Fractional CTO · Marketing Agencies
Fractional CTO
for Marketing Agencies
Technical leadership for agencies running on data, automation, and martech.
Marketing agencies run on data and automation — CRM platforms, CDPs, journey orchestration, consent management, attribution modelling. The tooling has never been more powerful, or more complex. Every new platform adds integration risk, and the regulatory requirements around data handling keep tightening. A fractional CTO brings the technical leadership to manage that complexity without adding a full-time salary.
Where I help most
The problems marketing agencies hire a fractional CTO to solve.
Martech stack sprawl
Most clients are running a mix of legacy CRM, recent point solutions, and new AI tools — poorly integrated and inconsistently maintained. Rationalising that stack requires someone who understands both the marketing objectives and the underlying systems.
Data quality and privacy
GDPR, consent frameworks, and first-party data strategy all have technical components that need to be right. Getting it wrong doesn't just create compliance risk — it produces bad attribution, bad segmentation, and bad decisions downstream.
Scaling automation without breaking things
Campaign automation that works at 10k contacts breaks at 1 million. Building for scale from the start requires architectural thinking that most marketing agencies don't have in-house.
Background
26 years building and leading digital at agency level.
I spent significant time at Digitas and Wunderman — two of the world's leading data-driven marketing agencies — building the technical side of CRM programmes, personalisation platforms, and data integration projects at enterprise scale.
Full background →How I work with agencies
Fractional CTO Retainer
Ongoing technical leadership — strategy, architecture, team oversight — typically 2–4 days per week.
Fixed-Scope Project
Tech audits, architecture reviews, and specific deliverables with a defined timeline and fixed price.
AI Development Workshop
Two-day in-person workshop where your team builds AI agents for your development lifecycle.
Technical Due Diligence
Independent assessment of a codebase, team, or platform — for investors, acquirers, or founders.
Ready to talk?
Book a free 30-minute discovery call. We'll talk through your agency's technical situation and I'll tell you honestly whether I can help.