The buyer
I managed large growth and acquisition programs at QuinStreet, GroupM, and Apex Growth. I know what a rate card is worth, what a package is really made of, and what happens to a number when you ask a second question about it.
About
I buy the ads the platforms can’t sell you.
I find the offline and off-platform media your buyers actually pay attention to, negotiate it, run the delivery, and then make the results land inside the reporting your team already trusts.
Why This Exists
Marketers can name a placement. Almost nobody gets it bought.
Integrating off-platform buys into your team's workflow is challenging; we make it easy.
The newsletter with 22,000 exactly-right subscribers. The association that owns your buyer's inbox. The conference where your entire shortlist eats breakfast together. That is the best media you can buy, and every single one of them costs you two weeks of chasing a rep, a media kit built in 2019, a procurement thread, a creative spec nobody has seen before, and a performance report that arrives as a screenshot.
So it never gets done. Or it gets done once, quietly works, and dies anyway at the next budget review because it could not be proven in the same table as Google and LinkedIn.
That is the entire company. I do the chasing, and I build the measurement.
Where I Learned This
I have been the buyer, the measurement guy, and the under-resourced marketer.
Twenty-five years of it, in the three specific seats this work requires.
The measurement guy
I led product teams at Equifax and Marketing Evolution, where the whole job was telling marketers which dollars actually worked. Attribution, media mix, incrementality, the difference between a signal and a story. I have built the systems that grade media, which is why I am unsentimental about grading my own.
The under-resourced marketer
Then I ran growth at Campaign Monitor with a skeleton crew, and every quarter taught me the same lesson. The best media I could buy was rarely on a platform, and it was always the first work to get cut. Not because it underperformed, but because nobody had the hours to carry it end to end.
Background
Twenty-five years across growth, media, product, and measurement.
I hold an MBA from the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. OffPlatformAds is operated by Martech Teams LLC, my consultancy.
QuinStreet
GroupM
Campaign Monitor
Marin Software
Marketing Evolution
University of Maryland
What I actually do
Research the media nobody has indexed. Read the media kit properly. Negotiate. Get the vendor through your procurement process. Ship the creative to spec, on their deadline. Confirm it ran. Then turn whatever the publisher sends me into rows your analyst can use.
What I am not
Not an ad network. Not a marketplace with a fake inventory counter. Not a dashboard pretending to have live availability. One operator with a research process, a phone, and a measurement stack. If off-platform is not your real problem, I will tell you that instead of selling you a map.
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