Most marketing reports aren't providing what you're actually looking for

Most marketing reports you review are just fragments—screenshots from 10 different platforms, stapled together at 11:47 p.m. the night before a client call. Clicks here, impressions there, a CSV nobody fully understands, and a paragraph of “insights” written by someone who’s barely awake.

And then we all act surprised when clients don’t see the value.

We’re working on a tool and a framework to fix that mess. Think of it as a unified reporting and storytelling system for agencies who are tired of defending invoices and want to get back to strategy.

This is the vision.

The Problem: Franken-Reporting

If you run a modern agency, your reporting probably looks something like this:

• Social lives in one tool
• Programmatic and display in another
• Search somewhere else
• Local listings and reviews in their own world
• Web analytics off in GA4 purgatory

Every vendor promises “great reporting.”
Individually, some of them even deliver.
Together? They create chaos.

The result:

• Disjointed client experience – Every month you’re explaining a new interface, a new metric, a new acronym.
• Defensive posture – You spend half the call justifying line items instead of talking about what to do next.
• Internal burnout – Your team is stuck screenshotting dashboards and manually writing recaps that sound the same every time.

AI doesn’t magically fix this. If you throw an LLM at a pile of bad, fragmented inputs, you just get expensive gibberish faster.

So the vision starts with a hard constraint:

No AI “magic” until the data and the story are structurally sound.

What About All the Existing Reporting Tools?

You might be thinking, “Don’t a dozen tools already do this?”

Kind of—but not really.

There are plenty of multi-channel dashboards and “all-in-one” agency reporting platforms. They’re great at pulling numbers into one place and auto-emailing a PDF. Where they usually fall down is exactly where agencies feel the pain:

• They’re vendor-first, not agency-first.
  Reporting is shaped around whichever platform sells you the media, not around the story you actually need to tell your client.
• They stop at charts, not a clear narrative.
  You still end up writing the real story manually: what mattered, what didn’t, what changed, and what you’re doing next.
• They don’t handle the full Franken-stack.
  A couple of major platforms plug in nicely; the rest become screenshots, exports, or “we’ll explain that later” on the call.
• They don’t think in retention and upsell.
  Most tools optimize for “look at all these metrics,” not “here’s why staying and growing with us is the obvious move.”
• They rarely include a human-ready video layer.
  Busy owners don’t want another login—they want a short, clear explanation they can absorb on their phone.

So yes, the market has dashboards. What’s missing is a system deliberately designed around agency reality: messy vendors in, one coherent, repeatable story out—decks, dashboards, and video all telling the same thing.

That gap is exactly where this tool lives.

The Vision: One Story, Many Pipes

We’re building toward a system that does one thing exceptionally well:

Turn a messy, multi-channel marketing footprint into a single, simple story that a non-expert can understand—and want to keep paying for.

Under the hood, it’s three big layers.

1. The Plumbing Layer: Multi-Source In, Human-Readable Out

We’re not trying to replace every tool. The system sits on top of what you already use:

• Social (paid + organic)
• Programmatic / display / CTV
• Search
• Local listings and reviews
• Website analytics
• Whatever weird niche vendor your biggest client insists on using

We don’t care whether it’s API-pulled, CSV-dumped, or PDF-attached. The job here is to normalize:

• Shared concepts: impressions, reach, clicks, conversions, revenue where possible
• Efficiency metrics: CPC, CPM, CPE, CPA
• Contextual tags: campaign type, objective, geography, audience themes

This isn’t “slap it into a BI tool and call it a day.”
It’s opinionated modeling around what actually matters for the kinds of clients agencies live and die by—small to mid-sized, local-ish, not living in dashboards.

2. The Story Layer: A Standard Narrative, Not Just Charts

Most reporting tools stop at “pretty dashboards.”
Dashboards don’t retain clients. Stories do.

We want the system to generate a reliable, repeatable narrative skeleton every month:

1. Here’s what we set out to do.
   Goals, constraints, what the client actually cares about.
2. Here’s what happened.
   Key outcomes in plain language, not jargon salad.
3. Here’s why it matters.
   Efficiency, benchmarks, “punching above weight” moments.
4. Here’s what we learned.
   Patterns across channels; where the signal is.
5. Here’s what we’re doing next.
   Concrete next steps and experiments, not vague “continue to optimize.”

