What Running Ads for Dozens of Clients Taught Me About Marketing

The lesson that mattered more than any platform trick

I've managed paid ads for a wide range of clients across Google, Meta, and now OpenAI. The biggest lesson isn't a targeting trick or a bidding strategy. It's that most agencies and marketing companies try to fit every client into a box.

That box usually sounds something like "you're a SaaS company" or "you're an ecommerce company," and it only ever tells a small part of the story.

Why the box doesn't fit

Labeling a business by its category tells you almost nothing about what actually makes it different. Two ecommerce brands can have completely different customers, completely different reasons people buy, and completely different reasons people don't. Treat them the same and you get the same cookie-cutter campaign running for both, with mediocre results for each.

That's the trap most agencies fall into, and it's rarely intentional. It's just what happens when you're managing too many accounts to actually learn any of them.

Why cookie-cutter campaigns fail

Agencies generally don't take the time to sit down, meet, learn, and grow with the businesses they work with. They run the same playbook across dozens of accounts because it's efficient for them, not because it's right for you. The brand's own insights, the things the founder knows about their customers that no dashboard shows, rarely make it into the campaign at all.

I've seen good businesses get mediocre ad results for exactly this reason, not because the platform failed them, but because the strategy never actually fit.

The promise I make instead

Here's what I tell every client I work with: you'll be a partner in your marketing, not a client of mine. Your business's nuances get heard and built into the strategy, not flattened into a template. That's true whether I'm running paid ads, building out SEO, or working as a fractional CMO.

It's also why I think about marketing as a pairing of a short-term strategy and a long-term one, built around your actual business instead of your industry label. If you want to see what that looks like end to end, that's the thinking behind my growth marketing and fractional CMO work, and it's the same standard I hold for paid ads management.