Performance Marketing Consultant at C-Level
A performance marketing consultant working at C-level does not run your ad accounts. They audit unit economics, fix the marketing to revenue ratio, and hand you a system your team can run without them.
What the role actually is at C-level
A performance marketing consultant engaged at C-level is not brought in to write ad copy, manage bids, or run a campaign calendar. That is execution work, and it belongs with an agency or an internal team. The C-level engagement exists because a business has spend that is not producing a defensible return, and nobody inside the organisation has the authority or the outside view to challenge how that spend is measured, allocated, and governed. The job is diagnostic and structural: find where the money is going, prove or disprove that it is working, and rebuild the system so the answer is visible every week rather than argued over every quarter.
The audit: where the work starts
Every engagement starts the same way, with an audit of spend against outcomes, not an audit of creative or channel tactics.
- Full channel-by-channel and market-by-market breakdown of spend against CPA, payback period and marginal return
- A test of whether reported ROAS or attribution numbers actually reconcile against real revenue and cash, since inflated attribution is the most common thing I find
- A review of contracts with agencies, affiliates, and media partners for structures that reward volume over quality
- An assessment of whether the internal team has the reporting cadence and authority to act on what the numbers show, or whether decisions are made on instinct or on the last person who presented
The metrics that matter (and the ones that do not)
Engagement models and fee ranges
How this work is structured depends on the scope of the problem, and the fee is set against that scope, agreed directly after a short diagnostic conversation, not from a published rate card.
- Fixed-fee diagnostic: a defined engagement to audit spend and deliver findings and a remediation plan, typically weeks not months
- Fractional retainer: a few days a month or a few days a week over two to six months to implement the remediation plan alongside the internal team
- Interim leadership: a near full-time mandate, usually six to twelve months, when the organisation needs someone to run the function directly during the reset, not just advise on it
- Outcome-linked components are sometimes layered onto the base fee where a measurable commercial target is agreed in advance, but the base of the engagement is always the diagnostic and structural work, not a percentage-of-spend arrangement that would create the same incentive problem the engagement exists to fix
What gets handed over at the end
A C-level engagement is not designed to create a permanent dependency on the consultant. The deliverable at the end is a system the internal team owns.
- A unit economics framework (CPA, payback, marketing to revenue ratio) that the internal team can run weekly without outside help
- Renegotiated or restructured contracts with agencies and partners that reward quality over volume
- A reporting cadence and governance structure so future spend decisions are made against evidence, not instinct
- A trained internal owner of the framework, so the discipline survives after the engagement ends
When an agency is the wrong answer
Businesses often hire an agency when the real problem is not execution capacity but measurement and governance. An agency will happily run more campaigns on a spend base that has never been properly audited, and will optimise against whatever metric they are handed, even if that metric is wrong. Hiring an agency before fixing measurement is how a marketing to revenue ratio gets worse, not better. The right sequence is: audit and fix the measurement and governance first, at C-level, then decide whether the execution gap is best closed with an agency, an in-house hire, or existing team capacity now correctly directed.
Why an operator, not a marketing agency principal
There is a real difference between someone who has advised on marketing spend and someone who has carried the P&L that spend rolled up into. I ran a 120 million euro annual marketing budget as Chief Marketing Officer of LeoVegas Group, a listed Nordic operator, against a 112.5 million euro P&L, cut the marketing to revenue ratio from 40 to 30 percent, and delivered 50 million euro of incremental revenue in under 12 months while doing it. That is the standard I bring to a consulting engagement: the discipline of someone who was personally accountable for the number, not someone presenting a framework from the outside.
https://niklaslindahl.com/services/performance-marketing-consultant