Blunt Instrument
Paid acquisition · Eleven DTC brands
Blunt Instrument runs paid acquisition for eleven DTC brands on a flat monthly fee. When your spend goes up we earn the same, which is the only way this relationship stays honest.
Forty minutes. We open your account, say what is wrong, and you keep the notes whether or not you hire us.
01 — The fee
a month, flat, all channels, all creative
That is the number whether you spend 40k or 400k, and we will tell you when to spend less.
An agency on 10% of spend has one lever it will always pull: more spend. It will not tell you the third channel is buying customers you already had. It will not cap a campaign that is printing volume at a payback you cannot finance. We have watched it happen from the inside, twice.
On a flat fee the only way we grow is by keeping you, so we argue with you about efficiency instead of selling you scale you did not ask for.
02 — The board
Best twelve months: a supplement brand from 2.1 to 3.4 blended MER on 4x the spend.
Worst: a furniture brand we could not move past 1.6, where we resigned the account in month five and refunded month four.
Supplements
Subscription
2.1 → 3.4
4x spend
Held for 26 months, still running.
Skincare
DTC + Amazon
1.9 → 2.8
2.2x spend
Cut two channels in week three.
Outdoor apparel
Seasonal
2.4 → 3.1
3x spend
Creative volume did all of it.
Furniture
High AOV
1.6 → 1.6
Flat
Resigned month five. Refunded month four.
Pet nutrition
Subscription
2.7 → 2.2
1.4x spend
They left for a shop on 12% of spend.
Men's basics
Low AOV
1.4 → 1.5
Flat
A 34% return rate we were never going to fix with ads.
Blended MER, first month against best rolling twelve. Every account we have ever run is on this board.
03 — The week
We look at cohort payback, not ROAS. Platform numbers are a claim, not a fact, and thirty day payback is the only figure your bank agrees with.
We ship three new creative concepts. Not three edits of the same concept. Three arguments for why someone should buy the thing.
We kill whatever is below threshold, including things we made and liked. You get one page on what died and what replaced it, and nobody schedules a call about it.
04 — Creative
We have a studio and two editors. We shoot your product ourselves, weekly, because the bottleneck is never targeting and has not been since 2021.
12–20
new assets a week per account, cut for the placement they run in, not resized after the fact.
05 — Fit
Under 30k
a month in spend. The fee eats too much of the account and we would be taking your money.
Agency of record
theatre. Quarterly offsites, a named strategist who never opens the account, a brand platform.
40 slide decks
for your board every month. We send a one-page memo and a loom.
06 — The exit
Two months notice either way, and we hand over every account, pixel, creative file and audience without a call about it.
No retention meeting, no win-back offer, no clause that makes the ad account ours. Everything was built in your business manager from day one because it was always yours.
07 — Next
Send us the account and forty minutes. We will tell you what we would change in week one, what we would kill, and whether £11,500 a month is worth it for a business your size. Sometimes the answer is no.
Blunt Instrument · Flat fee · No percentage of spend