Jack Relton
Before digital marketing, I made furniture. The first rule at the fine furniture school where I did my training in Somerset was that new trainees had to master the maintenance and use of hand tools — marking gauges, callipers, saws, chisels, planes — before they were allowed to even set foot in the machine room. The reason: whilst the machines were extraordinarily powerful, and could produce beautiful work fast, they needed a skilled operator. Someone who understood and respected the materials and the equipment. Hand planing a block of maple will teach you that maple is a very dense wood — compared to, say, pine — and needs to be taken with many shallow passes with a sharp blade. When you eventually come to the machine room to do your planing, you will know that the cut depth should be set accordingly, and you will understand what is happening inside the machine. And the finished result will be good. The people who got the most out of the machines were the ones who had first learned to do it by hand.
That attention to craft is what I've brought to performance marketing for the past decade. The materials are different. The mindset isn't. And the parallel is direct: AI is our machine room — extraordinarily capable, producing excellent work at scale. But it needs an operator who has done it by hand first. Someone who understands the brief, the audience, and — most importantly — when the machine is the right tool at all.
I've worked at large network agencies — Omnicom, GroupM — and at smaller independents. I've managed campaigns spanning Search, Social, Programmatic and Affiliates, spending over £5M per month for some of the most performance-driven brands in the UK. I like getting into the detail. I like solving problems that don't have obvious answers. I like building things that actually work — with cutting edge automation and human ingenuity.
Focussed on the craft, supercharged by tech.
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