Jessica Torstensson, Growth Client Director, Bench Media
After six months of escalating, but sporadic, stomach pain, I received a diagnosis in August 2023, that stopped me in my tracks, I had stage 3 bowel cancer.
A specialist had missed a 2.5cm tumour lodged in my large intestine, the kind of oversight you assume modern diagnostics no longer make.
Within days, I was in surgery. I returned to work almost immediately and completed twelve rounds of chemotherapy across six months. This wasn’t about proving resilience; it was about staying mentally integrated into my life.
Keeping my whole system healthy, not just the part being treated, became essential to my recovery.
And it reminded me of something I’ve spent 15 years fighting against in our industry: focusing on the parts, instead of the whole, is a dangerous game.
The medical oversight that led to my late diagnosis was a failure of visibility, a failure to connect the dots. In our industry, we suffer from the same condition by becoming obsessed with specialisation.
Think about it… alongside full-service media agencies, we have digital agencies, social agencies, content agencies and more. We plan our years in silos: a budget for performance and a budget for brand, often in two separate marketing teams.
But consumers don’t live in silos. They don’t experience digital marketing; they experience a brand.
After years spent leading integrated client portfolios at major agencies and consistently battling to stop creative, data, and media teams from slipping back into silos has confirmed that fragmentation is the enemy of growth.
Digital expertise is effective, measurable, and fast. But having spent years seeing the pitfalls, I can assure you that the focus on digital often narrows our vision to the bottom of the funnel only.
When we see a drop in conversions, we immediately pull the ‘performance lever and shift budget from awareness channels to conversion platforms to chase more clicks and conversions. This reactive approach is like treating the symptom, not the patient.
The data proves this shortsightedness has a massive commercial cost:
● The 60/40 Rule: IPA research from Les Binet & Peter Field shows that brands grow most
effectively when they strike the right balance between long-term brand building and short-term
activation. The classic 60/40 split isn’t universal, especially for smaller or emerging brands, but
the broader lesson is consistent: Brands that invest in both brand and performance grow stronger than those that rely solely on bottom of the funnel channels.
● MMM studies from Google, Meta and Nielsen also consistently show that 40–60% of conversions credited to performance channels (like paid search) were actually generated by brand building and upper-funnel activity earlier in the journey.
In other words, performance harvests demand, it doesn’t create it. Your performance campaign is only converting the demands your brand work created. If you starve the top, the bottom will eventually collapse.
True health, whether for a human or a brand, comes from a full-service mindset. It comes from stepping back and asking: How does the emotional impact of a TV spot influence the search behaviour? How does the OOH placement change the trust in the social ad?
The ultimate lesson from my illness is the principle I have always championed, that integration is survival, is not just good business strategy, it is essential.
As a marketing leader, you need to champion the full-service mindset and bring the required operational rigour to truly connect the dots. The brands that win going forward will be the ones that understand the whole picture.
If there is one media resolution you make at the start of 2026 let it be this: Stop treating media like a collection of body parts and start treating it like a complete system. Because if you miss the connections, you miss the things that truly matter.
My mission remains to solve the overall health of my clients’ brands.