Marketing stands at a crossroads. With $500 billion squandered annually on AdWaste—repeatedly paying platforms to reach customers brands already know—the industry desperately needs transformation. Traditional agencies peddle creative services whilst martech platforms sell underutilised features, leaving CMOs trapped between rising acquisition costs and declining returns. Enter Progency (product + agents + agency): a revolutionary fusion of platform technology, specialist expertise, AI agents, and continuous improvement that doesn’t just optimise marketing—it fundamentally rewires it from cost centre to profit engine.
Over recent months, I’ve explored the revolutionary concept of Progency across multiple essays, each revealing new dimensions of this transformative marketing approach. The chronological excerpts below capture the evolution of these ideas as they’ve developed. This compilation distils the most powerful insights from these writings into a cohesive framework.
Two Marketing Moonshots for Retention and Profits: NeoN and Progency: “What makes Progency truly a marketing moonshot is its potential to fundamentally restructure the economics of customer relationship management. By combining AI agent technology, performance-based pricing, specialised customer focus, accumulated expertise, and seamless integration, Progency addresses the most critical challenge facing modern marketers: extracting maximum value from existing customer relationships in an increasingly privacy-focused, cost-conscious environment…Progency represents not merely an evolution of existing martech approaches but a completely new paradigm. It combines the best aspects of specialised agencies (expertise, outcome focus) with the advantages of martech platforms (technology depth, data integration) while eliminating the weaknesses of both through AI agent orchestration and performance-based economics. Just as SaaS transformed software from product to service twenty years ago, Progency now transforms marketing from technology to outcomes.”
NeoMarketing’s 75 Theses: “Progency solves the persistent “Who Will Do It?” problem that plagues martech adoption—combining proprietary platform capabilities with specialist expertise and AI acceleration in a performance-based model that delivers outcomes, not just software…By shifting from consumption-based pricing (CPM or MAU) to revenue-share models tied directly to measurable results, Progency aligns incentives perfectly: if the brand doesn’t benefit financially, neither does the Progency. Progency specialises in maximising value from Rest customers—the often-neglected middle segment showing declining engagement—enabling marketing teams to focus their limited resources on Best customer retention and Next customer conversion. Through AI agent orchestration in a parallel marketing department, Progency delivers the operational scale of enterprise software with the strategic expertise of specialist agencies—creating a transformative approach that turns martech from a cost centre into a measurable profit engine.”
Progency as AI-first Agency of the Future: “Progency – inverts the traditional marketing funnel by focusing primarily on keeping and growing existing customer relationships rather than the endless (and increasingly expensive) pursuit of new ones. This retention-first approach acknowledges a fundamental truth that adtech-oriented agencies have long ignored: acquiring a customer once and nurturing that relationship delivers far greater ROI than repeatedly paying platforms to reacquire the same customers… At the core of this new model lies the PEAK framework—a comprehensive approach combining Platform, Experts, AI Agents, and Kaizen continuous improvement methodology to deliver performance-based outcomes rather than just services or software… Progency fundamentally reimagines compensation through performance-based models that align agency incentives directly with client business outcomes. Rather than billing for time, media commission, or flat retainers, the agency earns a percentage of the measurable uplift it creates.”
NeoMarketing’s Triad: NeoMartech, Progency, and MarCo: “The NeoMarketing Triad represents a revolutionary framework poised to reshape the marketing landscape by addressing fundamental flaws that have long plagued traditional approaches. For decades, two dominant models have defined marketing: agencies and pure SaaS platforms. Both models, whilst once effective, now suffer from inherent limitations that prevent brands from fully harnessing their marketing potential… Together, NeoMartech, Progency and MarCo form a cohesive, interconnected ecosystem—one that redefines marketing’s economics by maximising customer lifetime value, minimising acquisition costs and eliminating wasteful spending. This triad doesn’t merely improve existing approaches; it creates an entirely new paradigm, unlocking sustained profitability for brands and martech players, and ushering in marketing’s transformative new era… NeoMartech provides the AI-native technology foundation, Progency delivers the outcomes-focused execution, and MarCo creates the integrated ecosystem necessary for seamless operation… The ultimate goal is nothing less than a complete reinvention of marketing—one that eliminates AdWaste, maximises customer lifetime value, and creates sustainable profitable growth for both brands and technology providers.”
