MANUAL FOCUS · LONDON

Your marketing deserves more than the same playbook everyone else is running.

Manual Focus is a marketing agency for ambitious brands, with particular depth in endurance and sports. Our senior operators use AI as leverage, building brand, demand and growth in a fraction of the time.

Book a free working session How we work together
001 · THE PROBLEM

Most campaigns stop working
when launch week ends.

Most marketing still launches the same way it has for a decade, with a six-week campaign, a content flurry, a paid push and the hope something sticks. A better brief or a bigger budget doesn't change that.

We build something that keeps working after launch week ends, with owned, earned and paid wired together through the Forge, our shared AI platform. Each campaign feeds the next, and the tooling improves as new AI models arrive.

002 · WHO WE ARE

Operators first.
Marketers always.

Manual Focus is a marketing agency led by James Vickers, with 15+ years running brand, demand, product and growth across AI, fintech, sports tech, hardware and digital assets. James co-founded RGT Cycling and took it from 19k to 350k users before Wahoo Fitness acquired it. Around him, the Foundry brings senior operators with deep marketing CVs of their own. We keep up with AI so your team can get on with the marketing.

003 · IN THE WILD

Endurance and sports brands we've shipped with.

Classified Wahoo Wattbike Ribble RGT motif AI Muuvr Planet X Pelotan

And further afield in AI, fintech, sports tech, hardware and digital assets.

004 · HOW WE WORK TOGETHER

Engage by the problem,
not the job title.

/01 · STRATEGIC ADVISOR

Your team ships. Nobody's steering.

A senior brain in the room one or two days a month, so every week's output adds up to a strategy instead of a backlog.

  • A weekly or fortnightly working session that decides the next most important thing
  • Work in progress reviewed before it ships, not after
  • The AI tooling worth adopting, mapped to your team's actual workflow
  • Hiring and team-shape calls made with someone who has made them before

1–2 days a month. Day rate or monthly retainer.

Book a free working session
/02 · FRACTIONAL CMORECOMMENDED

You need a CMO. Not a full-time one.

An embedded senior marketer one or two days a week who sets the thesis, runs the team and ships the plan with AI doing the heavy lifting.

  • The marketing thesis and a 90-day plan inside the first month
  • Your existing team led, grown and held to a standard
  • AI embedded into the workflows the team already runs, not another tool on the pile
  • The key pieces of the plan shipped with that leverage in place

1–2 days a week. Three-month minimum.

Book a free working session
/03 · BUILD & HAND OVER

You know what you need. It isn't built yet.

A scoped build shipped in weeks with AI wired in from the start, then handed back with docs and training. No ongoing dependency.

  • Launches, SEO programmes, content engines, brand refreshes
  • Headless and rapid web builds on Shopify, BigCommerce, WooCommerce and WordPress
  • AI wired into the build from day one, not bolted on after
  • Handed back with docs and training. Fixed scope, fixed timeline, fixed price

Project-based. Typical builds: 4–12 weeks.

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/04 · MANUAL FOCUS · AIPRODUCT

We run the AI workflows. You get the output.

For CTOs, CMOs and teams who don't have the bandwidth to keep up with new models, build pipelines or learn another tool every week.

  • Content planning, wireframing and production owned end-to-end by Manual Focus
  • Pipelines maintained, models swapped in as they ship
  • Output delivered on agreed cadence, in your brand, ready to use
  • No internal training, no tool sprawl, no learning curve

Monthly retainer. Output on agreed cadence. Three-month minimum.

Book a free working session

Across endurance and sports brands, AI, fintech and digital assets. Every engagement starts with a 30-minute working session, free.

Read the detail

THE FORGE

005 · WHY THE AI STAYS SHARP

The Forge keeps us current.

We're part of a collective of senior operators called the Foundry. The Foundry shares AI tooling through a platform called the Forge, which is how new models reach client work soon after they ship. The shared part is tooling and pipelines, never strategy or content.

50+
years of senior marketing experience across the collective
SHARED
tooling and pipelines, not strategy or content
LIVE
new AI models added as they ship
006 · THE LENS · FREE

Your AI marketing team.
Yours free.

The Lens is our methodology in the open. Senior marketing operators distilled into 28 skills for Claude Cowork that read your brand context and ship the work alongside you, with 47 executable playbooks across brand, demand, content, ops and productivity behind them.

Every playbook carries the prompts, the eval gates and the failure modes, walked through end to end on a worked example. Read them free, install the skills free, and if you'd rather we ran the workflows for you, that's the product above.

Open The Lens Find your starter in 20 seconds

INSTALL THE TEAM

Customize → Plugins → Add marketplace
Scylark/manual-focus → install the-lens
set up the lens

Add the plugin in Cowork, then ask Claude to set up The Lens. Using Claude Code instead? It's two /plugin commands. The onboarding skill finds your brand documentation, builds the workspace and recommends where to start. Twenty to forty minutes to a working setup.

47 PLAYBOOKS · 28 SKILLS · 5 STACKS · MIT LICENSED

007 · WHAT IT'S WORTH

More marketing output, in a fraction of the time.

0x
faster brief-to-live, at best
0
free AI marketing playbooks in The Lens
0%
less time on production, at best
0+
years of marketing experience, combined

* Upper end of what we've seen across recent engagements, not an independent study. Results depend on the strategy being right to begin with.

008 · PERSPECTIVE

Notes from the work.

Brand, sharpened by AI.

Demand, faster than the old playbook.

Growth that compounds.

Senior operators. Real conviction. No fluff.

Got a problem, a brief,
or a vague feeling something's off?

Bring it. We'll figure out the shape of the work together. 30-minute working session, free.

Book a free working session