What a responsible marketing agency should be able to show you.
Not a values statement. A list of things we refuse to do, things we refuse to say, and documents you can open — each one traceable to a rule that already runs, or to a claim we have deliberately declined to make.
Every change queued and approved · New builds start paused · Escrow and a written data exit on platform work
Every agency has a page
like this one.
Most of them are worth nothing, and it is worth being specific about why before asking you to read ours.
It is a list of adjectives
Integrity. Transparency. Partnership. Nobody has ever failed one of those, because none of them describe an action anybody could be caught not taking.
The claim and the control are different things
Saying you are careful is a claim. A rule that stops a careless change reaching a live account is a control. Only one of them survives a bad week.
It was written by the people it would constrain
A standard nobody outside the business can check is a standard the business can quietly revise. If breaking it costs nothing, it is decoration.
The certification does the arguing
A badge on a footer is meant to end the conversation. It can be a real signal, but it is not a behaviour, and an agency should still be able to say what it actually does.
It never mentions anything the agency turned down
Every one of these pages is a list of things the business is in favour of. None of them list what it refused, which is the only part that costs money.
So the test for every line below is the same: is there a file, a state in a queue, a contract term or a document behind it? If there is not, it does not belong on this page.
There is a written list of things we will not do.
Six lines, standing, applying to every account we hold including the ones where letting it through would have been easier and nobody would have known. It is published in full on the SoudCoh Compound page rather than summarised here.
The kind of thing on it
A campaign switched on before the build has been read end to end
A change that skips the approval queue on its way to a live account
An ad pointed at a page that does not deliver what the ad promised
A report held back because the period went badly
A refusal is only meaningful when it has cost something. Each of these was written after a specific piece of work was sent back or stopped, and the account that caused it is redacted out of the rule — because the lesson travels between clients and the record of what happened does not.
Read the full listStanding refusals
6
Things none of us may do
On every account, in every market, including the ones nobody is watching
SoudCoh platform records
1,093
Changes pushed through approval
Each one queued as pending, approved, then pushed, and written to the account's change history
Platform engagements
30
Day data exit, agreed before the build
Source-code escrow lodged from sprint one rather than at go-live
Each of these describes a control that runs today, not a target. The approval count comes from SoudCoh platform records. The thirty-day exit and the escrow term are the ones carried on the Victorian council finance platform engagement.
Six steps every change to your account goes through.
This is the part that makes the rest of the page checkable. Every step produces an artefact you can ask for, which is the difference between a standard and a sentiment.
A change is a file, not a conversation
Whoever proposes it writes it down: what would change, on which account, and why. That is the artefact the rest of this depends on, because you cannot review a suggestion somebody made on a call.
It waits in a queue with a state
Pending, then approved, then pushed. A change sitting in that queue has not happened, and a change that has happened cannot be described later as something else. The queue for your account is yours to ask for, pending items included.
A person approves it before it is pushed
Nothing moves out of the queue on its own. Someone on our team reads the change in full and presses approve, and until then it has not happened. Sometimes that sends the whole idea back.
New builds start switched off
We build new campaigns paused so your account lead can read the whole thing end to end before a dollar moves. Before launch, a real test enquiry is pushed through every path and watched arriving.
A check we wrote catches what people miss
Some rules work better as code than as good intentions. A bond-cleaning ad once pointed at a carpet page, so we built a check that refuses that push. It covers cleaning campaigns today, not every trade.
Every change is written to your change history
What was sent, to which campaign, when and why. It is why the honest answer to “what changed three months ago” is a dated list rather than a story, and why we can hand that list to you rather than reconstruct it.
The claims we have decided not to make.
A certification mark says an outside body inspected a business and licensed it to say so. Wearing one that has not been granted — or wearing a real one at a tier that has not been granted — is a false representation about approval or affiliation, and the exposure is regulatory rather than aesthetic. So the list below is a rule we hold for legal reasons as much as honest ones.
We are not a certified B Corporation
We have not been through that assessment, so we do not use the term, do not display the mark, and do not gesture at it with lookalike wording. If it is ever earned, the evidence goes on file before the badge goes on the site.
Partner, never Premier
The one third-party programme we hold is Google Partner, agency ID 2794147994, which anybody can check in Google's own directory. A profile on a third-party agency listing still shows a higher tier. That is a field we filled in ourselves, it is not a tier that has been granted, and it does not change what this site says.
A badge is a real file or it is nothing
Certification marks are never hand-drawn, traced, recoloured or approximated to fit our palette. If the artwork is not the licensed artwork, the badge does not ship — a missing badge is honest and an approximated one is not.
No star rating we wrote ourselves
There is no self-authored review score in our structured data and no aggregate rating anywhere on this site. A rating has to have a live, visible source a reader can go and read, and ours would not.
No number we cannot show you the source of
Every figure in a case study is a figure from that account. We do not round it up, blend two accounts into one, restate it in a friendlier unit, or publish a result with no engagement behind it.
No promised result, ever
Not a lead volume, not a position, not a cost per enquiry, not a date by which any of those arrive. Published results describe what happened on one account, as percentages, multiples and rates. They are not a forecast for yours, and we will say that out loud in the meeting as well as in the footnote.
The same rule works in the other direction. The moment evidence arrives, one field changes and the badge ships — the instant it is true, and not one day before.
Your data, and how you
take it with you.
An agency that is hard to leave has a commercial reason to stop improving. These are the terms that make leaving possible, written down before the work starts rather than negotiated from a weak position afterwards.
