GAIN Credit
£40M a year across three continents, and the budget never sat still.
PPC, display and affiliate across Lending Stream and Drafty, run by a team split between San Diego, London and Chennai. Top-performing sales channel inside six months.
Where things stood
GAIN Credit ran a £40M-plus (roughly $50M) annual digital marketing budget across PPC, display and affiliate channels for its Lending Stream and Drafty brands, with a team split across San Diego, London and Chennai that had not yet been proven as a top sales channel.
The call
With a budget that size across regulated lending brands, the constraint was never finding more channels to add. It was refusing to let any channel run on autopilot. I moved spend continuously between display and paid search based on what was actually converting that week or month, shifting budget into paid when it was outperforming display and back again when the balance shifted, rather than setting a fixed mix and leaving it.
What got built
- Managed the £40M+ budget across PPC, display and affiliate for the Lending Stream and Drafty brands, continuously reallocated between channels based on real-time performance rather than a fixed mix
- Ran a distributed team across San Diego, London and Chennai by design rather than by default: traveled every other month, rotated staff from both offices through the US instead of letting each site operate on its own, ran always-on camera feeds between offices so people could coordinate without scheduling a meeting, and pushed spend authority down to whoever was awake when the numbers moved
- Developed product marketing strategy for a new lending brand
Results
£40M+
annual digital marketing budget managed (roughly $50M)
6 months
for the distributed team to become the company's top-performing sales channel
New Fintech Product of the Year
won at the Fintech Awards for a new lending brand's product marketing strategy
Scope
Sr. Manager, Digital Product and Marketing. Owned the budget, channel mix and team.