About L.E.N.
L.E.N. started with something I kept seeing throughout my career in marketing agencies.
Organisations were producing enormous amounts of useful information. Reports, campaign results, presentations, spreadsheets, decisions and conversations.
But very little of that information was being turned into knowledge the organisation could use again.
Teams changed. Agencies came and went. People moved on.
The files survived. The context didn’t.
A few years later, someone would confidently say:
“We tried that. It didn’t work.”
Maybe they were right. But what was actually tested? What were the circumstances? What did the numbers show? And would the same conclusion still hold today?
The person behind it
I’m Gary Reid. I’ve spent much of my career working in performance marketing agencies, including Forward3D and Carat, with brands such as Chanel, Nike, Hilton, Net-a-Porter and Diageo.
I’ve seen how much work goes into understanding a client’s business, preparing reports, developing strategies and explaining results.
I’ve also seen how often that work gets repeated because the people doing it don’t have access to what the organisation has already learned.
The problem isn’t a shortage of information.
It’s that the information rarely adds up to a useful collective understanding.
What we’re building
L.E.N. — Legacy Evidence Network — started as a way to connect marketing decisions, activities, outcomes and the evidence behind them.
But preserving that knowledge is only half the point.
The other half is making it useful.
Could we make preparing reports and QBRs less painful? Help international teams discover what other markets have already tried? Give strategists better-informed options? Help marketing leaders see important developments without having to ask everyone for an update?
That’s the direction we’re exploring.
The idea isn’t to replace people’s judgement with AI. It’s to give them better access to their organisation’s own experience, with the evidence attached.
And it shouldn’t require everybody to maintain yet another system.
Start with the work that’s already been done. Keep adding what’s happening now. Let the understanding grow.
What we believe
AI can help connect information, identify relationships and explore possibilities.
But a convincing answer isn’t necessarily a correct one.
L.E.N. is being built around original evidence, uncertainty and the ability for people to correct what the system gets wrong.
And just because we believed something yesterday doesn’t mean we’re obliged to believe it tomorrow.
Better evidence should lead to better decisions.
That’s as true of how we’re building L.E.N. as it is of the marketing knowledge we’re trying to preserve.