Progency’s Problem-Solving Prowess: “Progency represents a revolutionary solution to marketing’s most expensive and persistent challenges. By addressing reacquisition through authenticated targeting rather than wasteful platform spending, enabling reactivation through interactive engagement rather than ignored broadcasts, and unlocking revenue upside through personalised experiences rather than generic messaging, Progency creates a comprehensive framework for marketing transformation. This isn’t merely about incremental improvement—it’s about fundamentally rewiring the economics of customer relationships to eliminate waste, maximise lifetime value, and transform marketing from a cost centre into the primary driver of sustainable business growth. The $500 billion currently wasted on Adtech is an opportunity to be seized through a radical reimagining of how brands build and monetise customer relationships… Progency systematically addresses three critical challenges that plague modern marketers: reacquisition, reactivation, and revenue upside.”
From CMO to C-Suite MVP: How Progency Transforms the Marketing Leader’s Game: “AI Marketing Agents, AI Twins, and Channels 2.0 offer unprecedented opportunities to enhance LTV, reduce CAC, and eliminate the staggering 70% AdWaste (spent on reacquiring customers) currently haemorrhaging marketing budgets. For the first time, CMOs can take ownership of profitability by building deep, enduring customer relationships through truly personalised experiences—the essence of the NeoMarketing revolution. Progency takes this transformation even further by making martech (retention and referrals) as frictionless as adtech (acquisition and reacquisition). It brings unprecedented efficacy to marketing by enabling the once-utopian dream of a “Department of One” serving a “Segment of One.” For forward-thinking CMOs, Progency represents the fast track to becoming the Most Valuable Player in the C-Suite—the executive who transforms marketing from a cost centre into the organisation’s primary profit engine.”
From SaaS to Success: The Progency Proposition: “By embracing performance-based pricing tied directly to business results, SaaS companies create perfect alignment with their customers: they win only when their customers win. This shift from selling inputs (features, seats, API calls) to guaranteeing outputs (revenue growth, cost savings, measurable business improvements) transforms the SaaS business model from a capped subscription revenue stream to an unlimited upside opportunity with truly “infinite” TAM… The combination of three axes—services, AI agents, and success-based pricing—creates a new entity that transcends traditional SaaS – Progency. For enterprise buyers, this evolution eliminates the frustration of underutilised software investments. For vendors, it transforms the addressable market from software budgets to business outcomes—exponentially increasing potential revenue while creating deeper, more strategic client relationships… Incumbent SaaS companies possess three critical advantages: established clients, recurring contracts, and predictable cashflows. These should continue undisturbed while a separate, dedicated team launches a “Progency Startup” within the organisation… The Progency Startup’s revolutionary proposition to prospective clients is straightforward yet compelling: “Let us take ownership of your ‘Rest’ customer segment with zero platform fees. This allows your team to focus exclusively on your highest-value customers while we apply our PEAK framework—Platform, Experts, AI Agents, and Kaizen methodology—to maximise value from your underserved middle segment.””
Ending AdWaste: Progency for LTV, NeoN for CAC: “What if martech platforms evolved beyond selling software to guaranteeing outcomes? Today’s powerful martech platforms sit largely underutilised—victims of the execution gap between technological capability and operational reality. Most brands leverage just 30-40% of their martech features despite significant investments. Progency—a fusion of product, expertise, AI agents, and continuous improvement—represents the missing link. Through the PEAK framework (Platform, Experts, AI agents, Kaizen), Progency delivers true N=1 personalization at scale, transforming martech economics from cost-centre software to performance-based profit engines. This isn’t outsourcing—it’s a revolutionary approach where compensation ties directly to measurable business impact… Rest Customers (the middle 40-50% showing declining engagement) receive precisely timed interventions that prevent the slide into dormancy. Through AI-orchestrated personalisation and daily hotlines crafted via NeoMails, Progency systematically converts these wavering relationships into Best customer status—unlocking substantial revenue currently left unrealised by resource-constrained marketing departments.”
NeoMarketing’s Mantra: Double the Best, Halve the Waste: “Progency—a fusion of product, AI agents, and agency—solves the critical “Who Will Do It?” problem that has limited martech’s impact. Unlike traditional agencies using third-party tools or martech vendors providing just software, Progency combines proprietary platform capabilities with specialist expertise and AI orchestration in a performance-based model. Through the PEAK framework (Platform, Experts, AI agents, Kaizen), Progency takes end-to-end responsibility for driving measurable business outcomes. Most revolutionary is its economic model: eliminating platform fees in favour of revenue-sharing tied directly to measurable results. This creates perfect alignment between vendor and client—Progency succeeds only when brands succeed. By focusing specifically on maximising value from “Rest” customers, Progency enables marketing teams to concentrate on their Best and Next customers while systematically reducing expensive reacquisition through deeper, more relevant engagement…Consider that Best customers typically generate 3-5x more annual revenue than Rest customers, with significantly higher purchase frequency and average order values. Every Rest customer successfully elevated to Best status can represent a significant increase in additional annual revenue with virtually no acquisition cost…NeoMarketing’s dual strategy—Progency’s Rest-to-Best transformation alongside NeoN’s precision targeting—creates an integrated solution to marketing’s most expensive inefficiencies. By systematically doubling the Best customer base while halving AdWaste, this approach doesn’t merely optimise existing processes; it fundamentally rewires marketing economics.”
