Recommendation: consolidate & Collar's paid media management and creative production under one AI-native team. Kickoff Monday, May 18. Paid media takeover from Attention on June 1.
& Collar has the budget, the assets, and the analytics. The constraint is operational: creative and media are run on separate operating tracks, with no production engine between them. That is the gap to close.
| Function | Current state |
|---|---|
| Media buying | Attention agency, media-only. $5K to $17.5K / month. No briefing layer, no creative production. |
| Creative | No dedicated strategist or production engine. Messaging and brand expression are stale. |
| Analytics | Mark in lead. Northbeam in production. Attribution and event tracking are working. |
| Assets | $1M+ in high-quality production assets on hand. |
| Budget | $150K to $200K / month, with appetite to scale on performance. |
| Calendar | $16M to $19M revenue target. Majority concentrated in the final four months. June is the largest single month. |
An AI-native operating model produces more creative, runs more tests, and learns faster per dollar than any available alternative. This is the central case for the recommendation.
| Dimension | Traditional agency |
|---|---|
| Productivity | Brief-to-ship cycle of 2 to 4 weeks per piece. Sequential handoffs between creative, copy, design, media. |
| Performance | Limited variant testing. Learnings rarely structured back into the next brief. |
| Cost | $10K to $25K / month media-only; creative billed separately at agency rates. |
| Operating leverage | Linear: more output requires more billable hours. |
Two structural changes versus the traditional chain. First, AI collapses the production stages that do not require human judgment, concentrating human time on the stages that do. Second, every test routes structured learning back into the next brief.
This is not a future-state claim. The firms now leading on AI marketing (McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, the more advanced DTC operators) are already running this model. The relevant question for & Collar is whether to adopt it ahead of category competitors or after.
MH-1 takes over & Collar's paid media management and stands up the AI-native creative production engine. Four senior practitioners assigned to the account: an Operating Partner, Creative Director, Media Buyer, and Marketing Engineer. One accountable lead.
Four senior practitioners assigned directly to & Collar. Names and profiles in Exhibit 4.
Operating Partner, AI Marketing. Ex-CMO, trained on AI marketing operations. Single point of contact for Ben. Owns the account end-to-end: strategy, weekly cadence, performance review, and accountability for the team behind the work.
Creative Director, AI Marketing. Senior creative lead with AI tooling fluency. Owns brief writing, asset library curation, the quality bar, and the creative testing framework. Reviews every output during ramp.
Media Buyer, AI Marketing. Senior paid media operator running Meta and Google day to day. Owns budget pacing, bidding strategy, audience configuration, and account structure. Replaces Attention's media function inside the pod.
Marketing Engineer. Senior engineer embedded in the account. Builds and maintains the creative production pipeline, the media-buying automations, and the custom reporting layer Mark and the team consume. Updates the stack continuously as platforms and models change.
Behind the pod sit MarketerHire's internal engineering and creative organizations and the broader talent network. Specialists rotate in for one-off needs (motion design, UGC casting, lifecycle, organic) without a separate contract.
| Role | Person |
|---|---|
| Operating Partner, AI Marketing | Jarred Goldberg |
| Creative Director, AI Marketing | Drew Ragosta |
| Media Buyer, AI Marketing | Cameron Rzonca |
| Marketing Engineer | Josh Flores |
Mark and the analytics function stay. Northbeam stays. MH-1 integrates with the existing stack rather than replacing it. The custom AI dashboards we build sit on top of Northbeam and the warehouse Mark owns, surfacing the cuts Ben uses to make decisions weekly.
Two service lines, run together by the same pod, $15,000 / month all-in. The objective is to lift creative throughput AND testing throughput, not either in isolation.
| Line item | Fee |
|---|---|
| Paid Media Management All social and search channels |
$10,000 / mo |
| Creative Production Hybrid: AI + significant human ops |
$5,000 / mo |
| Total | $15,000 / mo |
The objective is unambiguous: ship more creative, and run more meaningful tests against it. Both numbers must move together. Production without proportional testing is wasted output. Testing without proportional production is creative starvation.
What & Collar should expect:
Kickoff Monday, May 18. Two-week build window. Paid media takeover from Attention on June 1, in advance of the June revenue peak. Sprint cadence (Monday review, Friday retro) begins the week of takeover.
Pod on the ground with Ben, Mark, and the & Collar team. Audit the asset library, the Attention account history, Northbeam, the warehouse, and current ad inventory. Lock the tool stack. Agree June peak targets.
Marketing Engineer stands up the AI production pipeline. Creative Director writes the first briefs against audit findings. First creative produced and queued for launch. Attention coordination continues toward a clean handoff.
Attention transitions out. Pod assumes Meta and Google account management on June 1. First creative goes live. Sprint cadence begins: Monday review, Friday retro. Custom AI reporting in Mark's hands.
Pipeline produces against winning concepts. Spend scales against ROAS and contribution margin targets agreed in Week 1. Each sprint adds capacity for what is working and removes what is not. Senior Partner runs a weekly call with Ben.
Sprint cadence continues through Q3 and Q4. Scope additions reviewed at the 90-day QBR: lifecycle email, organic social, influencer, landing-page production. New scope added through the same pod, no new contracts.
The metrics below are standard for engagements of this type. Final targets and baselines will be developed with & Collar at the Week 1 audit and locked at the first formal sprint review.
| Metric | What it measures |
|---|---|
| Blended ROAS | Northbeam-attributed revenue divided by media spend across all paid channels. |
| Contribution margin % | Profit after COGS and media. The number that matters for the June peak. |
| Creative throughput | Shipped, on-brand creative pieces per sprint. |
| Testing throughput | Tests run per sprint that produced a clean performance read. Distinct from creative throughput, and the more important of the two. |
| Time-to-test | Days from brief to creative live in Meta. |
| Winner rate | Percent of tested creative meeting the agreed ROAS / CPA threshold. |
$15,000 / month all-in. Service line breakdown and fees in Exhibit 5. Media spend ($150K to $200K / month) bills through & Collar's ad accounts directly with no markup or agency fee on top of spend. Tool costs (AI generation, voice / video synthesis, dashboarding) pass through at cost or are covered by & Collar's existing subscriptions. Estimated tool spend at full pipeline: $1,500 to $3,000 / month.
| Role | In-house cost |
|---|---|
| CMO / senior marketing lead | ~$20K / mo |
| Creative director / strategist | ~$15K / mo |
| Media buyer | ~$5K to $15K / mo |
| Marketing engineer | ~$15K / mo |
| Creative production / project mgmt | ~$5K / mo |
| Total | ~$60K to $70K / mo |
Two factors make this the right decision in May, not later.
The calendar. Most of & Collar's annual revenue concentrates in the final four months, with June as the largest single month. Decisions made in mid-May compound through the second half. Decisions made in July do not.
The cost of waiting. The current setup produces below what the budget can absorb. Each week of delay is media spend running against stale creative through a media-only agency, with no production engine behind it. The MH-1 model is designed to be live in two weeks and producing into June. Waiting trades known opportunity cost for no offsetting upside.
Kickoff Monday, May 18. Paid media takeover June 1. Pipeline producing into the June peak.
To proceed, reply to the email this proposal came from, or contact chris@marketerhire.com directly.
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