Field note
Why we charge a fee instead of a share of your spend
Percentage-of-spend pricing pays an agency to spend more. Here is the arithmetic, and what we do instead.
Audacities
We make the work, buy the media, and run a network of our own.
The house
An independent agency working in film, print, dimension, and network.
We run sixteen companies of our own. Everything we sell you, we run on ourselves first — the ad stack, the publishing operation, the network, the analytics. None of it is theory picked up from a vendor deck.
300+Properties operatedAn automotive editorial network, each property covering a single model line
3,000+Pages of inventoryOwned ad inventory that is editorial, not made for advertising
2Owned publicationsA quarterly magazine and a book imprint, both live
16Operating companiesAcross the parent group, from armor to coffee to telephony
In houseAd operationsPlanning, trafficking, and optimization, run by the people who make the work
DirectSeller of recordNo resale chain sitting between the buy and the page
Order of services
Four stages, held by one team.
A holding company splits these across four subsidiaries and bills for the seams. We kept them in one house, which is the only reason the work stays coherent from the first line of copy to the last line of the media plan.
Before anything is made, we settle what the brand is and who it is for. Most work that fails was aimed wrong, not made badly. This stage is where that gets caught, and it is the one we will not skip.
- Naming
- Positioning
- Identity
- Brand standards
- Audience & journey
- Category audit
- Messaging
Concept through finished asset, made here rather than briefed out. Crew, edit, and post are in house, which is why turnarounds are measured in days and why a change to the buy does not mean a change of vendor.
- Campaign creative
- Art direction
- Copy
- Film & broadcast
- Photography
- 3D & motion
- Live production
- Sound
Connected TV, streaming, and digital video planned, bought, and measured by the same desk that reports on it. We charge a management fee rather than a share of spend, because a share of spend pays us to waste your money.
- Connected TV
- Streaming & OTT
- Programmatic
- Direct buys
- Owned inventory
- Measurement
- Attribution
- Reporting
Books, under our own imprint. Editorial through distribution, on the same production discipline as everything else in the house, and on presses and channels we already know how to reach.
- Editorial
- Design & typesetting
- Ebook
- Distribution
- Launch
- Rights
Audacities Press
The house has its own imprint.
Most agencies write about the work. We publish. The press runs on the same production line as the campaigns — editorial, design, print, distribution — and it is where the thinking gets tested in public before it is sold to anyone.
Field note
What running a publisher taught us about buying media
Operating inventory changes how you read a media plan. Notes from the other side of the exchange.
Imprint
Publishing with Audacities Press
Editorial through distribution, for authors who want a house that finishes what it starts.
SternBaureihe
Most agencies rent their media. We run a network of our own.
An automotive editorial network of 300+ properties built for one audience: Mercedes-Benz enthusiasts and collectors, chassis by chassis, from the W121 to the current line. Operated end to end on an ad stack we built and maintain ourselves, with more than 3,000 pages of ad inventory live across the network today and growing every week as listings, articles, and market data populate. It is not a client engagement and it is not for sale.
The network's home is sternbaureihe.com — the hub every chassis site links back to — and its buyer-and-seller marketplace is mb-chassis.com, where the audience already goes to trade parts, shop for cars, and read the market. It means creative gets tested on live inventory before a dollar reaches an exchange. It means placement can be guaranteed within a category most agencies cannot even name. And it means that when we tell you what a buy is doing, the numbers are ours, not a vendor's.
300+properties operated
3,000+pages of ad inventory
In housead operations
Directseller of record
Ventures
We will take a position instead of a fee.
We are a holding company before we are an agency, and we build brands we own. For the right venture we will trade creative, media, and platform for equity, or a split of equity and cash, which keeps a young company's costs down and puts our outcome next to yours.
Fee
Straightforward engagements. Fixed scope, fixed price, no percentage of your media spend.
Hybrid
Reduced cash against a minority position. For companies with a real product and a thin first year.
Equity
We build it, we run it, we own part of it. Reserved for a small number of ventures a year.
Talk to us
Tell us what you are launching.
One form, every reason. Pick what brings you here and the questions change to suit it. We reply within one business day.
A division of
Proselyte Holdings, Inc.
Henderson, Nevada · West Palm Beach, Florida