I initially joined England Athletics as a consultant on RUN:EA, a membership platform designed to support runners through coaching content and exclusive member benefits.

At the time, paid media was being managed by a large agency. Despite consistent investment, performance had become a growing concern. Customer acquisition costs had climbed to around £152 per member, a figure that was completely unsustainable for the product.

Campaigns were being managed, budgets were being spent and reports were being delivered, but there was very little proactive effort to improve results. The account felt as though it was being maintained rather than actively developed.

Having worked closely with the team and developed a strong understanding of both the product and audience, I proposed taking over the account and rebuilding the strategy from the ground up.

Rather than waiting for new creative assets to appear, I worked with the team to rapidly develop and test a wide range of messages, angles and creative concepts.

The goal was to identify the one angle that had the potential to transform account performance.

Once we identified the strongest-performing message, new variations were produced, budget was consolidated behind the winning creative and underperforming ads were quickly removed.

Every decision was driven by performance data, allowing us to focus spend where it would have the greatest commercial impact.

In the two months prior to the account rebuild, RUN:EA acquired 21 new members at a CPA of £152.

In the two months following the testing period, the platform acquired 73 new members for the same level of spend, reducing CPA to £43.73.

This represented a 248% increase in memberships acquired and a 71% reduction in acquisition costs.

More importantly, it proved a principle I see repeatedly across paid media accounts.

Performance rarely improves because of campaign tweaks alone. It improves when somebody is actively looking for opportunities, generating new ideas and using data to guide creative decisions.

Paid media works best when you have a partner who is constantly testing, learning and recommending what comes next.