AI absolutely plays here—but as an assistant, not the boss.

The vision is:

• AI drafts the narrative, tuned to your brand voice and templates.
• Your team reviews, polishes, and adds human nuance.
• Over time, the system learns which insights get used, ignored, or edited.

The goal is not “zero human touches.” The goal is “your strategists spend 15 minutes sharpening a good draft, not 90 minutes starting from a blank slide.”

3. The Delivery Layer: Decks, Dashboards, and Video

The output isn’t one thing; it’s a bundle that stays in sync.

Internal dashboards for your team

• Granular, nerdy, drill-down capable.
• Designed for strategy and QA, not clients.
• The place you go to argue with the numbers and change course.

Client-facing decks

• Automatically generated in your tool of choice (Slides, PowerPoint, Gamma, etc.).
• Same structure every month so clients learn the pattern and stop getting lost.
• Enough detail to be credible, not so much that you lose the plot.

https://youtu.be/C8bEFEweITs

Optional AI video recap

• Short, avatar-based monthly summary.
• Perfect for busy owners who will never read a 20-slide deck but will watch a 2-minute video on their phone.
• Consistent tone and structure, tuned to your agency voice.

All three are powered by the same underlying data and story.
Change the data once; dashboards, decks, and video all align.

What This Is Not

Let’s be clear about what we’re not building.

• Not another all-in-one “agency OS”
  We’re not trying to replace your CRM, ticketing, project management, or ad platforms. Those are separate problems.
• Not an attribution religion
  This isn’t a perfect multi-touch attribution engine. For most agencies, that’s overkill and often fictional. We’re focused on clear, honest contribution stories, not fake precision.
• Not a “magic AI dashboard”
  If a pitch starts with “we’re AI-first,” you should probably run. We’re workflow-first, AI-assisted. The stack matters, but the monthly meeting matters more.

Why This Actually Matters for Agencies

This isn’t just a data project. It’s a business model project.

When unified reporting and narrative are working, a few things change:

1. Retention goes up
   Clients finally see the through-line from spend → activity → outcomes → next moves, instead of random tactical noise.
2. Conversations move up a level
   You stop arguing about “why my CPC is higher than last month” and start talking about “are we going after the right audience and offers.”
3. Your team gets unstuck
   • Fewer late nights building Frankenstein decks.
   • More time on creative, experimentation, and strategy.
4. You get leverage on upsell
   A clean, unified story makes it much easier to say, “Here’s what we’d do with +20% budget,” and have it land.

AI is the multiplier—but only after you have the system.

How Bait Shop Thinks About Building It

Internally we think in two modes: Factory and Lab.

Factory: The Reliable Backbone

This is the part that has to be boring in the best way:

• Stable data pipelines from your core platforms
• A unified data model your team can understand
• Standard templates for dashboards and decks
• Baseline AI-assisted summaries you can trust not to hallucinate nonsense

Every month, like clockwork, the Factory does its thing.

Lab: The Experiments That Push the Edges

This is where we play:

• Testing different narrative structures
• Experimenting with AI video recaps, tones, and lengths
• Trying new ways to visualize “punching above weight” and efficiency
• Surfacing cross-client learnings without breaking privacy

The Lab isn’t a separate playground for side projects; it runs on top of the Factory. We test with a subset of accounts, measure impact, and promote winners into the core system.

That’s how this avoids becoming a one-off “cool demo” that rots in someone’s bookmarks.

Where We’re Headed

The end state we care about looks like this:

• A small business owner opens their monthly recap—deck or video—and actually gets it.
• They can answer, in their own words:
  • “What did I pay for?”
  • “What did I get?”
  • “What’s happening next?”
• Your account manager walks into the meeting with confidence, not defensiveness.
• Your leadership sees reporting as a strategic asset, not a monthly tax on everyone’s sanity.

Under that calm surface, there’s a system quietly doing the hard stuff: integrations, normalization, AI-assisted story generation, automated decks, maybe a talking-head video.

If you’re running an agency and thinking, “That’s the reporting world I want,” that’s the direction we’re building toward at Bait Shop.

Not another dashboard.
A system that makes your work understandable—and therefore a lot harder to cut.