Imagine your ad account is finally working with your business instead of against it. The products getting pushed hard are the ones with the best margin and healthy stock, not just whatever’s converting best on the platform this week. Nothing sells out mid-campaign because the person managing your ads actually knew your rate of sale before they touched the budget. Every pound spent is working toward the plan you already made, not a plan the algorithm invented on your behalf.
That’s what working with me looks like. Not just an agency running your ad account from the outside, but a strategy built around your stock, your margins, and your actual commitments, managed by someone who understands what it takes to turn a plan into profit.
Here’s where that comes from.
For years, I sat in buying meetings months ahead of a season, committing to stock based on forecasts, sell-through rates, and margin targets. That was the job: work out what would sell, how much of it, and when, and make sure the numbers added up. Get it right and the business turned a serious profit. Get it wrong and you were sitting on dead stock in January or scrambling to reorder a bestseller that had already sold out.
What I remember most, though, isn’t the buying. It’s the disconnect that used to happen with marketing.
A product list would land on my desk (or on the marketing team’s desk, depending on which side of the fence you were on) usually after the orders were already placed. Marketing wanted hero pieces to push, to gift to press, to send to a celebrity for a shot at coverage. The problem was, by that point the buy was locked. Quantities were fixed. If a product got picked up and started moving, there was often very little room to react. I’ve seen a single press placement or a well-timed gift wipe out a stock position in days, with a replenishment order that couldn’t land in time to catch the demand. Good for column inches, expensive for the P&L.
Marketing and merchandising were technically working toward the same goal but rarely working from the same information. One side knew what was coming, what margin was on it, and what the plan was. The other side knew what would get attention. Neither had full visibility into what the other was doing until it was too late to change course.
Why this gap matters more now, not less
Marketing has changed a lot since then. It’s not just press and a Christmas TV campaign anymore. Social media and influencer marketing opened up dozens of channels that didn’t exist when I was buying: paid social, creator partnerships, UGC, retargeting, whatever platform is having a moment this quarter. That’s genuinely powerful. Brands can move fast, test messaging, and reach an audience with a precision that a TV ad buy never could.
But more channels and more speed also means more ways to create the exact same mismatch I used to see, just faster and at a larger scale. A Meta ad account can scale spend on a product line in days. If that scaling isn’t connected to what’s actually in stock, what the rate of sale was planned to be, or what margin that line is carrying, you can end up in the same position: chasing performance that the business can’t actually fulfil, or worse, burning ad spend pushing a line that was never meant to be a hero product in the first place.
This is the gap I built Ads Couture to close.
What I actually do differently
Meta and Google’s algorithms are good at one thing: finding performance within the ad account. They optimise for clicks, conversions, and whatever signal you feed them. What they don’t know, and can’t know, is your business.
They don’t know your commitments to a supplier. They don’t know the rate of sale you forecasted for a line six months ago. They don’t know that one product carries double the margin of another, even if the cheaper one converts better on paid social. They don’t know what’s arriving in three weeks or what’s already run out. The algorithm optimises for the account. It doesn’t optimise for your business.
That’s the piece I bring in from my retail background. When I manage an account, I’m not just looking at CPA and ROAS in isolation. I want to understand your stock position, your AOV, your margin by product line, and what your actual plans are for the quarter. That context changes how a campaign gets built and where budget goes. A product with strong margin and healthy stock might be worth pushing hard, even if its on-platform conversion rate looks average next to a lower-margin bestseller. A line that’s about to sell out shouldn’t be the one getting the ad spend this week, no matter how well it’s performing in the algorithm’s eyes.
This is what I mean when I say I work as an extension of your team, not just someone running your ad account from the outside. Weekly meetings, visibility into what’s actually happening on your side of the business, and a strategy that’s built around your commitments and your numbers, not just what the platform says is working.
Why this matters if you’re choosing an agency
If you’re an ecommerce brand already investing seriously in paid media, or a head of marketing weighing up agencies for Meta and Google Ads management, this is the question worth asking any agency you’re considering: do they understand your business, or just your ad account?
Most agencies are very good at the second part. Fewer are set up to do the first, because it takes more than media buying experience. It takes someone who’s sat on the other side of the business, in the buying and merchandising seat, and knows what it actually costs when marketing and stock aren’t talking to each other.
That’s the gap I work in. If you want an ads partner who thinks about your business the way a merchandiser would, not just a media planner, get in touch and let’s talk about what that could look like for your account.