Before Zeller Media existed, I spent 15 years inside the agency machine. I worked at Havas, MediaCom, and Starcom — three of the largest media agencies in the world. I managed multimillion-dollar paid search and paid social accounts across pharma, OTC consumer health, financial services, and legal. Collectively, the budgets I touched exceeded $100 million in annual ad spend. I learned an enormous amount. I also saw, from the inside, why so many businesses end up frustrated with their agencies. Here’s what I took from that experience — the good, the bad, and why I ultimately decided to build something different.
What Big Agencies Get Right
I’ll start with what agencies do well, because dismissing them entirely would be dishonest. Big agencies have infrastructure. They have dedicated teams for search, social, display, video, programmatic, and analytics. They have access to platform betas, industry benchmarks, and research resources that independent operators typically can’t get. They have processes for onboarding, reporting, quality assurance, and campaign governance that are tested at scale. The discipline I learned inside those agencies is the same discipline I bring to every Zeller Media client. Budget pacing protocols, search query reporting cadences, bid strategy evaluation frameworks, conversion tracking audits — all of that was refined over years of managing accounts where a single mistake could mean six figures of wasted spend. When you’re managing a pharmaceutical brand’s Google Ads campaigns and every headline needs legal review, you learn to build systems. When you’re allocating $2 million per month across 15 markets and four platforms, you learn budget discipline. When a client’s CFO is on the quarterly business review asking why CPA moved 12% in one direction, you learn to have answers.
Big agencies taught me how to operate at scale. That skill doesn’t disappear when you apply it to a $30K/month account instead of a $300K/month account.
What Big Agencies Get Wrong
The structural problems are real, and they’re not fixable with better intentions. They’re baked into the model. The first problem is layers. At every agency I worked at, the person who sold the account was not the person who managed it. The account director set the strategy. The account manager translated the strategy into tasks. The junior buyer executed the tasks inside the platform. The analyst pulled the reports. And the client talked to the account manager, who relayed information in both directions — often losing context each time. This meant the person with the deepest understanding of platform-level performance was the furthest from the client. And the person closest to the client often couldn’t answer specific questions without checking with someone else.
The second problem is staffing economics. Agencies make money by maximizing revenue per employee. That means each buyer or analyst is managing as many accounts as possible. At the agencies I worked at, it was common for a junior buyer to manage 8 to 15 accounts simultaneously. The inevitable result is that accounts get triaged, not managed. The squeaky wheel gets attention. Quiet accounts — the ones that aren’t visibly breaking — drift. The third problem is incentive misalignment. Agencies are incentivized to retain clients, which means they’re incentivized to avoid conflict. Telling a client their landing pages are terrible, their CRM is broken, or their sales team isn’t following up on leads — that creates tension. So agencies avoid it. They stay in their lane, optimize what they can control, and let the other problems fester.
I watched accounts slowly degrade because nobody was willing to have the uncomfortable conversation. That’s not management. That’s conflict avoidance.
The Moment I Decided to Leave
There wasn’t one dramatic moment. It was a accumulation. I kept seeing the same pattern: talented people doing mediocre work because the system was designed for scalability, not excellence. Clients paying premium retainers for management that amounted to budget monitoring and monthly reports. Accounts where the foundational work — negative keyword management, tracking validation, landing page analysis — wasn’t happening because it wasn’t “in scope” or because the junior person assigned to the account didn’t know it needed to happen. In 2015, I started consulting on the side. By 2019, Zeller Media became my full-time focus. The shift was simple: stop pretending to be an “agency” and start being what clients actually need — a truth-telling, data-driven operator who gets results.
What I Brought With Me
The playbooks I built for global brands are the same ones I use for every Zeller Media client. The scale is different. The discipline is identical. Budget pacing is monitored continuously, not checked at month-end. Search query reports are pulled and acted on regularly. Smart bidding strategies are reviewed against actual performance data, not left on autopilot. Competitors are tracked using tools like SpyFu. Creative performance is analyzed bi-weekly and fed back into production cycles. Tracking is audited, not assumed. I operate inside structured systems — ClickUp for task management, Supermetrics for reporting automation, SpyFu for competitor research, and Merchant Center for commerce testing. Performance lives inside systems. Systems create accountability.
The biggest thing I brought with me is the willingness to have the conversations agencies avoid. If your landing page is leaking leads, I’ll tell you. If your sales team isn’t following up fast enough, I’ll tell you. If your CRM integration is broken and your conversion data is fiction, I’ll tell you. Not because I enjoy delivering bad news — because you can’t fix what nobody names. What I left behind was the bloat, the layers, and the incentive to keep clients comfortable instead of keeping them growing.
What Zeller Media Clients Get That Agency Clients Don’t
Direct access to the operator. Not an account manager. Not a coordinator. The person who is physically inside your paid search and paid social accounts every day. Custom dashboards built around the metrics that matter — cost per qualified lead, pipeline revenue, ROAS by campaign — not vanity metrics packaged in a pretty PDF. Candid calls where every conversation is a working session. I tell you what’s performing, what’s not, what I’m changing, and why. No sugarcoating, no slide decks, just straight answers and a plan. Holistic thinking that goes beyond the ad account. I work with clients on conversion and funnel optimization, landing page performance, tracking infrastructure, and internal alignment between marketing and sales. Because the best ad campaign in the world doesn’t matter if the system it feeds into is broken. 35+ brands across ecommerce, lead generation, healthcare, financial services, hospitality, and startups. Every one of them gets the same thing: an operator who treats their ad spend like their own money.
The Takeaway
Big agencies taught me how to think at scale. They also taught me everything I didn’t want to replicate. If you’re spending real money on paid media and you’re getting monthly reports that don’t drive action, strategy calls that don’t address the hard problems, or management that feels more like maintenance — the issue might not be your campaigns. It might be your model. If you want to see what operator-level management actually looks like, book an audit. I’ll show you what’s happening inside your accounts and give you a plan to fix it.
The playbooks I built for Fortune 500 brands are the same ones I use to scale yours — minus the bloat.
