Bumbl 3.0: What We're Building Next And Why

Every week, something changes.

A new AI model, a new tool, an algorithm update, another capability that would have seemed impossible a year ago.

It's an exciting time to be working in marketing. But it's also a strange one. The pace of change is enough to make even experienced people question what they know, how they work and what will matter in a few years' time.

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, particularly as we've been working on the next chapter of Bumbl.

For most of advertising's history, agencies have operated around a relatively simple exchange. A business needs something made, and it pays people with the expertise to make it. An advert, a website, a video, a campaign.

The model made sense when producing those things required specialist tools, knowledge and resources that most businesses didn't have.

There is still partial truth in this, but the economics of making things are changing.

Today you can get to an output in a fraction of the time and resources it once took; the barriers to production are falling, and they'll continue to fall.

This creates an interesting problem for agencies. When everyone can make more, is making more really where the value is? I don't think it is.

In fact, I think we're entering a period where the ability to produce things becomes less important than the ability to understand what should be produced, and more than ever – making sure what is being produced is good enough to rise above the ocean of mediocrity.

More output doesn't necessarily create more impact. Sometimes it just creates more noise.

What are we actually solving for?

Over the last few months, we've been going back to first principles at Bumbl.

We wanted to understand what kind of company we should be building for this changing world. Not just how we should look or what services we should offer, but what problem we're fundamentally here to solve.

One thing became increasingly obvious: over the years, businesses have come to us asking for all sorts of things. Some need help with social media, some want to improve their Google Ads, others want better creative, more leads or a new strategy.

The requests change with the technology, the channels and whatever happens to be working at the time. But when you spend enough time asking questions and understanding what's happening inside the business, you tend to arrive at the same place.

They want to change their rate of growth.

Sometimes growth has stalled. Sometimes the business is growing, but nowhere near as quickly as its founders believe it could. Sometimes the marketing is producing plenty of activity, but not enough commercial return.

The symptoms are different but the underlying ambition is consistent.

The tools will change. The problem won't.

There's a temptation in marketing to organise ourselves around the tools we use. But tools are not the problem we're solving, they're how we solve it.

A business doesn't fundamentally want Google Ads, it wants customers. It doesn't want a content calendar, it wants attention from people who might buy something. It doesn't want creative, it wants ideas that connect with its audience and produce a result.

The distinction matters because the tools will keep changing. The way customers discover businesses, the way we create and distribute work and the economics of advertising will all change.

If we build an agency around today's tools, we'll spend the next decade chasing whatever replaces them.

I'd rather build one around the problem that remains; helping businesses grow.

A different kind of accountability.

I also think agencies need to become more comfortable being measured on the things that matter to the businesses they work with.

It's easy to report on activity, but a business ultimately cares about whether it's growing, what it costs to acquire a customer and whether that growth is commercially sustainable.

Revenue, CAC and momentum.

Of course, a marketing agency can't control every variable inside a business. Pricing, product, operations, sales – they all play their roles in growth. But we can take responsibility for understanding those variables rather than pretending they don't exist.

We can ask better questions, make more commercially informed recommendations, be willing to challenge a brief when we think there's a better way forward.

And we can measure our contribution by what changes, not just what gets delivered. That feels like a much more useful relationship between an agency and a client.

The next chapter of Bumbl.

All of this thinking has led us to a clearer idea of what Bumbl should be.

An agency that helps businesses change their rate of growth by bringing strategy, creativity, technology and execution together into one coherent system. We call that system SlingshotOS.

We're building it to move quickly, adapt as the world changes and stay focused on the commercial problems our clients actually need solved.

That's not an entirely new direction for us. In many ways, it's what we've been working towards for years. But we've become much clearer about why it matters, what we need to build and where we want to go.

Our new positioning brings that ambition down to these words:
We apply human insight and creativity to evolving technology, to help brands do better advertising.

And today, we're launching a new website and identity to reflect it.

The website is one expression of a much bigger change. We're continuing to evolve how we work, how we use technology, how our team operates and how we deliver value to the businesses that trust us.

I don't know exactly what the marketing industry will look like in five years. I'm not sure anyone does.

But I'm increasingly convinced that the agencies that thrive won't be the ones producing the most work, or even the ones using the latest tools.

They'll be the ones that understand what needs to change, bring the right people and technology together, and make it happen.

That's the company we want to build.

Onwards.

– Greg Miles, Bumbl Founder