When an unnamed client launched a product with no marketing history, no search presence, and a website that had been live for twenty minutes, Jamie Love expected TikTok Shop to drive the numbers. It didn’t. Website purchases ran at roughly triple the TikTok Shop volume, with no other traffic source in play. Consumers were finding the product on TikTok and completing the purchase somewhere else.

For Jamie, that result wasn’t a failure. It was the point. “The clever brands are looking at it as an investment into discovery that no other platform can give you,” he says. “Instagram can’t give you that. Facebook can’t give you that.” As founder and CEO of Monumental Marketing, Jamie has spent eight years pushing back against the idea that marketing is primarily about appearance rather than commercial outcome.

Monumental, founded in London in 2017 with offices in Edinburgh, serves direct-to-consumer lifestyle brands, app developers, and growth-stage companies that need marketing to move revenue. Its service model covers social media management, influencer marketing, social commerce, and paid media, with a consultative layer for companies that need senior marketing direction without the cost of a full-time hire. The agency has worked with more than 140 brands across most major global markets.

“Good marketing is growth,” Jamie says. “It’s not pretty.”

A Model Built for What Agencies Were Ignoring

Jamie was 22 when he founded Monumental, motivated by a pattern he kept observing in the agencies he had worked in. Senior people won the pitch. Junior people delivered. What was promised rarely matched what arrived.

“You would sit in these pitches with these people promising the world,” Jamie says. “The people who pitched you, you never see again.”

Monumental does not use a conventional account-management layer; Jamie says every team member is a marketer, with clients working directly with the people involved in the work. The model also means declining clients whose briefs will not produce results. Last week, Jamie says, he walked away from a prospective engagement after deciding the proposed approach had no credible path to performance. Earlier in the agency’s history, he would have said yes.

“Our marketing is their marketing,” he says. “My saying yes to that is me saying yes to my own marketing being crap.”

Selling Growth, Not Pretty Pictures

Monumental’s competitive pitch is built around a single argument: brands cannot pay salaries with awareness metrics. That framing resonates most strongly with founders, Jamie says, because they understand the financial stakes directly.

“You can sell the coolest campaign,” he says. “But at the end of the day, a brand will buy what sells. We’re not selling pretty pictures. We’re selling sales, growth, and community.”

His first question for a brand without a social strategy is not about channels or budgets. Jamie asks how much discomfort the brand can tolerate. Brands with rigid guidelines and approval chains get a different plan than brands that hand over creative control entirely. That single question, he says, tells him more about what a client actually wants than any brief does.

Why Applying Your Instagram Playbook to TikTok Will Fail

Most brands arrive at TikTok Shop with assumptions shaped by Amazon or Instagram. Jamie says both fail because TikTok operates between marketplace and social platform and behaves like neither.

“You can’t adapt what you’ve got to fit because it’s its own world,” he says.

Price sensitivity defines much of the platform’s commerce behavior. According to Jamie, lifestyle and personal care categories see average basket sizes around £25, and conversion rates can drop above that threshold. Luxury brands require a different strategy entirely. New brands should also expect low response rates from affiliate outreach: Jamie cites one client that sent 4,000 creator invitations and received 20 approvals. Platform fees, affiliate commissions, and content production costs stack in ways that most brands do not budget for in advance.

Break-even typically arrives between months two and four. A client Jamie describes without naming started at £100 in weekly revenue during week one and reached a consistent £3,500 per week by month four, on a total budget of under £5,000 per month. 

The approach was what Jamie calls ecosystem thinking: affiliate content, shoppable posts, keyword optimization, and promotional mechanics, each applied consistently across all levers simultaneously. Nothing was done in exceptional depth, he notes. The consistency of covering the full ecosystem was the differentiator.

Where TikTok Shop’s Value Actually Lives

The more important claim Jamie makes about TikTok Shop is that its direct-sale performance may be the wrong metric to optimize for. The discovery pattern he observed in the product-launch case is, in his view, the durable commercial opportunity.

He sees a parallel with Amazon. Brands running TikTok Shop campaigns find users browsing on TikTok and completing transactions on Amazon, drawn by established trust and Prime delivery guarantees. The attribution models most brands rely on are not capturing that traffic, meaning the return on TikTok investment is systematically undercounted.

One underutilized opportunity Jamie highlights: brands whose customers skew older. The fastest-growing demographic on TikTok is currently over 35, he notes, and because most advertisers still associate the platform with younger users, competition for that inventory is lower. Lower competition means lower auction costs for equivalent reach, which translates to better return for brands willing to enter now.

Affiliates, Influencers, and the Distinction That Changes Everything

Among the most consequential misunderstandings Jamie encounters is treating TikTok affiliates as influencers. The two models operate under different cost structures and require different expectations.

Affiliates post about products because they earn commission on sales. They are not representing the brand. Jamie compares them to a customer buying a product in a shop and posting that they liked it. Neither party controls that transaction, and applying influencer management discipline to affiliate volume outreach creates confusion and cost overruns.

“Person A could go into the shop and buy [a product] and post a picture being like, ‘I bought this, and I like it,'” Jamie says. “You can’t control that. And this is the same.”

For new brands, he advises building affiliate volume before prioritizing match quality. Selectivity only becomes feasible once a brand has a sufficient track record for creators to evaluate.

AI-Enabled Experience Will Outlast the Rest

Jamie’s view of where the agency business goes from here centers on one combination: experienced human judgment running on AI infrastructure. Agencies that use AI to replace human expertise, he argues, will underperform those that use it as a force multiplier.

“The winning formula will be AI-enabled humans,” he says. “People who have been there, done that, and have the nuance to say, ‘Actually, based on your product and this city, no,’ in a way that AI just wouldn’t get.”

On the consumer side, Jamie expects AI-driven discovery to reshape product recommendation at scale. ChatGPT and similar tools are already influencing which agencies brands select, he says, an early signal of how recommendation engines could function as a new discovery layer for products and services. Brands that build authority recognized by LLMs will gain a channel advantage that parallels early SEO.

Performance-based measurement of creator impact is where Jamie believes the influencer category is heading. TikTok’s affiliate mechanics have begun replacing follower count with direct sales attribution as the baseline measure of creator value. 

“Content will be monetized in a very different way,” he says. “Because the old model is out the window.”

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