In my last article, I introduced the Performance Loop – a six-stage framework for making your campaigns work harder by building structured, in-flight optimisation into the way your team operates.
The process itself is straightforward. Set up your measurement framework before launch. Review performance weekly. Optimise based on what the data tells you. Report regularly. Loop your learnings back into the next brief.
But here’s the thing nobody tells you when they hand you a measurement framework: the process is the easy bit.
What actually determines whether it works is what happens in the room.
Multiple teams, one campaign
Most marketing campaigns involve multiple distinct groups of people: depending on your team structure it could include:
the campaign team who own the brief and the strategy;
the digital team who own your owned digital channels (e.g. website and email);
the analytics team or data owners who own the numbers;
the agency or agencies who own the creative and paid media execution;
the stakeholders who your team are ultimately accountable to for the campaign’s success.
In theory, these groups are all working toward the same goal. In practice, they can easily end up operating in silos, with each team doing what they see as ‘their bit’ and no one actually looking at how all those ‘bits’ piece together into a successful, holistic campaign. Sometimes, all that pressure can fall to the campaign team – who spend too much of their time chasing colleagues for data, trying to interpret data they don’t understand or attempting to fathom why data from different sources seems to be telling them different things.
This is one of the most common reasons performance review processes fail. Not because the dashboard wasn’t built, or the KPIs weren’t agreed, or the meeting wasn’t in the diary. But because the groups in the room don’t feel equally responsible for what the data is showing them.
It’s rarely the only reason, though. In my experience, the Performance Loop lives or dies on a handful of cultural foundations: shared accountability, the safety to ask questions and admit what you don’t know, the courage to call out what isn’t working, the patience to let the data settle, and a senior leader who sets the right tone. Get those right, and the process largely takes care of itself.
Let’s take each in turn.
1. Shared accountability isn’t a nice-to-have
The weekly review meeting only delivers results if everyone in it feels the same level of ownership over the campaign’s performance – regardless of which team they sit in or which agency they work for.
That means the analytics team aren’t there to present numbers and leave. They’re there to help the room understand what the numbers mean, to dig into anomalies, and to bring their expertise to bear on the question of what to do next. They’re as invested in the outcome as the campaign team.
It means the agency isn’t there to defend their work. They’re there as genuine partners in the optimisation process – bringing their knowledge of the channels, the creative and the audience to a shared conversation about performance. The best agency relationships I’ve experienced are the ones where the account team walks into the review meeting already knowing what they’d change and why.
It means everyone takes part in the whole discussion, not just the part about their own channel. The social media specialist might spot something in the search data that the search team has missed; the agency might have a theory about why website visitors are dropping off. When people only tune in for ‘their bit’, those connections never get made.
It also means getting the basics right. Every channel owner provides their data on time and in the agreed format, so the dashboard is ready before the meeting rather than pieced together in a last-minute scramble. Late data isn’t a minor admin issue: it means the whole room is making decisions with part of the picture missing.
And it means the campaign team aren’t the only ones accountable for results. When everyone in the room has skin in the game, the quality of the conversation – and the decisions that come out of it – improves dramatically.
2. Psychological safety isn’t soft – it’s strategic
For that conversation to happen, people need to feel safe having it.
This matters more than most leaders acknowledge. A weekly review meeting where people are worried about saying the wrong thing, asking a question that reveals a gap in their knowledge, or putting forward a hypothesis that turns out to be wrong, is a meeting where the collective intelligence of the room stays locked away. You end up with a lot of nodding and not much insight.
The conditions that make the Performance Loop work are the same conditions that make any high-performing team work: people feel able to ask what they think might be a stupid question, or admit they don’t understand what a data point is telling them, knowing it won’t be held against them. They feel able to put forward a hypothesis about why something is performing the way it is, knowing it will be taken seriously rather than dismissed. And they feel able to challenge a conclusion, knowing the challenge will be heard as intellectual curiosity rather than personal criticism.
That safety comes with a responsibility, too, particularly for channel specialists. Every channel has its own language: CPAs, VCRs, ROAS, bounce rates, quality scores, the list goes on. It’s second nature to the people who use it every day, but can be baffling to almost everyone else. When a discussion slips into channel jargon, the rest of the room disengages, and the people who might have spotted the answer stop listening. The best specialists translate as they go, explaining not just what the number is, but what it’s telling us and why it matters for the campaign.
