This ad agency has an AI chief of staff running the place
Senior team up front. AI Chief of Staff in the back.
BaD Mktg is two founders with 40+ years of agency experience and a network of 2,500+ creators. No middle managers, no junior hand-offs. So who runs the place? Goodie, our AI Chief of Staff. Here’s what it gives back to our clients’ business.
The billable hour is dead
Mad Men silos weren’t built for this.
Billable hours have always punished agencies that work fast and produce value.Greg Castro, VP Global Partnerships, Mobvista1
The old model, with accounts, strategy, creative and production all passing work down the line, was perfect for making one or two TV spots a year and ideal for billable-hour maxxing. Most creative agencies still work that way. But brands now need content that never stops, built for a media plan.
Brands need high-performing content across the whole consumer journey, made fast, made well and priced so it makes sense. Today, AI can definitely help make the work faster, but as Sir Martin Sorrell puts it, “if you charge on time, that is compressed.”2 Under hourly billing, every hour AI saves is an hour the agency can’t bill, so there’s no reason to save it. Clients end up paying for time, not results.
Clients have noticed. Sorrell says marketers now ask: “If AI cuts 20% of the time it takes to manage our media, does that mean fees drop 20% too?”3 What they want is simple: a price for the work, agreed before it starts.
Everyone is getting faster
Speed is the floor now.
AI is giving every agency the same head start. Decks can come together quicker, first drafts arrive sooner, edits move faster. That’s table stakes.
But a faster silo is still a silo. What fixes a broken model is a new model: strategy, creative, accounts and production in one senior team.
Two senior pros × 2,500+ creators
A distributed network is our superpower.
At BaD Mktg we — the senior talent — lead every project, from initial meetings to on-set management. BaD Ideas, our brains and experience in an AI wrapper, helps get us to the right strategy and the creative way in faster. Once we have an approved creative concept, we build a right-sized team from Baddies, our network of 2,500+ creators: directors, editors, production houses, photographers, designers, etc., each cast job by job.
Hundreds of them have already made work with us, and our Baddie Watch™ tool keeps finding more. Right-sized, right-priced, and always the right creator for the job, big or small.
Every creator means paperwork
…& paperwork is a serious time suck.
Every person on a job means an agreement before they start, an invoice when they’re done, a check that the invoice matches what we agreed, a payment, and sometimes a chase.
in one
month
In September alone, 28 different freelancers and suppliers billed us.
This is where most shops hire a coordinator, then a middle manager to manage the coordinator. We didn’t.
We created the process, AI just executes it
Our AI Chief of Staff runs the place.
Between us we’ve got 40+ years of running campaigns, and we know how a job should be handled. Every vendor papered before they start. Every bill checked against what we agreed. Everyone paid once. Nothing goes out without one of us saying yes.
Goodie is that process, written down and turned into a system. Connected to all our tools, it handles our admin, from scheduling our lives to paying our bills. It does it our way and only stops to ask when it hits something it hasn’t seen. We answer once, and the answer becomes part of the system.
In June it had to ask us about almost every invoice. In September, 7 in 10. The newer rules it’s testing would handle about two in three on their own.
Pretend you’re Goodie
Should you handle it, or stop and ask? Three real invoices, names removed.
A month’s worth of busy work
Here’s what Goodie handled in September, counted from our own records.
Paid once, paid right
- 6invoices that didn’t match what we’d agreed, Goodie held them until we decided what to do
- 7billed under a name it couldn’t confirm, Goodie checked with us before anyone was paid
- 2extra copies of an invoice we’d already paid, Goodie flagged & fixed it
Ian gets his own briefing every morning. On Sept 18 it reminded him the French script was due at the client’s translator that day, and that the deadline fell in the middle of Yotam being OOO. Ian DIDN’T forget 👍🏼
projects
signed
Since March: about 90 projects tracked in one place and 72 freelancer agreements signed.
So how much time do we actually save??
Goodie gives a week of time back to the work… every month!
The default time for each job is based on published findings. Use the sliders to change them if you think they’re off!
About 9.6 hours a week, after our review time.
With every time at the low or high end of the published range, it comes to 7 to 13 hours a week. Sources are at the bottom of the page.
We bill on output, not hours.
But if we did, here’s what that week would have cost the client.
The hours come from the calculator above. Change them there and this updates.
That’s about $83,600 a year of client budget that can be refocused on the work.
What that week of time is worth… in actual client value.
All the time we save means our brains get to focus on the important things, the things that actually drive value for our clients:
- developing killer strategy and creative
- casting the right Baddie for every job
- proactive client conversations that paperwork used to crowd out
- etc. etc. (we’re finding new ways all the time!)
In other words, our senior attention and work stays on your brand, not on admin. And that was kinda the point all along.
Three key learnings that really help the system flow
Drafts, not sends
Anything going to a client stays a draft until a real person sends it. On its own, Goodie only sends routine receipts, like telling a freelancer their invoice arrived.
Plain language or nothing
Every note says what’s wrong and what to do next, in a sentence. If you have to decode an alert, you won’t act on it. The conversational aspect makes it quick to answer… just like you’re texting someone.
The real world breaks demos
One big client’s spam filter quietly swallowed our e-signature emails. Another’s security blocks e-signature tools altogether. The fix was low-tech: send the signing link from a person’s mailbox, or send a one-page PDF. The good news? Once fixed, that solution is banked forever and the system continues learning.
Think this system could help your business?
You don’t need to build what we did… it’s already built!
Get in touch with us! We’d love to talk to others who are trying to create a similar business model… or would like to use ours!