Why you're getting this: You've interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on what I’m working on to build an agency I actually enjoy running. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don't want to get it

Alright, let’s get into it.

Earlier this week I got on a call with Erwin, a media buyer who manages 158 ad accounts by himself.

My first reaction: that's not possible. My second: okay, what’s the secret?

A few things that make this work:

He runs only Meta ads for fashion brands. He doesn't do other channels, he doesn't talk to clients on Slack, he doesn't make creatives. Pure media buying.

His view: media buyers should only do high-level work. Strategy. Pattern recognition. Deciding where to scale and where to pull back. Everything else (uploading ads, duplicating campaigns, turning off Meta's annoying enhancements) is maintenance. And maintenance should be automated or handed off.

He has a small team of PAs who handle day-to-day client communication so he can stay in his zone of genius. He also uses tools like AdsUploader and Manus to operate efficiently at that scale.

Very strict onboarding. Clients get a detailed intake form before the kickoff call. If it's not filled out, the call gets cancelled. Erwin told me there's basically a 100% correlation: clients who do their homework stay the longest and perform best. Clients who half-ass the form churn in three months. It also sets the tone from day one that this is a two-way relationship.

The big mindset shift for me: I've been thinking 15 accounts per buyer was too much. Erwin made me realize that with the right systems and tools, we could probably 2x our media buyers’ capacity without sacrificing the quality.

We're going to test a few things over the next few weeks: integrating Ads Uploader, trying Manus for automated reporting, and rethinking our approach to communication on Slack (sometimes it takes 50% of a media buyer's time that could go toward actually growing the account)

More on this soon.

Our previous Head of Paid Media, Andrii, worked with me for 8 years. He was my first hire. I taught him how to run ads from scratch, and over time he became a minority partner and one of the best media buyers I've ever worked with.

Unfortunately, he decided to leave and serve in the Ukrainian army. That's the kind of person he is.

When he left, my first thought was: there's no way we can replace him.

I was wrong.

Last year we hired Diana as a team lead. Within a month she turned her pod around and made it highly profitable. The quality of work improved across the board.

At some point she mentioned that her previous Head of Media Buying was a true ads wizard and reminded her of Andrii. She suggested we hop on a call just to connect, even though he wasn't looking for a new job.

We hit it off right away. I knew he was the right person for the job.

It took some convincing. He had been at his company for 6 years. But with Diana's help, he’s now a part of our tribe.

His first priorities: build our creative department from scratch and level up the team on AI.

Excited to see what he builds.

I believe in the next 12-18 months, the media buyer role is going to look completely different. Less execution, more managing AI agents. More like a project manager than someone who clicks buttons.

You might have seen the story about Medvi. One guy scaled it to $1.8B in revenue in two years. He and his brother, essentially. They used AI agents to build fake doctor pages and run thousands of AI-generated ads. He might go to jail for the misleading marketing techniques, but hey, the scale is still impressive lol.

That's the direction things are heading for legitimate operators too.

We're already moving that way. Step one was documenting all our internal processes. We got through 120 of them. Step two starts in a week: every media buyer on the team will track every task they do, down to the minute, for one week.

Once we have that data, we'll aggregate it, categorize everything, and figure out which tasks are repetitive enough to hand off to AI. That becomes our automation roadmap. The goal is fewer, better-paid buyers doing only the work that actually requires a human.

I'll share what we find.

Talk soon,

Dmitry