Progency: The Growth Alpha Engine: “Rather than selling time, features, or vague promises, a Progency [positions] itself as an “Alpha Generator” for marketing—delivering measurable, superior outcomes compared to industry benchmarks or the brand’s historical performance. Compensation would be tied directly to this demonstrable outperformance, creating perfect alignment between the Progency’s success and the client’s business results…Marketing alpha can be conceptualised as measurable outperformance against established baselines—whether industry benchmarks, historical performance, or control group outcomes. For example, converting “Rest” customers to “Best” status at rates exceeding historical averages, driving retention metrics beyond industry standards, increasing engagement frequencies, or expanding average order values amongst existing customers…Measuring Alpha against internal baselines positions Progency as a collaborative partner augmenting existing capabilities rather than creating an adversarial dynamic that might arise if performance were compared to industry standards suggesting the internal team was “below par.” It establishes a foundation of trust and collaboration essential for long-term partnership…For Best customers—the top 20% who deliver 60-80% of revenue and up to 200% of profits—the Alpha strategy is extreme retention and expansion. Just as investors maximise returns by doubling down on high-performing assets, Progency’s mission becomes deepening loyalty, increasing share of wallet, and extending lifetime value among this elite cohort…Progency’s Alpha strategy focuses on converting Rest to Best through timely, tailored engagement. AI-driven segmentation identifies micro-patterns of interest and drop-off. Interactive NeoMails deliver both daily engagement and relevant nudges at precisely the right moments. Personalisation engines test offers, messaging, and timing across millions of individualised journeys. The goal: prevent churn before it happens, rekindle lapsed interest, and systematically surface hidden champions from within the middle segment…Like an investor rebalancing a portfolio, Progency continuously shifts customers up the value ladder—transforming the client’s customer base into a higher-yielding, compounding growth engine. By focusing Alpha efforts inward—on owned relationships rather than rented reach—Progency builds proprietary advantage that competitors cannot easily replicate.”
Progency: An Implementation Playbook: “The starting point for a Progency implementation is by building a data foundation. Within data, the first step is to have the past transaction data available to be able to do the Best-Rest-Test segmentation based on forward-looking LTV to be able to plan out the Progency implementation… By targeting Rest customers first, Progency establishes a clear value proposition: transforming overlooked, declining relationships into high-value Best customers without disrupting existing marketing operations—exactly the balance most CMOs seek when implementing revolutionary new approaches… The promise of Progency is to deliver a “Growth Alpha” over what in-house marketing teams can provide… Once Progency demonstrates its Growth Alpha with a sub-segment of Rest customers, CMOs face a transformative opportunity: expanding this revolutionary approach across their entire customer base. The early success creates a compelling case not just for expanding within the Rest segment, but for applying Progency’s PEAK framework to Best customers as well—where even modest percentage improvements create substantial absolute value.”
Progency = McKinsey × Palantir: The Future of Marketing Execution: “McKinsey stands as the quintessential management consultancy, renowned for its ability to transform businesses through a distinctive blend of strategic insight, specialised expertise, and methodical execution. Understanding McKinsey’s operating model provides valuable inspiration for what Progency must become in the marketing realm… McKinsey doesn’t simply improve management; it fundamentally rewires how organisations operate. Similarly, Progency doesn’t merely enhance marketing; it reconfigures the entire discipline from cost centre to profit engine through the systematic elimination of AdWaste and activation of underutilised customer relationships… Where CMOs currently lack a trusted partner capable of both strategy and execution – particularly in the age of AI – Progency fills this void with a unique fusion of knowledge, talent, technology, and outcome guarantees. By combining McKinsey’s strategic rigour with technological enablement that transcends human limitations, Progency creates the new gold standard for marketing execution: not just expertise, but expertise at scale with guaranteed results… [Palantir’s] idea of embedding experts in client organisations offers a transformative blueprint for Progency’s evolution. What Palantir accomplished with their Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) wasn’t merely customer success management—it was a systematic knowledge extraction mechanism that simultaneously delivered immediate value while building institutional intelligence that could be codified into software. Progency could deploy its own “Marketing Growth Engineers” who work within client ecosystems to solve immediate challenges while gathering domain knowledge that continually enhances the AI Agents Collective. These embedded specialists would cultivate deep client understanding that typical SaaS providers never achieve, enabling Progency to transition from service-heavy engagements to AI-powered automation as patterns emerge and agents evolve—maintaining white-glove outcomes while dramatically improving profit margins and scalability. The result? A virtuous cycle where human expertise guides AI development, which in turn amplifies human capability, creating an unmatched competitive advantage in marketing execution that competitors simply cannot replicate… Drawing inspiration from McKinsey’s elite problem-solvers and Palantir’s Forward Deployed Engineers, the Marketing Growth Engineer (MGE) represents Progency’s front-line catalyst for transformation—combining deep technical expertise with strategic marketing acumen to deliver measurable business impact… Through Marketing Growth Engineers, Progency delivers what neither traditional consultancies nor conventional martech platforms can offer: a partner that combines strategic insight with guaranteed execution, deep technical capabilities with marketing intuition, and immediate impact with long-term scalability… In an industry where marginal improvements and feature parity have become the norm, Progency offers the path to 10X growth—not through incremental enhancement, but through fundamental business model reinvention that aligns technology providers’ success with genuine client outcomes.”
