Skip to content
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 working session How we work together
001 · THE PROBLEM

Flat campaigns result in
diminishing returns.

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 flat campaign produces flat results regardless of brief quality, budget size or how shiny the launch deck looks.

We build something that keeps working after launch week ends, with owned, earned and paid wired together through the Forge, our shared AI platform. The system learns from each campaign and improves as new AI models arrive, so growth holds steady instead of tailing off.

002 · 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 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.

Bring us into the room
/02 · FRACTIONAL CMOMOST CHOSEN

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.

Start the conversation
/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.

Scope the build
/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 cadence.

Book a 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

003 · 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. That's why we ship at machine speed, and why our capability keeps getting sharper as new AI models arrive. The shared part is tooling and pipelines, not 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
004 · THE LENS · FREE

Your AI marketing team.
Yours free.

The Lens is our methodology in the open. Senior marketing operators distilled into 26 Claude Code skills that read your brand context and ship the work alongside you, with 46 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

/plugin marketplace add Scylark/manual-focus
/plugin install the-lens@manual-focus
set up the lens

Two commands in Claude Code, then ask it to set up The Lens. The onboarding skill finds your brand documentation, builds the workspace and recommends where to start. Twenty minutes to a working setup.

46 PLAYBOOKS · 26 SKILLS · 5 STACKS · MIT LICENSED

005 · WHAT IT'S WORTH

More marketing output, in a fraction of the time.

0x
faster brief-to-live, on average
0
channels covered (owned, earned and paid) from day one
0%
less time on production, more on strategy
0+
years of marketing experience, combined

* Across recent engagements. Best results when the strategy was right to begin with.

006 · 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.

007 · 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 do the hard miles on AI so the marketing side gets the upside.

008 · PERSPECTIVE

Notes from the work.

· 3 min read

The citation moved off the page

The overlap between top Google links and AI-cited sources has fallen from 70% to under 20%. Your rankings stopped predicting who gets quoted.

· 4 min read

Building content engines that compound

Most content marketing programmes are campaigns wearing a content disguise. Here's what actually compounds, and why it usually doesn't.

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 working session