Doug Dinwiddie

Founder, Maitland

Doug Dinwiddie is the founder of Maitland and spent eight years caddying on the European Tour before building the agency.

Doug Dinwiddie is the founder of Maitland. Before agency life, he spent eight years caddying on the European Tour, where the lesson was simple: the number on the scorecard is the number, and there is nowhere to hide. He has carried that into ten years of running Maitland, building an agency around accountability rather than vanity metrics. He writes about what good marketing partnership actually looks like, and why honesty beats salesmanship every time.

Doug Dinwiddie is the founder of Maitland. Before he started the agency, he spent eight years as a caddie on the European Tour. It is an unusual route into marketing, but it taught him something that has shaped everything since. In professional golf, there is nowhere to hide. The number on the scorecard is the number. You either helped or you did not, and no amount of talking changes the result. Most marketing does not work that way, and Doug thinks it should. Too many agencies talk about brand awareness and engagement precisely because those things are hard to measure and easy to claim credit for. He built Maitland to do the opposite: to be accountable to revenue, to show its working, and to tell clients the truth, even when the truth is "this is not worth doing" or "we are not the right fit for you." Ten years on, that is still the heart of how the agency operates. One team, one plan, accountable to one number. Doug believes the best client relationships start with honesty rather than salesmanship, which is why Maitland would rather show a business what it is missing than tell it what it wants to hear. On the blog, Doug writes from the founder's chair: what good marketing partnership actually looks like, why most businesses need better marketing rather than more of it, and how to cut through the noise, including all the noise about AI, to focus on the things that genuinely move a business forward.

Articles by Doug Dinwiddie

• Where we use AI at Maitland. And where we don't.
• How to check a marketing agency's results before you believe them
• What is an outsourced marketing team, and is it right for your business?
• Why do marketing agencies use 12 month contracts? (The honest answer)
• How to choose a marketing agency in the UK: the honest seven step guide
• What percentage of revenue should a small business spend on marketing?
• Why juggling multiple marketing agencies fails (and what to do instead)
• Marketing agency vs in-house team: the honest UK comparison
• What a marketing agency actually costs in the UK (and what drives the price)