Capabilities

Paid Media & Advertising

Most mid-market companies running paid advertising have no way to tell whether it’s working. The platforms report what the platforms want to report, the agency forwards those numbers in a deck, and nobody in the building can connect the spend to revenue. So the budget keeps going, the reports keep arriving, and every quarter somebody asks the question that never gets answered: what did we actually get for that?
Start

What we do

01

Paid search (Google, Bing)

Where intent is highest and waste is most expensive. We run search where the math says it works — not because the playbook says you have to.

02

Paid social (LinkedIn, Meta, others as relevant)

Strategy-first, not platform-first. The right channel falls out of who the buyer is and where they’re actually paying attention — not out of which rep called us about ad credits this quarter.

03

Programmatic and display

Used selectively, where the math actually supports it. Most mid-market companies are sold programmatic budgets they don’t need; we’ll tell you when you’re one of them.

04

Retargeting and audience work

Built around the actual customer journey we’ve mapped, not generic “warm audience” automations. The retargeting that produces revenue is specific to the segment and the moment.

Most paid programs report on activity. A working paid program reports on outcomes. The difference shows up in five places.

  • Every dollar has a destination. Spend is allocated against specific buyer segments and specific funnel stages — not against “more leads” or “brand awareness.”
  • The CAC math is segmented. Blended CAC tells you almost nothing. CAC by buyer segment, by channel, by stage tells you everything. A working program has that math built in.
  • Channels get fired. Not all channels work for all businesses. A working program actively kills the ones that aren’t producing and reallocates the budget to ones that are. Most programs don’t do this.
  • The conversation in the monthly review is in dollars. Not impressions. Not clicks. Not CTRs. What did each channel produce in pipeline. What did each campaign produce in revenue. What did each segment cost to acquire.
  • The system is auditable. A buyer or your CFO can sit down with the program, pull the numbers, and reconcile them. Nothing is hidden inside a platform report nobody else can read.

When a paid program isn’t producing these five things, the diagnosis is rarely “we need to bid higher.” It’s usually that the program was set up to run, not to produce.

The approach

Most paid media agencies start with the platform. They optimize the campaigns they were given, in the channels their team is certified in, against the goals the previous agency set. Same activity, slightly better executed.

We start with the diagnostic. Which customers are profitable? Which channels do they actually buy from? What does the funnel look like once they convert? Where in that funnel is paid media the right intervention, and where is something else (a content engine, a retention motion, a sales process fix) the higher-leverage move?

Where this works best

Paid media as part of a Seafoam engagement tends to be the right fit when:

  • You’re spending real money on paid advertising and can’t connect it to revenue.
  • You’ve been with the same paid media agency for more than three years and the conversation hasn’t materially changed.
  • Your CAC has been creeping up year over year and nobody can explain why.
  • You’ve been told to “just spend more” and you suspect it isn’t the right answer.
  • You’re sitting on a measurement gap that means you genuinely don’t know what your paid media is producing.

What makes this different?

Most paid media agencies report on their own work. They tell you what the platform shows them. They tell you what their bidding tools optimized for. They tell you what their team did last week.

We report on what your business produced. CAC by segment. Pipeline contribution by channel. Revenue closed against media spend. Different report. Different conversation. Different decisions.

One Retainer. Two Stages of Intensity.

What The Engagement Costs

Phase 1 ends with a number: exactly how much revenue is sitting on the table and where it's leaking. Phase 2 is how we go get it. $6k–$18k/month, depending on scope.

Phase 1
Diagnosis & Strategy

Customer interviews, fieldwork, and a full audit of your funnel, synthesized into a current-state journey map, a prioritized roadmap, and a dollar figure on exactly what’s leaking and where.

Phase 2
Ongoing Retainer

We execute against what Phase 1 found, running your marketing day to day, adjusting as the data updates. As the system matures and runs leaner, the goal is to cost you less, not more.

Questions We Get

Click the link below for full pricing details, and more about how we compare to a full-time CMO, a fractional CMO, and a traditional agency:
How We Work