Why you’re getting this: You’ve interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on my journey to building an AI-native agency. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don’t want to get it.
Alright, let’s get into it.
We’re rebuilding the AdTribe website
We’re rebuilding the AdTribe website, and it’s a bit embarrassing how long it took us.
We have a database of over 80 case studies. For years our website showed 6 of them. So that’s where we start: getting a lot more of our actual results in front of people.
Second, positioning. We already do full-funnel growth marketing for most of our direct clients, but our main page still opens with “Take your brand to the next level” (like every other agency on the planet). The new one leads with full-funnel.
Third, we want to restart the AdTribe newsletter and share what works and what doesn’t across our portfolio of clients. We have almost 100 accounts under management, and so far most of what we learn stays inside the team.
And the fun part: I’m building the website myself with Claude Code. Four years ago I paid over $10k for our website design. This time I’ll probably spend a fraction of that (even though it’s going to take a ton of my time).
The first draft already looks pretty decent 👇
Why media buyers actually quit
Recently I sat down with Claude and dug through the notes from 570 interviews my team of recruiters at Haven did with media buyers, most of them this year. I wanted to see why these people were open to a new job in the first place.
355 of them gave a clear reason, and what I found surprised me:
No room to grow: 41%
Want a different kind of work: 30%
Want bigger budgets or international clients: 24%
Stability: 17%
Pay: 14% (and only 7% led with it)
Bad management: 9%
Everyone assumes buyers leave for money. In reality, pay is fifth on the list. Three times more buyers leave because they stopped growing: same accounts, same budgets, same channels, no new challenge.
Keep in mind these are reasons people tell a recruiter, so polite answers are probably overrepresented. But the gap between growth and pay is too big to ignore.
If you have media buyers on your team, this is useful, whether you run an agency, a DTC brand or an app. You can’t always outpay the market, but you can give a good media buyer more room to grow. Let them build landing pages, work on creative strategy, and own more than just the ad account.
That’s what we’re doing at AdTribe. With AI, a media buyer can now do work that used to need a designer and a developer, so our buyers are becoming full-funnel growth marketers. The job gets more interesting, and a good buyer has a reason to stay.
Talk soon,
Dmitry