Some of the most important work we do never appears in a case study, because no client wants a case study titled "the week everything caught fire". The hacked WordPress site serving casino pages to your donors. The ad account suspended at 9pm in the biggest giving week of the year. The migration that quietly deleted five years of rankings. The pixel that stopped firing in March and nobody noticed until the quarterly review.
The industry has no product for this. Agencies want retainers; consultants want transformation programmes. What a marketing director with a burning platform actually needs is an emergency department: someone senior, available now, who has seen this exact wound before and knows the order of operations.
So we productised the emergency
We call them Troubled Digital Scenarios, TDS. One service, one promise: triage first, blame later. The protocol is always the same. Stop the bleeding: contain the hack, appeal the suspension, pause the spend that's evaporating. Stabilise: restore tracking, traffic or trust to a known-good state. Then, and only then, diagnose how it happened and what prevents the sequel.
In a digital emergency, the expensive thing isn't the consultant. It's the third day of not knowing what's wrong.
For our retained charity clients this discipline is contractual, emergency campaign activation in hours, not days, because humanitarian appeals don't wait for a Monday kick-off call. For everyone else, TDS is the door you come through when something has already gone wrong and the usual suspects are quoting you a discovery phase.
The uncomfortable pattern
After enough emergencies you notice the same root causes: a plugin nobody owned, a tracking change nobody tested, an account permission nobody revoked, a renewal nobody diarised. Digital disasters are rarely exotic. They're maintenance debts with dramatic timing, which is why every TDS engagement ends with the dull, valuable document: the list of debts you're still carrying, priced against the cost of this week.
We'd rather you never need us this way. But if you're reading this with a fire burning, skip the contact form pleasantries and say so. Triage first.