What we learn carries. What is yours does not.
A rule, a guard, a phrasing a platform rejects: those travel between accounts, so a new client starts with what earlier ones already paid for. In SoudCoh Compound that is Rule 08: build on practical campaign experience. Your spend, your enquiries, your bids, your creative and your name stop at your account.
We do not run both sides of a market
No two directly-competing accounts in the same service area. This is the one boundary that cannot be audited after the fact, so it is a decision made before signing rather than a control run afterwards.
Leaving is a project with a date on it
On platform work the exit is written in before the build starts: source-code escrow lodged from sprint one rather than at go-live, and a data exit with a defined notice period and a defined export format. Thirty days on the Victorian council finance platform.
Where it lives is specified, not assumed
Sovereign Australian hosting, sole-tenant so your identity store and database are not shared, customer-controlled key management, encryption in transit and at rest, and immutable audit logging. Written into scope rather than described in a sales meeting.
Published results carry no dates
Case studies show percentages, multiples and rates of our own work, with no dates, month names or period lengths. A competitor should not be able to read a client's trading calendar off our website.
The rest of it is already published.
Nothing on this page is only on this page. Each of these is a live document on this site, and each one predates anybody asking us about it.
- PrivacyWhat we collect, why, how long it is kept, and how to ask for it back. Written to be read rather than to be survived.
- Modern slavery statementOur position on labour in the supply chain behind a marketing engagement, published rather than assumed.
- How we run an accountThe rules every channel we run follows: what counts as an enquiry, what gets cut, where budget goes and what one account may learn from another.
- Accessibility, specified in the contractWCAG 2.2 AA is the floor we build web work to, and on platform engagements it is a contract term rather than an aspiration.
The questions this raises
Including the one about the badge.
The standard, answered.
Certifications, sign-off, who owns the account, whether we would take your competitor, and what happens when a period goes badly.
The first call is free and there is no deck.
Book a callNo. SoudCoh is not a certified B Corporation and we do not describe ourselves as one. We have not been through that assessment. We would rather publish the controls we actually run — a written list of things we will not do, an approval queue every change passes through, a data boundary and a written exit — than borrow the credibility of a certification we have not earned.
Google Partner, agency ID 2794147994, which is checkable in Google's own directory. That is the one third-party programme this business holds that a reader can independently verify, and it is the only one on the site. Where a programme is claimed on a profile we filled in ourselves, that is not verification and it does not get a badge here.
A person on our team, through a queue. Every proposed change is written down, held as pending and approved before it is pushed, and nothing pushes itself. New campaigns are built paused so your account lead can read them end to end first. Before launch a real test enquiry is pushed through every path, and every change lands in your account's change history.
Yes. Every change we make is written to your account's change history: what was sent, when and why. You can also ask for the queue on your account, including the items still pending. The answer to “what changed three months ago” is a dated list rather than a recollection.
You have full-visibility reporting on performance and spend at all times, and on long-term agreements ownership and handover options are available to discuss. For custom platform work the position is firmer: source-code escrow from sprint one and a data exit with a defined notice period and export format, written in before the build starts.
Not in the same service area. We do not run two directly-competing accounts, because the boundary that protects you cannot be verified after the fact. It is a decision made before signing rather than a control we ask you to trust.
Structure, and only de-identified structure. A rule, a guard, a phrasing a platform has rejected. Every one of those is a file somebody wrote with a date and a reason in its header, and you can ask to read the ones running on your account. Your spend, your enquiries, your bids, your creative and your name are not structure and do not travel.
Because a competitor should not be able to read a client's trading calendar off our website. Published results are percentages, multiples and rates of our own work, with no dates, month names or period lengths. The client always has the full dates; the public page does not.
No, and we would be wary of anybody who does. Advertising platforms are auctions and we do not control the other bidders, the market, or what happens after the enquiry reaches your team. What we will commit to is the cadence, the approval queue, the change history and the review turning up on the agreed date whether the period was good or bad.
You hear it from us, in the report, on the date it was due. A report held back because a period went badly is on the list of things none of us are allowed to do. Then we say what we are changing and what we got wrong, which is a harder conversation and a much shorter one.
No long-term lock-in. We ask for enough runway to be fair to the work, because an engagement judged on its first ten days is being judged during the fortnight we are still cutting waste out of it. The terms are put in front of you in plain English before anything is signed.
Yes. On enterprise and public-sector engagements the change history and the approval queue can be read independently whenever you want, and the same terms that made the council platform engagement possible are available on commercial work. A standard that only holds when nobody is checking is not a standard.
Where this standard actually gets tested.
A standard is easy to publish and harder to hold. These are the pages where the same terms are stated against real work rather than in the abstract.
- SoudCoh CompoundOur whole-business growth offer, by application: every channel run by one team, on one plan, with one set of numbers.
- Enterprise and governmentWhere these terms get tested hardest: requirement schedules, procurement, sovereign delivery and independent review.
- Working across five marketsThe same standard in Australia, the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and New Zealand.
- Custom platforms and web appsOwnership, escrow, hosting and exit in detail, because a platform is the engagement with the most to lose.
- The published resultsEvery write-up names the work behind the result, shown as percentages, multiples and rates.
- What working with us looks likeScope, cadence, who you deal with, and what we ask for in return. The commercial half of this page.
Hold us to it
Ask for the queue on your account, ask which rules are running on it, or ask us to put the exit terms in front of you before anything is signed. All three are reasonable and none of them need a reason.
No pitch deck. No badge we have not earned. A real conversation.