The Thinking Behind New Rebellion
I’ve sat on both sides of the table. Agency-side, building campaigns. Client-side, managing budgets. The same problems show up everywhere, and they’re almost never about capability. They’re about structure.
Hi, I’m Fil.
I’ve spent nearly the past decade in leadership roles across both agency-side and client-side marketing. I’ve managed a top 50 marketing budget in the country. I’ve built internal teams from scratch. I’ve run agency relationships and been on the other side of them. And the single most consistent observation from all of that experience is this: most marketing underperformance has nothing to do with talent or ideas. It’s structural.
Teams are at capacity. Budgets somehow always feel tight. Impact isn’t where it should be. Marketing gets treated as a cost centre after targets aren’t hit. People point fingers. And nothing fundamentally changes. Just another crisis meeting. Another restructure. Another new hire who inherits the same broken system.
New Rebellion was started because I got tired of watching that cycle repeat.
What I learned on the agency side
On the agency side, I learned how to move fast. How to make campaigns run under pressure. How to stretch lean budgets across too many channels and still produce results that kept clients renewing.
I also learned where agency models break. The pitch team sells the vision, then the delivery team inherits a brief they didn’t write. Account managers become project managers, spending more time on timelines than strategy. Talent turns over, institutional knowledge evaporates, and the client doesn’t notice until results start sliding six months later.
Most agency work is good. Some of it is excellent. But the structural incentives of the agency model create friction that even the best people can’t fully overcome. Agencies are incentivised to expand scope, not sharpen focus. To add channels, not consolidate them. To maintain relationships, not challenge assumptions. The model rewards activity, and activity isn’t the same as progress.
What I learned on the client side
Then I moved in-house. I led teams, managed substantial budgets, built internal capabilities and delivered on multi-year growth targets. And I saw a completely different set of problems.
In-house teams have context that no agency can replicate. They understand the business, the product, the customer, the internal politics. But that context can become a trap. Teams get so close to the work that they stop questioning it. Internal consensus replaces external challenge. The strategy that was right eighteen months ago keeps running because nobody has the bandwidth or the mandate to revisit it.
I watched good strategies fail because execution was disconnected from intent. I watched marketing lose credibility with finance and the board because nobody had built the measurement framework to demonstrate commercial contribution. I watched talented people burn out trying to do everything at once because the business hadn’t made the hard decisions about what to prioritise and what to cut.
In both worlds, I saw the same thing: good people with good intentions, blocked by broken systems. Lots of action, not enough impact.
Why New Rebellion exists
New Rebellion was started to solve a specific problem: the gap between marketing strategy and commercial outcomes. Not with more slide decks or bigger teams or longer engagements. With clarity, focus and accountability.
We’re not a marketing agency. We don’t want to manage your media or produce your content on an ongoing retainer. We’re a consultancy that sits at the intersection of marketing, finance and leadership. We come in, diagnose the system, identify where the structural problems are, build a plan that connects marketing activity to commercial results and help the business execute against it.
The principles are simple. Strategy must connect to commercial metrics or it’s decoration. Execution must be measurable or it’s activity. Accountability must be shared between the business and its partners or nobody owns the outcome.
We work with the business, not around it. We don’t replace your team. We make your team more effective by fixing the system they’re operating in.
Who we’re here for
We work best with ambitious businesses that have outgrown their current marketing approach but aren’t sure what comes next.
You might be spending significant budget and not confident it’s working. You might be seeing lots of activity across channels but no clear commercial ROI. You might have an agency relationship that feels comfortable but isn’t producing the growth you need. You might have an internal team that’s talented but overwhelmed, and you need someone to help them focus.
If you’re ready to stop optimising for busyness and start optimising for outcomes, that’s exactly the conversation we want to have.
What comes next
New Rebellion is still early. We’re building deliberately. Small team, senior practitioners, high-touch engagements. We’d rather do deep work with fewer businesses than shallow work with many.
Every engagement starts the same way: understand the business, audit the current state, identify the structural gaps, build a plan that connects to commercial outcomes. No templates. No one-size-fits-all playbooks. Just honest assessment and clear direction.
If that sounds like what you need, book a 30-minute chat and let’s see if we’re the right fit.
