Our story and our values

Why DAVID?

DAVID is the answer to a question.

“How do you get a group of people to do great work?”

Agencies are full of smart, talented, caring people who want to do a great job for their clients.

But the targets they are measured against have very little to do with educating clinicians, helping patients, pushing the creative envelope or solving difficult strategic problems.

Month-end revenue.

Utilisation.

Overservice.

These are some of the real targets that decide who gets promoted and when. Which agencies grow and which wind down. Which founders exit with gratitude, and which must give up with grace.

But the pursuit of these targets forces compromises that interfere with doing great work. So the work suffers, the people doing it get frustrated, and clients must be replaced, at least as quickly as they're lost.

The psychology of motivationWhen faced with two competing goals, people will work towards the one you measure.

So, to answer the question we asked ourselves back in July 2025, the way to get a group of people to do great work is to:

01Define great work.
02Reward them for doing it.
03Set no other targets.

At DAVID, great work is easy to define because we let our clients do it for us.

It’s the stuff that blows their minds.

It doesn’t matter what the brief is. There’s always an opportunity to surprise, excite and delight.

So at the end of every project, we hold ourselves accountable to one question:

“Did we exceed your expectations?”

If we didn’t, we give you money back. If we did, we bonus ourselves.

Money talks. It tells people where your priorities are.

And the model works.

4.0AVERAGE CLIENT SATISFACTION SCORE(3 out of 5 = “met expectations”)

DAVID consistently exceeds expectations.

We have no other target because every success begins and ends with a happy client. And we want nothing to distract us from that.

No finance targets putting pressure on us to rush work.

No utilisation targets forcing us to give work to the wrong people.

No counting rounds of review. Our clients are our partners and we all want to get it right first time.

No chasing margin through delegation. We don’t have junior teams and never will.

We’re the best in the business, free to be the best in the business.

So why DAVID?

David was a shepherd boy who did the unexpected. He beat a giant using a long-range sling when he was expected to fight at close quarters and lose.

The classics are classic because they teach us something fundamental.

When the rules guarantee failure, change the rules.

So DAVID is changing the rules. Instead of accepting targets that contradict our values and interfere with our goals, our model is true to a foundational axiom of human behavior:

Incentives dictate outcomes.

The right incentives will produce the right outcomes.

Founder and Managing Director

Alasdair Simpson

Alasdair spent over a decade paying attention in healthcare communications before founding DAVID. Before that, he had an eclectic career spanning apps, games and academic publishing. He also writes for film and TV and has sold two scripts to date.

He has a BA in Physiological Sciences and an MSc in Pharmacology, both from Balliol College, Oxford.

When he’s not running DAVID, Alasdair is running long distances in the English countryside.