We are an agency, and we still think a good number of brands reading this should keep paid media internal. Below roughly $5,000 a month in spend the maths cannot work in our favour: a retainer would take a bigger share than the media itself, and a competent in-house buyer knows your product better than any outsider will. The question is not which is better in the abstract. It is whether your team can clear the creative volume the platforms now demand.
Obvious conflict of interest, so the page is built to be useful even if you never call us. The section below on when to stay in-house is the one we would give you on the phone.
Last verified 1 September 2026 · Volume figures from the Schaefer AdVault, queried 2 September 2026
Two axes: how narrow the category focus is, and how far the work goes past creative into running and measuring media. Worth knowing before you start taking calls, because the agencies on the left of this grid solve a different problem from the ones on the right.
Positions drawn from each agency's own published service list and stated industry focus, September 2026. Not a quality ranking.
Media buying stopped being the hard part several years ago — the platforms optimise the buy themselves now, and they do it better than a person can. What they cannot do is invent the thing being shown. That is the constraint, and it is measurable: here is what your category is actually putting live.
Ask your team what they shipped last quarter, then find yourself on this chart. If you are at 24 and your competitor is at 200, no amount of bid strategy closes that. They are running eight times as many attempts at finding the thing that works.
This is the whole argument for hiring out, and equally the whole argument for not bothering: if your team is already at the top of that chart, an agency is a tax.
Source: Schaefer AdVault, queried 2 September 2026. The vault indexes ads observed running on Meta, so these figures describe live creative volume rather than everything a brand produced. Counts are ads whose run start falls inside the last 90 days.
| Capability | Schaefer | In-house team |
|---|---|---|
| Knows your product, plant and supply chain in detail | – | ✓ |
| Changes made same day, with no scope conversation | – | ✓ |
| Cheapest option below roughly $5k a month in media | – | ✓ |
| Sits in your planning meetings by default | – | ✓ |
| Creative production at 25+ new concepts a month | ✓ | – |
| Buyer research fielded before media runs | ✓ | – |
| Benchmarks from outside your own ad account | ✓ | – |
| Ad corpus across 1,370+ F&B brands, free to search | ✓ | – |
| Retail media across Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, Target, Kroger | ✓ | – |
| Shopper activation — Fetch, Social Nature, Aisle | ✓ | – |
| Contractually on the hook for the number | ✓ | – |
Green is a clear yes, grey is a no, teal means possible but usually the thing that breaks first. The top four rows are genuine in-house advantages and no agency can honestly claim them — we cannot know your business the way your own team does. Weigh the rows that describe your actual bottleneck, not the count.
Research is not a report we hand over and leave. It is the input to the creative, which is the input to the media, which is measured back against it. Pull any one of them out and the other three get worse.
Category-scale survey work plus qualitative, fielded and analysed by our own team. The people who read the data are the people who brief the creative, so nothing is lost in a handoff.
How the research works →Concepts built against each motivation the research surfaced, at the volume the platforms need before they can learn anything. Brief, design, copy, test.
See the creative process →Meta, TikTok and Pinterest, structured as a test against the research rather than run on platform defaults and hope.
See how paid social runs →Retail media, search and streaming across Amazon, Walmart Connect, Instacart, Target and Kroger, plus shopper activation through Fetch, Social Nature and Aisle — all measured against the number we agreed at the start.
See the full media scope →If the honest answer sends you elsewhere, we would rather you found that out here than four months into a retainer.
Count distinct concepts, not resizes of the same one. Under 25 and creative volume is your ceiling regardless of who buys the media. Over 75 and you are already running like the top of your category.
That is our floor. Below it a retainer takes a share of the budget that would do more good in the media itself, and we say so on the first call rather than the fourth month.
Not what your competitors post — what they are actually paying to put in front of buyers, and which motivation it appeals to. If nobody can, you are optimising blind.
Every answer here is one we would give on a call. Publishing them just means fewer wasted calls.
Three results from food and beverage brands. Every one started with research into why the category buys, not with a media plan.
Research replaced a 30–45 year-old grill dad with a retiree over 65. Conversion rates doubled. Not one additional dollar of media spend.
Read the case study →We rebuilt the best-customer cohort, re-pointed the budget behind it, and fed the platforms a volume of creative the brand had not run before.
Read the case study →A competitive landscape study surfaced an entire product line inside existing capability — and an $80M category opportunity.
See the work →We work food and beverage brands spending $5,000–$500,000 a month across paid social and retail media, and every engagement starts with buyer research.
Most agencies do not offer one because they do not want the pressure. Ours is the reason we turn work down — it only holds up if we are honest at intake about whether we can move your number.
ROAS, CPA, conversion rate, revenue growth or foot traffic — named before anything launches, so there is nothing to argue about afterwards.
Not at contract signing. Research runs first, two to three weeks, and the three months begin when the ads do.
100% of our agency fees for the period. No negotiation, no process to go through, no exceptions.
And if it isn't, we'll say so on the first call rather than the fourth month.
Work With Us →Not sure whether to hire out? We will tell you straight.
Work With Us →