Timmy Bolliger / Zapiro Media
Marketing systems
Allocation · Performance · Team build-out

Most marketing budgets are spent. The good ones are allocated.

I'm Timmy Bolliger. I build marketing systems for companies that already have a product and revenue, but no reliable way to turn money into growth. Strategy, paid acquisition, and the team that runs it after I leave.

Fig. 01 — Marketing as an allocation system Capital → Positions → Return → Reallocation
Marketing as an allocation system A budget enters an allocation gate, is distributed across four channel positions — paid acquisition, owned channels, brand and retention — produces measured return, and is reallocated through a feedback loop. INPUT ALLOCATION RETURN BUDGET capital in gate PAID ACQUISITION fast feedback / high variance OWNED CHANNELS slow build / compounding BRAND long horizon / hard to attribute RETENTION lowest cost of capital RETURN measured, not assumed Σ REALLOCATE — EVERY POSITION RE-EARNS ITS BUDGET
INBUDGETcapital in
01PAID ACQUISITIONfast feedback / high variance
02OWNED CHANNELSslow build / compounding
03BRANDlong horizon / hard to attribute
04RETENTIONlowest cost of capital
OUTRETURNmeasured, not assumed
↩REALLOCATEevery position re-earns its budget
— Positions are held for a reason, not out of habit. — Return is measured on the horizon the channel actually operates on.
§ 01
Method

A marketing budget behaves like a portfolio. Every channel is a position with its own cost of entry, holding period and variance. Most companies never treat it that way. They run campaigns, judge them on the last thirty days, and start over next quarter.

Framed as a portfolio, the questions change. What is the expected return on this position, and over what horizon? What is it correlated with? What are we holding for compounding and what are we holding for liquidity? Which positions are we only still holding because we already own them?

That frame is what I bring. Everything else — creative, media buying, lifecycle, hiring — is execution against it.

The second half of the work is leverage. Most marketing teams are slower than they need to be because the work between the work is manual. I spend a lot of time on where AI and automation genuinely remove steps, and where they just add one more thing to maintain. That distinction matters more than the tooling.

§ 02
Engagements

Five ways this usually starts

Advisory
Allocation strategy

Where the next unit of growth actually comes from: positioning, channel mix, offer and pricing architecture, and the sequence to get there. Delivered as a written plan with owners, budgets and checkpoints. Not a deck.

Project
Performance marketing

Paid acquisition across Meta, Google and YouTube, plus the funnel behind it — landing pages, offer testing, tracking, attribution. Rebuilt so the numbers being reported are numbers the business can act on.

Project
Webinar & VSL funnels

The full sequence, not just the slides: registration and show-up mechanics, the argument the presentation actually makes, the transition into the offer, and the follow-up that recovers the people who did not buy live. Most webinars fail structurally, long before anyone reaches the pitch.

Project
Team build‑out

Designing the marketing org, writing the roles, running hiring, and installing the operating rhythm: planning cadence, reporting, and the handful of documents that keep a distributed team aligned without living in meetings.

Interim
Fractional CMO

Marketing leadership part-time for companies between senior hires. Running the function, managing agencies and freelancers, reporting into the founder or board until a permanent CMO is in place.

§ 03
Background

Where the opinions come from

Eight years in marketing, most of it on the inside rather than the consulting side — first running campaigns myself, now as Chief Marketing Officer at a European online education company, leading a distributed team of seven and owning the marketing P&L end to end.

Which means I have made the decisions I advise on, with real money and real people, and lived with them long enough to learn something. Most of what I believe about marketing I believe because a version of it once did not work.

Outside the day job I spend my time on investing, applied AI and systems design. That is not a coincidence. All three are the same discipline: allocate scarce resources under uncertainty, build the machine that makes the next decision cheaper, and let compounding do the work effort cannot.

Background in applied psychology, which is the least fashionable and most useful thing on this page. I work remotely, in German and English.

Portrait of Timmy Bolliger
Fig. 02 — Timmy Bolliger
§ 04
Contact

If something here matches a problem you have, write to me.

hello@zapiromedia.com

Tell me what the business does, what marketing looks like today, and the outcome you are trying to reach. German or English. I answer within two business days, including when the answer is that I am not the right person for it.