Most founders think about ad spend as a monthly budget. They allocate £X, the agency spends £X, the dashboard reports against £X. Predictable. Tidy. Wrong.
Paid media at scale behaves more like a duty cycle than a budget. On-pulses do the customer-acquisition work; off-pulses give the funnel time to convert what the on-pulses surfaced.
When you treat it as a budget you ignore the recovery phase. When you treat it as a duty cycle, you build the off-time into the plan and stop blaming creative for fatigue that was actually pacing.
The frame applies to organic too. Which is why Old Dirty Brasstards’ 15× ROAS isn’t a creative win, it’s a duty-cycle win wrapped in good creative.