Most marketing fails quietly.

Not with a disaster. With a campaign that ran, reported acceptably, and changed nothing about the business. We built Groundswell to be the opposite kind of company: small enough that the people who sold the work are the people who do it, and stubborn enough to argue about whether it is working.

We started in 2014 with three people and one belief that has held up: the interesting problems in marketing are almost never marketing problems. They are pricing problems, product problems, or a promise the company cannot keep. An agency that is not allowed to say that is an expensive way to make banner ads.

So we organised around the argument rather than the deliverable. Strategy, creative, media and engineering sit on the same team from week one, and they are accountable to the same number. There is no handover between departments because there are no departments to hand over between.

We are thirty-one people across Amsterdam and Toronto. We take on roughly twelve engagements a year, which is fewer than we could sell and about as many as we can do properly. When we are full, we say so.