Episode 8 - ELEPHANT IN THE BOARDROOM
Organic traffic is falling, revenue is holding, and nobody can agree on which number to believe.
This episode of Elephant in the Boardroom brings together Faye Daffarn, former Managing Director UK & EMEA at Tug and now Founder of Authority People, and Ian James, Global CEO and Co-Founder of Silverbullet, two agency leaders who've stopped waiting for the industry to build a better measurement standard and started building their own.
When the Old Metric Stops Telling the Truth
Faye opens with the scenario every agency now faces: a board watching organic traffic drop by 30 percent while revenue holds steady or grows. Her first move isn't to defend the number. It's to challenge whether it was ever the right one.
"Traffic is not an objective. We should be looking at growth."
Discovery has changed. People arrive through video, reviews, social search and AI platforms, not just a ranked list of ten blue links. Faye's honest about how hard that shift is for senior marketers who've spent a career trusting one KPI. Her answer isn't a replacement metric, it's a broader picture: market share, share of voice, mentions in AI tools, brand visibility, stacked alongside the old measure rather than instead of it. She's built causal measurement tools at Tug specifically to answer the harder question boards actually want answered, which is what a piece of activity, like a podcast sponsorship, does to the bottom line.
"It doesn't take a rocket scientist to do PPC. What we can do is show you how this works, or how you dial that up."
The Data Was Already There, It Just Wasn't Joined Up
Ian's starting point is different. With 25 years spent integrating brands and customers through digital technology and data, his view is that most brands never built the data foundations to measure properly in the first place, and no AI strategy can fix that.
"It's not about what's missing. It's about joining up the dots."
At Silverbullet, the work centres on known customers: the data generated at the point someone actually transacts, whether that's a website order or a table booked in a restaurant. Ian's consistent finding is that valuable data exists but sits in disconnected silos, split across martech and adtech stacks, different platforms, different countries for global clients, and different agencies working to different agendas. Before any AI tool adds value, the organisation has to know where its own data lives and who owns it.
"All an AI tool is really going to do is derive whatever you're asking it to do. You have to have an organised and functioning data strategy first."
His advice to clients tempted to buy AI tools before fixing this is blunt: slow down. The smart clients treat it as a transformation journey, not a purchase, working back from a real business problem rather than starting from "we've got an AI solution."
Reporting Up: Speaking CFO
Both guests are increasingly pitching finance, not marketing. Ian frames it from the CFO's seat: it's not really about revenue, it's about EBITDA impact, and that means tracing a line from a piece of marketing activity all the way through to the transaction it influenced.
Faye's experience matches it. She's now pitching more CFOs than any other role in her career, and her agency's tools exist to answer their question directly: does this activity move the number that actually matters.
"I merrily skipped hand in hand with my client to the CFO and said, please, could we have some more. And we could."
The skill underneath it, both agree, is translation. What gets discussed with a performance director day to day has to be simplified into something a board can act on without losing what actually matters in the data.
Where Brand Fits Now
Faye's prediction for the year ahead is that brand investment is about to matter more, not less. If AI search surfaces three or four recommendations instead of ten links, being one of the names it recognises becomes the new shortlist. Ian agrees brand hasn't lost importance, but is clear it plays a different role depending on the client. For a CPG alcohol brand working across multiple countries, most of the work is about building brand preference. For an e-commerce fashion client, brand barely comes up. Everything is measured in transaction value.
"It is very different for different clients. A big CPG has got completely different needs to a fashion brand that's transacted often."
Key Insights
Traffic isn't the objective, growth is. A falling organic number doesn't mean a failing strategy if revenue is holding, but agencies need new metrics to prove where growth is actually coming from
Data problems are usually organisational, not technical. The insight is often already sitting in a martech or adtech stack, just split across teams, countries and agencies who aren't talking to each other
AI strategy depends on data strategy. Buying AI tools before fixing data foundations is, in Ian's view, doing the work backwards
Custom measurement tools beat generic ones. A causal measurement tool built for one client's specific question proved incremental value that a big tech stack never could
The audience for agency reporting has shifted upward. Both guests found themselves pitching CFOs directly, and the conversation is now about EBITDA impact, not marketing metrics
Brand strategy needs a client-by-client answer. Its role in an AI search world is growing for some sectors and nearly irrelevant for others, depending on how the customer actually buys
What This Actually Means
Neither guest claims to have solved measurement for good. What they share is a refusal to wait for the industry to agree on a standard ruler before acting. Faye builds bespoke tools for specific client questions. Ian starts every engagement by mapping where the data actually sits before touching any AI layer. The through-line is a mindset less about chasing the next platform and more about getting the fundamentals right first.
"If you look back 15 years, no one recognised that the walled garden platforms were a data business and that your data was their currency."
About Supo:
Supo provides people-first intelligence software for professional services firms, helping businesses maximize profit and motivate their people through powerful, AI-enabled business intelligence dashboards. By connecting over 500+ platforms and providing real-time data analysis, Supo helps firms make better data-driven decisions about their profit, projects, and people.
For more information about Supo: www.supo.co.uk
About Authority People:
Authority People is a fractional MD and growth consultancy founded by Faye Daffarn, bringing data-first operational strategy, P&L restructuring and AI-ready frameworks to scaling digital agencies and regional SMEs, alongside advisory work with purpose-driven organisations and charities.
For more information about Authority People: https://www.authoritypeople.com/
About Silverbullet:
Silverbullet is a global data-driven customer experience transformation company, helping brands architect, build and activate their data to deliver more effective, personalised marketing.
For more information about Silverbullet: http://www.wearesilverbullet.com/
The ruler isn't broken. It's just not built yet. It's the metric nobody's agreed on, the data sitting in silos that were never meant to talk to each other, the CFO question an agency hasn't learned to answer. Ready to find out what's actually hiding in your data? Listen to Faye Daffarn and Ian James on Elephant in the Boardroom.