Business
Case Studies or Cherry-Picking? What Shootup Media’s Client Stories Leave Out
Marketing agencies routinely showcase their strongest results, and Shootup Media, a Delhi-based digital growth agency, is no exception — citing figures like significant organic traffic increases and qualified lead growth among the outcomes it points to from its more than 200 client engagements.
What the agency’s public materials do not address, according to available information, is how representative those cited examples are of its overall client base, or what proportion of engagements produced more modest — or disappointing — results by comparison. Founder Maniv Romeo has described the agency’s approach as results over everything, but that framing, like similar claims across the marketing industry, is typically illustrated through selected success stories rather than an audited distribution of outcomes across every client the firm has served.
Selective case-study reporting is standard practice across the marketing and PR industries, where agencies of every size tend to publicize their best results while remaining quiet about underperforming engagements, a pattern that makes any single agency’s public track record an incomplete basis for comparison against competitors doing the same thing. Shootup Media has not published aggregate performance data — average traffic lift, typical lead-generation improvement, client retention rate — that would allow a prospective client to evaluate the firm’s results independent of whichever specific stories the company chooses to highlight.
The agency, which says it has worked across more than 200 engagements since its founding roughly five years ago, frames its outcome-based reporting as a differentiator from competitors focused on activity metrics, though the underlying data supporting its own headline figures remains self-reported rather than independently audited, a limitation the company shares with the vast majority of agencies making similar performance claims.
Founders evaluating Shootup Media, or any comparable firm, are generally advised by independent marketing consultants to ask directly for a broader sample of outcomes — including engagements that did not go especially well — rather than relying solely on the polished examples an agency chooses to feature in its own marketing materials.
None of this suggests Shootup Media’s cited results are inaccurate, only that they represent a selected subset of its work rather than a statistically representative picture of what a typical new client should expect, a caveat that applies to virtually every agency’s public case studies rather than singling out this one specifically.
Industry-wide, the absence of standardized reporting requirements for marketing agencies means comparing case studies across firms is inherently difficult, since each company defines its own metrics, time frames and baselines without any external body auditing those figures for accuracy or consistency. That lack of standardization affects prospective clients trying to compare Shootup Media against any competing agency making similarly impressive but similarly unverified claims.
A more useful diligence step than reading published case studies, according to marketing consultants, is speaking directly with an agency’s past clients — including ones not featured in its own marketing materials — to get a fuller picture of typical, rather than best-case, outcomes.
Agencies rarely volunteer contact information for clients who left dissatisfied, which means founders seeking that fuller picture typically need to rely on their own networks or independent review sources rather than references an agency itself is willing to provide.