Giving media a clearer commercial role

During OKA’s rebuilding period, the brief was to review paid search, paid social and affiliates, and make the accounts and reporting more useful for commercial decisions.

That meant looking beyond individual channel measures. The business needed a clearer connection between what people were buying, where demand existed and how media investment could support it.

Account structure and channel measures needed to connect more clearly to category demand, product economics and the role of each channel. Traffic and attributed sales were useful signals, but they did not give the whole picture.

Improving digital media was the starting point for a wider media approach. A common view of demand and economics could give paid search, paid social and affiliates a clearer purpose within a business that sells both online and through stores.

The work combined a channel audit with a reporting framework: a common category view and weekly productivity reporting, bringing activity, attributed orders, revenue and media spend into the same conversation.

The review also set out GA4 reporting improvements and clearer attribution conventions. These would help teams understand what a measure includes, compare like with like and recognise where a change in reporting affects the apparent result.

The account review, reporting framework and populated planning workbook gave the team a common basis for decisions. Recommendations for account restructuring and tracking remained distinct from confirmed implementation in live systems.

The central planning tool was Media Engine, Dark Horse’s productised service for planning media from the bottom up. For OKA, it brought the extensive product line detail—selling prices, costs and intake margins—together with matched keyword volumes.

Product economics provided the starting acquisition-cost allowance. Monthly search demand provided a view of category seasonality: when people were looking for relevant products, and how that demand changed through the year.

The workbook translates these inputs into product-level cost guidance, monthly search-category budgets and a proposed channel mix, assessed against revenue and profit objectives, the available marketing budget and cost-of-sales targets. Online and store economics and the chosen attribution assumptions also inform the plan.

Media Engine works back from the target using product economics and seasonal demand, giving the business a clearer basis for judging whether its revenue ambitions and budget fit together. It helps frame what to promote, when to invest and how much acquisition cost the business can support.

The purpose is to improve confidence in reaching the revenue target within budget while protecting the required profitability. Cost allowances guide bidding and allocation decisions; they are not minimum auction bids. Results remain conditional on demand, conversion and channel-response assumptions.

The populated planning workbook is a substantive deliverable. A live profit-based bidding system and execution of the broader media plan are not claimed as outcomes of the assignment.

Retail Week’s January 2026 report ↗ reported a 21% year-on-year sales uplift in the run-up to Christmas, which OKA credited to Black Friday momentum and its winter sale period.

This was after the engagement and concerned the whole business. It is separate context, not evidence that our work caused that result.

The assignment brought together an account review, reporting foundations and a populated Media Engine planning workbook with product-level cost guidance, category budgets and modelled media allocations.

Digital marketing became the foundation for a broader planning conversation: what demand exists, what it is worth serving and what role media should play. The next task is to test and develop that direction with reliable commercial evidence.