3. Brave enough to switch it off, patient enough to wait
Psychological safety also gives people the confidence to say the hardest thing in any review meeting: this isn’t working. It’s tempting to keep a struggling channel or message running in the hope that it turns a corner, especially when someone championed it or a stakeholder is attached to it. But every week an underperforming activity stays live is budget that could be working harder elsewhere. The best teams are prepared to make bold decisions, including switching things off altogether, without anyone feeling it’s a black mark against them.
The same applies to trying new things. A live campaign is the perfect place to test a new format, audience or message, as long as everyone agrees upfront how success will be judged. Some tests will fail, and that’s fine – in fact, failed tests are evidence of a team that is constantly pushing boundaries and innovating, and should be celebrated. What isn’t fine is quietly keeping a failed experiment running because nobody wants to be the one to admit it hasn’t worked.
Honesty matters in the reporting, too. When stakeholders are pushing hard for good news, it can be tempting to present the numbers in their most flattering light. But a massaged report doesn’t make the campaign perform any better. It just means the problems get fixed later, if at all.
Courage needs to be balanced with patience, though. One of the hardest rules in the Performance Loop is resisting major optimisations in the first two weeks after launch. Algorithms need time to bed in, audiences need time to self-select, and early data is often volatile and misleading. Jump in too soon and you risk reacting to noise rather than signal, and undoing the learning the platforms need to perform. Fix anything that’s clearly broken, like a faulty tracking link, straight away. But agree the two-week rule upfront, and hold the line even when early results make everyone nervous.
None of this happens by accident. It has to be modelled from the top of the room.
4. Setting the tone as a leader
If you’re the most senior person in the weekly review meeting – whether you’re the marketing director, the campaign lead or the client-side contact – the culture of that meeting is yours to set.
In practice, that means a few specific things.
Be in the room. It sounds obvious, but it’s the foundation for everything else. If the most senior person regularly sends apologies or drops in for ten minutes, the team quickly concludes the meeting is optional, and the energy drains out of it. Turning up consistently, and fully engaged, tells everyone this matters.
Ask the first stupid question yourself. Nothing signals psychological safety faster than the most senior person in the room saying “I might be missing something here, but can someone explain why this metric is moving in this direction?” Even when the specialists are explaining things clearly, the sheer volume of data can be overwhelming, and once people lose the thread, important observations get missed. So be ready to pause and play back what you’ve understood so far. Even if you didn’t need the recap yourself, someone else probably did, and it gives everyone permission to do the same.
Take every hypothesis seriously, and follow it up. When someone offers a theory about why a channel is underperforming, the right response is “that’s interesting – how would we test that?” not a quick dismissal. Then agree who will investigate it and bring the answer back to the next meeting, so it doesn’t quietly get lost. Even hypotheses that turn out to be wrong are valuable: they help the room think through the problem more rigorously.
Separate performance from blame. The question in the room is always “what is the data telling us and what do we do about it?” – never “whose fault is this?” The moment the meeting starts to feel like a debrief on who let the campaign down, the honest conversation stops. People start protecting themselves instead of improving the campaign.
Invite the agencies into the conversation, not just the output. Brief your agency partners on the spirit of the review process, not just the logistics. The best agency teams will come to the meeting with a point of view on the data already formed. Give them the space to share it.
Make it safe to be brave. Back the team when they recommend switching something off or trying something new, and when they bring you numbers that aren’t what anyone hoped for. How a leader reacts to bad news in week three determines whether they’ll hear the truth in week four.
Protect the long game. When a campaign ends, the next one is already demanding attention, and it’s easy to let the longer-term review slip. But brand effects build gradually, and in B2B, new business can take six to twelve months to land. Insist that the reviews at six and twelve months actually happen, and turn up to them, so the campaign’s longer-term impact isn’t missed and its learnings make it into the next brief.
Where this leaves you
If you read my last article on the Performance Loop and thought “yes, but getting my team to actually engage with this is the hard part” – you were right. The process gives you the structure. The culture gives you the results.
Both are learnable. Both take time. And both are worth the investment.
The campaigns that consistently outperform aren’t usually the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated tools. They’re the ones run by teams who have learned to think together in the same room, ask honest questions of the data, and treat every week of a live campaign as another opportunity to get closer to the best possible result.
That’s the loop. And it only closes when everyone in the room is pulling in the same direction.
If you’d like to talk through how to build this kind of performance culture within your marketing team, I’d love to hear from you.
Photo by Campaign Creators on Unsplash
