Before you change the agency, the platform mix or the MarTech stack, find out what you already have.And what you keep when you change them.
Not the reports. The learning underneath them.
Every deliverable belongs to you.
No vendor commissions, no tools to sell.
What we empowerour clientsto answer
An independent view of attribution and revenue, relative to spend, not the platform’s version of it.
Visibility into where principal media is used, and what rebates or mark-ups are applied.
Your own forensic view of what percentage of programmatic spend actually reaches the publisher.
An independent read on which creative is driving performance, and which needs to be shelved.
Always-on measurement, incrementality testing and marketing mix modelling running inside your own architecture, not requisitioned one-off studies.
A diagnostic that covers what agency reviews were never designed to surface
How it runs
Problem definition before any solution is recommended
Diagnostic report covering what your brand holds and what it does not
Forensic level findings on where intelligence and capability are compounding outside the brand
Architecture overview, so you can take control
Remediation plan covering the next pitch and the changes to make
Every deliverable belongs to the brand
We run your MarTech stack against our database of 15,000+ tools.
We interview the subject matter experts at your company and, with your permission, your partners.
We review your contracts and terms.
We run all our findings through our proprietary analytics.
We present forensic level findings on where the intelligence and capability your first party data and spend is compounding outside the brand, and an architecture overview that allows you to take control.
Charles Colbourne
Founder & Principal · ASEMELi
Charles has spent twenty+ years building and running marketing, content, and technology operations for global brands. He has operated on all sides of the intelligence issue: the brand, media owner and agency.
Ready to own your intelligence and build capability that compounds?
We are a neutral and independent intelligence advisory. We are not arguing against agencies or for in-housing. We are arguing against dependency, and believe brands should be able to recover the intelligence their investments create that currently builds capability for their partners.
Let’s talkQuestions brands ask before the first conversation
Value in advertising is moving from execution to intelligence. What works, and why, is where it sits now, for you and for your partners.
Where that intelligence lives is now a question that matters. The ASEMELi diagnostic™ maps out where the intelligence your advertising spend generates is compounding, what it’s costing you, and how to take control.
Media audits, incrementality tests, marketing mix modelling, an entire industry of third-party services exists to tell brands what their own marketing spend is actually doing. The emergence of walled gardens and black boxes is an understandable concern for brands. For many, the response was to buy more third-party interpretation. That was the right instinct. It did not settle the question, because the independence does not come with the model, and more of what you need to know about your own spend now sits outside your business.
Ask most brands what intelligence they’d retain if their agency or platform relationship ended tomorrow, and the honest answer is they’d need to go and check the terms and clauses in their various contracts. Not knowing what you retain is itself an indicator.
No. We're not against agencies or platforms, we're advocating for the brand building its own capability and control, and working with partners to close the operational gaps that remain. That can mean advising on platform and partner selection, reviewing contracts, or supporting a brand through a pitch process, before or after. We've researched over 15,000 martech products, so the guidance is independent and neutral, not tied to any vendor.
In principle, yes. But procurement is catching up fast in an area that's moving quickly, especially around AI. ASEMELi exists partly to support procurement teams in assessing the opportunities available in the run-up to a pitch. If you're about to go through a pitch process, our advice is to work out what capability you want to build in parallel to what you want to get out of the pitch itself. Supporting procurement through that shift is part of what we do.
Analytics companies build and run your measurement. ASEMELi doesn't touch your analytics stack. It independently diagnoses whether what you're already being told, by your analytics vendor, agency, or platform, can be verified, and whether your brand actually holds that intelligence or is renting it back every cycle.
A typical consultancy advises on strategy, creative, or channel mix, often from opinion and experience. ASEMELi's diagnostic is forensic: it maps where intelligence is generated and trapped across your specific vendor and platform stack, based on evidence, not a strategic recommendation exercise.
No, different question. A marketing or media audit checks whether your spend is well-priced, well-negotiated, and performing against targets, valuable work. The diagnostic asks something else: whether the intelligence that spend generates is something your brand actually owns, or whether it's trapped inside the platforms and vendors running it. The two are complementary, not competing.
Having a team doesn't automatically give you independent visibility. Most internal analytics teams are still interpreting what platforms and vendors report to them, they own the analysis, not necessarily the underlying intelligence it's built on.
No. Even the best partner relationship resets when it ends, unless the intelligence built during it stays with the brand rather than the partner. That is a structural question, not a partner-quality question, and it holds regardless of how good the current relationship is.
No. ASEMELi is a diagnostic service, not software. No implementation, no licence, no integration project.
The real question isn't whether you have systems, it's whether they're generating intelligence your brand actually keeps, or whether you're renting access to intelligence sitting inside third-party agencies, platforms, or martech providers. We help you understand the difference, and extract what you can into your own intelligence layer.
AI helps us gather and organise evidence faster, but it doesn't generate the findings. Every diagnostic is built from real client data and independently reviewed, the same standard we're asking you to hold your own vendors to.
Yes, often more so. Centralising analytics doesn't automatically mean the brand owns what it generates, it just moves the same question up a level, from local to regional. The intelligence can still sit with the platforms and vendors running the activity, wherever the reporting line points.
Either, and the two are named products. The full stack diagnostic runs 30 days across data, content, execution and analytics. The single area diagnostic runs 15 days on one area, with analytics and measurement as the default starting point and data, content or execution available on request. Same method either way, narrower scope.