The marketing industry is in the middle of a structural reordering, with platforms, channels and the rules of audience attention all shifting faster than most agencies can adapt. The agencies that will define the next decade are the ones reading those transitions early rather than reacting to them late.
That discipline is rarer than it sounds, and harder to build a business around than most founders are willing to admit.
Sam Gormley is the founder and global CEO of Two Point Technologies, a digital agency that pairs strategic consultancy with hands-on execution for consumer brands navigating periods of change. His background sits at the intersection of legacy institutions and digital-native upstarts, a vantage point that has shaped how the firm approaches every engagement. Gormley believes the future of consumer marketing belongs to retail media and connected commerce, and the agency is positioning itself accordingly.
A Frustration That Became a Company
Before founding the agency in 2017, Sam Gormley spent his early career on the client side of marketing, with responsibility for hiring outside agencies. The experience left him with a specific diagnosis of why the work so often failed. Developers, creatives and account managers each operated in their own terminology, culture and incentives. Coordination across those silos was constant, expensive and rarely successful.
"The developers spoke a different language to the creatives," Gormley recalls. "The account managers were speaking to clients and not being able to speak internally."
His proposed fix meant changing the system from within: put smart generalists from different disciplines in one room and remove the fragmentation at the source. He quit his job to test the idea with what he now characterizes as more confidence than evidence. "I think it was a combination of naivety and youthful arrogance, honestly," he says, looking back.
The initial target was fintech, a sector where he anticipated a coming collision between large legacy institutions trying to reach broader audiences and developer-led startups needing to move beyond technical language.
The thesis proved correct, then quietly solved itself for several years. The renewed fragmentation across AI, influencer marketing, retail and commerce platforms has made the original premise relevant again.
What Two Point Technologies Does
Gormley's agency, Two Point Technologies, seeks to pair strategic consultancy with hands-on execution inside a single organization. Its work splits across two client groups. The majority is consumer brands, with industries like pet care accounting for between 30 and 40% of weekly time, and the remainder of the consumer roster including Yamaha Music, candy and apparel brands. A smaller practice helps large publicly listed companies operate parts of their business like agile startups.
Across both groups, services span audience-first performance marketing, strategy, audits, analytics, customer relationship management and digital creative.
What separates the engagements from a traditional agency model is the deliverable. Instead of producing audits and roadmaps, Two Point seeks to build products that clients can deploy directly into their own operations, shortening the distance between strategy and execution. "The way we tackle problems is not time and materials. We build products, and we go to market," Gormley explains. The metric every engagement ladders back to, he adds, is sales.
The Yamaha relationship is now in its fifth year, and the agency changed its model roughly two years ago to reflect a more mature business.
Gormley's Philosophy Built on Generalists and Analytics
The agency reached 48 people in its UK office during a rapid post-pandemic expansion, when digital adoption accelerated across nearly every consumer category at once. Being in charge of that growth taught Gormley that culture in a service business is easier to measure than to feel, and that the most useful signal sits inside the company's communication tools.
Gormley realized that the metric that mattered was direct-message volume on Slack. A spike in private messages reliably preceded broader culture problems and prompted leadership to run workshops that pulled difficult conversations back into open channels. "It may sound weird, but that was our signal and noise of making sure that everyone on the team felt like they were getting the benefits and the training they needed," he says. Once addressed, the signals would drop within days of intervention.
The operating model is built on what Gormley calls a generalist suit of armor: training every team member to run advertising, handle data, build websites and manage clients, complemented by senior specialists when dealing with areas like Amazon retail media.
Before AI, that level of cross-training was prohibitively expensive, but after the spreading of applications like ChatGPT, Two Point began having account managers handle initial creative ideation before passing work to the creative team, bridging an internal terminology gap. "AI has allowed us to take people straight out of academia and make them really useful," Gormley says.
The result is a team built to absorb new disciplines as the market introduces them, rather than one organized around the categories that defined marketing a decade ago.
Betting on Retail Media Next
Looking forward, Gormley views retail media as the structural shift that will define the next decade of consumer marketing. The argument rests on a number that has quietly inverted the industry's hierarchy. Amazon's advertising business generated $68.6 billion in full-year 2025 revenue, a larger figure than the roughly $55 billion that US advertisers spent on linear broadcast and cable television in the same year. A company most consumers still think of as a retailer now sells more advertising than the entire traditional TV industry.
For Gormley, that figure is confirmation that the transition is no longer speculative. Retail platforms offer brands something neither broadcast nor social can match: full-funnel control at the point of purchase, starting with brand awareness and reaching education and conversion. The data is closer to the transaction, the targeting is sharper, and the feedback loop between spend and sales is measured in a matter of days.
"You can do full-funnel marketing on retail sites. You can do brand awareness, education, and product marketing. Also, you can get them to convert with discounted and limited-time stuff," Gormley says. "That offers advertisers, marketers, and brands far more control over their customer at the point of purchase than any TV ad will ever get you or any Facebook ad will ever get you."
The structural risk, he notes, is data ownership. Brands rent customer information from the retailer rather than holding it directly, a dependence that becomes harder to unwind the more spend moves onto the platform. He expects every major retailer to eventually try to follow the Amazon model, in part because the math demands it. Thin supply-chain margins are exposed to disruptions like conflicts in trade or shipping routes, while advertising revenue is not.
A Career Based on Reading Transitions Early
Sam Gormley has built Two Point Technologies around a simple bet: that the agencies worth hiring are the ones willing to read the next shift before the market names it. From bridging fintech language gaps to riding the post-pandemic pet care boom, the firm has compounded by treating each transition as a problem to engineer and not as a trend to chase.
