Marketing programmes,
built like production systems.
IFF is a Leeds digital agency that operates marketing programmes the way a good engineering team operates a product — with version control, weekly dashboards, written runbooks, and the discipline to ship the same thing every Tuesday for two years running.
// IFF Digital Media — operating reference export const firm = { established: "2017, Leeds", team: 18, // operators, in-house active: 9, // engagements at a time cadence: "weekly drops, monthly retros, quarterly resets", minimum: "£14k/mo · 6 months", promise: "the principal who designs ships", };
The operating thesis.
A small set of opinions we have not budged on since 2017. We hire against them, refer clients in and out around them, and price our retainers against them.
One principal per engagement.
Every engagement has one named operator at the top of the email thread — not an account manager, not a "client success lead," not a layer of pods between you and the work. The person who designs the programme is the person who ships it. If you cannot get them on a call within 24 hours, that is the bug, not the feature.
Documentation is a deliverable.
Every process we build is written down in /your-team-notion, not ours. The four-page operating runbook we hand off at the end of phase two is the asset we consider our actual deliverable; every paid ad and email campaign downstream is a footnote to it. If the engagement ever ends, your team should be able to run the programme from the runbook for at least six months without us.
The unit of work is the iteration.
Weekly creative drops. Monthly performance reviews. Quarterly strategic resets. Not campaigns. Not sprints. Not launches. The unit is the same every week, and the cadence does not change because the calendar changed. You can set your watch by us; clients have told us we are the most boring part of their week, and they meant it as a compliment.
The best marketing programmes look indistinguishable from a good engineering team's product — versioned, documented, observable, and shipped on a predictable schedule.
Programme stack v1.4
Six modules, each priced individually, run by a single principal. You can subscribe to any combination — most engagements use three or four modules together, and the minimum order is one.
| Module | What it ships | Floor |
|---|---|---|
| brand.systems | Naming, marks, narrative architecture, voice. 10-week sprint with a brand book and rollout plan written for your team to run from. | £24k flat |
| paid.acquisition | Meta, Google, TikTok, second-tier channels. Account architecture, weekly creative testing roster, monthly performance review. | £14k/mo |
| lifecycle.crm | Email, SMS, on-site programmes. We touch your ESP directly, rebuild segmentation, document everything in your tools. | £7k/mo |
| web.build | Marketing sites, microsites, landers. Designed in the studio, built in the studio. The principal who designs ships. | £18k flat |
| analytics.measurement | GA4, server-side tagging via Stape, CAPI, attribution modelling, weekly board dashboards. 6-week build sprint + maintenance. | £22k + £4k/mo |
| fractional.cmo | Sits on your weekly leadership call, owns the marketing P&L, runs the vendor stack. 9–14 month engagements, designed to hand off. | £15k/mo |
We do not currently run programmatic display, OOH, or earned PR in-house. For any of those, we'll refer you to a Leeds shop we trust — without expecting a referral fee.
Operating cadence.
What a week, month, and quarter look like inside an active engagement. Predictable, written down, and the same every time.
Weeklycron(0 16 * * 5)
Friday 16:00. Written status from your principal — what shipped, what is queued, what we want your input on next week. Sent before close of business, every week, no exceptions.
Weeklycron(0 10 * * 2)
Tuesday 10:00. Creative review. The week's drops, queued in your tools. You can flag anything in the queue and we'll adjust by Thursday.
Monthlycron(0 14 1 * *)
First Monday. 90-minute performance review against the dashboards your team operates from. We bring a recommendation, not a deck. You accept it, or send us back to think harder.
Quarterlycron(0 10 1 1,4,7,10 *)
Start of each quarter. A one-page strategic reset. What changed. What we got wrong. What we are doing for the next 90 days. Goes to you and your board.
If we miss a Friday status or a Tuesday review without 24h notice, you get the following month at 50% off the floor, no questions asked. We do not miss these.
Engagement spec.
The plain particulars of working with us. Most of these are non-negotiable; the ones that are negotiable are marked.
| floor | £14k / month per module |
| minimum.term | 6 months, with a 30-day clean-break clause at month four |
| billing | Monthly in advance, GBP, 14-day net |
| access | You provision your tooling (ad accounts, ESP, analytics, warehouse) to a single shared address on our domain |
| documentation | Lives in your Notion / Confluence / Coda. Not ours. |
| handover | Four-page runbook delivered at end of phase two and updated quarterly. Your team can run from it. |
| kill.switch | 30 days' written notice from month five onwards. We run a clean offboarding to whomever you bring in. |
| rate.review | Annual, on engagement anniversary. RPI-linked. |
Phases
Every IFF engagement runs through four phases on a predictable timeline:
- Diagnose (weeks 01–02) — audit of every channel and every pound of spend over the prior 18 months; six customer interviews; one document at the end.
- Architect (weeks 03–06) — write the operating runbook. You sign it off; it becomes the document we run from.
- Build (weeks 07–14) — rebuild accounts, ship the first creative drops, wire the analytics layer, set up the weekly dashboard.
- Operate (weeks 15+) — the cadence above. Weekly · monthly · quarterly. Indefinitely, if it is working.
The firm.
IFF Digital Media was founded in 2017 by three operators who had spent the prior decade watching marketing programmes get built badly — pitched on a deck, executed in a pod, handed off to an account-management layer, and then quietly re-pitched eighteen months later when the contract came up for renewal. We have built the opposite kind of firm.
We are eighteen people on the fourth floor at Century Way in Thorpe Park, ten minutes from Leeds city centre. We have been at nine active engagements since 2021 — the size at which the principals can still sit on every brief. The roster turns over slowly; average engagement length is twenty-six months.
The clients we keep tend to be operators between £4m and £40m in revenue, mostly D2C and digital-first retail, with at least one senior person on the leadership team who can read a dashboard with us in the room. We say no to a high percentage of inbound — usually because the fit is wrong, occasionally because we are simply full.
Start a brief.
A short paragraph is enough. If it's a fit, we reply within two business days with a sensible first conversation. If it's not, we tell you and pass you on to the best Leeds firm we know for the work.
// minimum viable brief POST mailto:[email protected] { "company": "your company name", "stage": "founder-led | post-seed | series-a | scale", "problem": "what isn't working right now", "timing": "when would you like to start", }
Suite 4.2, 1175 Century Way
Thorpe Park, Leeds LS15 8ZB