A US DTC portfolio running paid social at scale grew combined revenue 987%

Challenge

The portfolio was adding brands faster than its in-house team could buy for them. Every new brand meant another set of ad accounts to watch, another budget to pace and another weekly reporting cycle.

Hiring more buyers helped, but the team was still spending most of the week inside ad managers instead of on product, merchandising and creative. Platform-native automated rules took some of the waste out and stopped there.

Native rules were never going to solve it. The portfolio needed one team to own paid social end to end — the buying, the creative pipeline and the reporting — across every brand at once.

Solution

Three years ago the portfolio handed paid social to us in full. We run the accounts the way an in-house team would if it had nothing else to do.

We monitor ad performance daily and act on it the same day rather than at the end of the week. Budgets get paced, losing ad sets get cut and winners get funded while the result is still live — which is where most of the wasted spend on a high-volume account actually goes.

To scale spend we agreed clear conditions with the client for what a winning campaign looks like, and we move budget into it as soon as it clears them. If a campaign is having a good day, the portfolio takes advantage of it that day, not the next one.

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Results

Paid social spend across the portfolio grew 1,160% while staying profitable, and combined revenue across the brands grew 987%.

What worked on one brand moved to the next. Once a buying structure, a creative angle or a pacing rule proved out, we rolled it across the portfolio, so a new brand launched on a playbook that already worked instead of on a blank account.

Handing the buying over returned an average of nine hours per brand per week to the client’s own team. That time went back into product, merchandising and creative direction, which is what raised the ceiling on what the accounts could profitably spend.