Fractional Media Buyer Who Holds the Logins and the Card

I bill a flat monthly fee and never a percentage of spend, because the moment my income rises with your budget you can no longer trust my recommendation to cut it. In the last four engagements I took, month one reduced spend rather than raised it. That is the normal shape of a first month here. Whose hands are on the account: Mine. I hold admin on the accounts and make the allocation call myself, in the platform, most working days. There is no junior behind me and no agency pod. The person deciding where the next hundred thousand goes is the person who has to explain the last hundred thousand to your CFO. If your account currently sits in an agency's MCC and they will not release it, settle that before we speak again, because I do not buy through somebody else's account. The decision you are paying for: Where the marginal dollar goes this week, and where it stops. Which campaigns get ended rather than optimised. When a channel has saturated and its incremental cost has quietly doubled while the reported cost per acquisition held steady. Whether the lift you are celebrating is real. I read incrementality with geo holdouts rather than platform-reported conversions, and I will not run a holdout across fewer than twelve comparable markets or shorter than six weeks, because underneath that the result is noise dressed as a decision. Where the business genuinely cannot support a holdout, I will tell you the question is unanswerable rather than answer it badly and let you spend against the answer. Platforms: Google Ads including Performance Max, where I insist on asset-group and feed-level control rather than one campaign swallowing the account and taking credit for demand you already had. Meta, using Advantage+ where it earns its place and manual structures where it does not. In Japan: Yahoo! Japan Search Ads and Yahoo! Japan Display Ads, LINE Ads, and SmartNews for a small number of categories. Apple Search Ads for app clients, and if your app ships in Apple's Kids Category the absence of third-party SDKs changes your attribution question before it changes your buying, so we settle that in week one. Reddit and developer newsletters for tooling clients, where the constraint is inventory quality rather than bid strategy. The weekly rhythm: A Monday note of no more than one page: what moved, what I changed, what I am watching, and the single decision I need from you. A month-end reconciliation against your own revenue system rather than the platforms' reported numbers. I do not send a dashboard in place of a recommendation. Not included: Creative production and landing page builds. I write precise briefs and reject work that does not fit them, but I do not make the assets. The one exception is Japanese search ad text, where translated English copy fails in a predictable way and I write it myself. Tracking repair beyond identifying that it is broken: when the measurement plumbing is the problem, that is a separate build. Marketplace retail media on Amazon or Rakuten, which I do not buy and will refer out. Not for you if: You want percentage-of-spend billing because it makes the finance approval easier. You want somebody to execute a plan that is already decided, in which case a good freelance buyer at a fifth of this fee is the correct hire and I will say so. Your monthly budget is small enough that the allocation question answers itself. Or the account must stay with an incumbent agency while I advise from outside it. I have done that arrangement; it does not work, and I will not sell it again.