Ten Transformative Principles
I asked Claude for a summary of the key ideas.
The ideas explored throughout these writings converge into a revolutionary framework that fundamentally transforms how marketing creates value. Progency isn’t merely another martech evolution—it’s a paradigm shift that reimagines the entire discipline through ten defining principles.
First, the PEAK Framework serves as Progency’s foundation, integrating Platform capabilities, Expert knowledge, AI Agents, and Kaizen methodology into a unified approach that transcends traditional service-software boundaries. This framework enables what was previously impossible: strategic depth combined with operational scale.
Second, performance-based economics creates perfect alignment between vendor and client success. By shifting from input-based pricing to outcome-based compensation, Progency only succeeds when brands achieve measurable growth—transforming the traditional vendor relationship into true partnership.
Third, the Best-Rest-Test-Next segmentation framework revolutionises customer strategy by focusing resources where they generate maximum impact. Progency specialises in converting Rest customers to Best status, systematically doubling the high-value segment whilst reducing expensive reacquisition needs.
Fourth, AI Agents Collective enables true N=1 personalisation at unprecedented scale. These specialised AI systems handle segmentation, content creation, journey orchestration, and analytics—creating a “Department of One” that delivers individualised experiences without proportional staffing increases.
Fifth, Growth Alpha methodology positions Progency as marketing’s investment manager, systematically delivering outperformance against established baselines through measurable, data-driven improvements that compound over time.
Sixth, the Marketing Growth Engineer role combines McKinsey’s strategic rigour with Palantir’s embedded expertise, creating specialists who bridge technical capability with marketing intuition whilst feeding institutional knowledge back into AI systems.
Seventh, AdWaste elimination addresses marketing’s greatest inefficiency by redirecting the 70% of budgets wasted on reacquisition towards retention-focused strategies that build deeper, more valuable relationships.
Eighth, the transition from “software without service” to “software with success” fills the execution gap that leaves most martech platforms underutilised, ensuring capabilities translate into measurable business outcomes.
Ninth, the flywheel effect creates self-reinforcing improvement cycles where better personalisation drives higher engagement, which funds further innovation, which enables even better results—transforming marketing from linear cost to exponential value creation.
Tenth, C-Suite elevation transforms CMOs from tactical operators into strategic business leaders by providing the metrics, accountability, and profit contribution that earn genuine boardroom influence.
Together, these principles create more than incremental improvement—they represent marketing’s fundamental evolution from acquisition-obsessed cost centre to retention-focused profit engine. The brands that embrace this transformation won’t merely improve their marketing efficiency; they’ll gain unprecedented competitive advantages through deeper customer relationships, lower acquisition costs, and sustainable profitable growth.
The choice facing marketing leaders is stark: continue managing the slow decline of traditional approaches whilst AdWaste drains profits, or embrace the Progency revolution that promises to transform marketing into the organisation’s primary growth driver. The $500 billion AdWaste crisis represents both marketing’s greatest challenge and its most significant opportunity—one that Progency is uniquely positioned to address through the systematic application of AI, expertise, and outcome-based accountability.
The future of marketing isn’t about better campaigns or smarter platforms—it’s about fundamental transformation that aligns technology, talent, and economics around the singular goal of creating lasting customer value and maximising customer equity—the total lifetime value of all customer relationships that represents a brand’s most valuable asset on the balance sheet.
