§ 3.3.2 and § 3.3.3 · A1 / A2 / A3 · two weeks to stand up · monthly oversight thereafter
What this is
Coordination of specialist partners on your behalf. For paid media, that means briefing the partner, keeping creative and message consistent with everything else you publish, and reviewing performance monthly. For PR, it means bringing the story and the relationship while the partner brings media access. We stay accountable for whether the work serves your thesis. We do not do the specialist execution.What we do not do, precisely
We do not build, run, or manage advertising campaigns, and we do not touch your ad account or your budget. Ad spend goes directly from you to the platform. The paid partner’s fee goes directly from you to them, though at times we can invoice on a pass-through basis. We do not write press releases, pitch journalists, or maintain media lists. Those relationships take years to build and cannot be improvised.What we do instead
The thing specialists most often lack is context. A paid partner given a budget and a vague objective will optimize for the metric in front of them, which is frequently not the metric that matters to your business. A PR partner without your positioning will pitch a generic story. So we write the brief, and the brief comes out of your thesis and your messaging document. We review the creative before it runs so your ads look and sound like the rest of your work. We read the performance and tell you what we think, including when we think the spend is not earning its place. That last part is why coordination is worth paying for. A specialist is rarely the right person to tell you their own channel is not working.Paid is an accelerant, not a foundation
Paid attention stops the moment you stop paying. It works well on top of something that already converts—a proven landing page, a message that has been tested organically, an offer with evidence behind it. It works badly as a substitute for building those. It also requires lots of ongoing content to populate channels, test messages, and build the infrastructure required to convert leads from paid media. We will usually argue for organic first and paid later, and we will say so if we think you are reaching for spend to avoid a harder problem.What we need from you
A decision on budget and a tolerance for the learning period, which is real and costs money before it produces anything. Someone on your side who owns the relationship with the specialist commercially. We coordinate. We do not sign their contract. For PR, something genuinely newsworthy. The most common failure is a campaign built around an announcement that is interesting internally and to nobody else, and it is better to hear that from us before billing our specialist.What sits outside the fee
All ad spend, the paid specialist’s fee, the PR specialist’s fee, media database subscriptions, and wire distribution. All of it is yours, quoted separately, and paid directly or on a pass-through basis.Next: the artifact
Sixty consecutive days of publishing, and why that is the line.