The situation
I took over a key retail account during a team transition, with Black Friday weeks away. Peak trading is when a retail client makes its year, and it is also when an unstable agency team does the most damage: dropped threads, unclear ownership, and decisions made too slowly to matter. The client relationship needed steadying at exactly the moment the stakes were highest.
The work
The first job was continuity. I established single points of ownership for every workstream, set a communication cadence the client could rely on, and agreed the peak trading plan well in advance: budgets, promotional phasing, escalation routes, and who decides what when trading moves fast. Peak is won in the weeks before it starts, and the aim was that by the time Black Friday arrived, nothing about how the account ran would be improvised.
The second job was the bidding strategy itself. Rather than chasing volume at any price, I introduced AI-driven bidding models built around profitability, so the algorithms optimised toward margin-aware targets rather than raw sales counts. During the peak period itself the account was traded actively: pacing watched through the day, budgets moved to where the return was, and underperforming lines cut quickly rather than left to spend through the weekend.
The results
The account delivered its record profitability. Sales targets were exceeded by 22% while CPA came down 19%, which is the combination peak trading rarely produces: more volume and better efficiency at the same time. The client relationship came out of Q4 stronger than it went in, which was the quieter half of the brief.