination is planned. A cruise is researched for weeks and often booked months out. Both brands were running paid media across Google Ads, Meta and programmatic, and both needed those channels directed as one system aligned to how their customers actually decide, rather than three channels optimised in isolation to whatever each platform finds easiest to claim.
There is a particular tension in luxury performance marketing: the pressure for efficiency pulls toward tactics that cheapen the brand, and brand protection pulls toward media that never has to prove itself. The job was to hold both.
The work
I directed the integrated digital strategy across the portfolio, managing multi-channel budgets exceeding £1.5m a month. The channel plans were built around the purchase journey: upper-funnel activity tasked with genuine discovery and demand creation, performance channels tasked with capturing and converting that demand, and each layer measured against the job it was actually given rather than a blanket CPA that would have starved the top of the funnel.
Budgets were governed as one pot, not three. Spend moved between Google, Meta and programmatic based on where it was working hardest against the trading calendar: seasonal peaks for the retail destination, booking windows and itinerary launches for the cruise line. Media quality was treated as non-negotiable, because for brands like these, where an ad appears is part of what the ad says.
The results
The portfolio ran with one performance direction across every channel, budgets exceeding £1.5m a month deployed against trading priorities rather than platform habits, and channel plans the client teams could interrogate because every layer had a stated job and a measure to match. For brands where the purchase journey is long and the brand is the asset, that discipline is the result: efficiency without erosion.