The Experience vs. Expertise Gap

Most digital professionals today have learned their craft in an era of abundant venture capital and growth-at-all-costs mentality. They’ve often optimized for vanity metrics, managed campaigns with seemingly unlimited budgets, and rarely faced the harsh realities of profit-driven decision making.
When economic headwinds hit and CFOs start demanding ROI justification for every digital penny spent, these professionals often struggle to adapt their strategies to more constrained, performance-focused environments.

We’ve seen countless “senior” digital marketers who can build topline attribution models but have never had to defend a media budget in a board meeting and lack trading experience which understandly takes time to acheive. They understand programmatic advertising inside-out but can’t explain why their customer acquisition costs increased 40% while conversion rates remained flat.

When marketing teams lack digital touchpoint granularity or user pathway modelling immaturity then efficiency starts looking rather limited so whether you need a true ROAS, T-ROAS or CLTV in support of CAC efficiency gain wherever your organisation is positioned then you need to review if the current strategy is going to get you there and when.

Methodology

The Digital Counsel methodology involves establishing localised trading frameworks that validate hypotheses about digital channel effectiveness, channel reach & resonance, and messaging positioning before scaling investment. This includes comprehensive audit of existing digital assets, team strength dynamics, identification of market-specific opportunities, and development of phased expansion strategies that minimize risk while maximizing learning velocity.
Today’s digital ecosystem rewards platform proficiency over strategic thinking. Professionals become experts in the mechanics of Paid media, Google Analytics, or HubSpot, but lack the broader business acumen to understand when these tools,strategy or even messaging is the wrong solution entirely. They’ve optimized campaigns within platform silos without grasping how these efforts integrate into larger customer journey orchestration and when that impacts revenue generation or pipeline creation with diminishing CLTV then you have a problem.
The most dangerous candidates are those with impressive certifications and technical skills but no experience navigating platform changes, algorithm updates, or sudden policy shifts that can devastate campaign performance overnight. When these are adding to a lack of actual trading expertise with that hands-on understanding then you need a support mechanism to nurture existing digital teams and realign digital performance that aligns to the KPI’s.
Digital roles have segmented into more and more specialisms over the last 5+ years where the more established and experienced digital peers have 10+ Years of experience which covered BaU on the core digital pillars of ‘Acquisition, Conversion & Retention’ where as more recent talent are working on limited trading understanding and expertise but also digital silos which create barriers to learning, development and accountability.
There is no one to blame here, it’s simply a dynamic of how the digital eco-system have evolved over the years where an almost unlimited head count has been offered whenever a ‘digital’ challenge is identified and quite often it does not fix the problem long term but may provide some interim accountability.

Digital is changing so make sure you evolve with it otherwise you will get left behind.