How many people does it take to run an agency? Two.
Two partners, no juniors, no retainers, more than $2 million in revenue over three years: Digiday profiles BaD Mktg, a Toronto agency that put fifteen years of craft into AI rather than into an org chart. I recognise every line, because it is the reasoning that made me build mediagentic.
On 13 October, Digiday profiled BaD Mktg, a Toronto agency run by two partners, Ian Buck and Yotam Dor, who have worked together for fifteen years. They sold their first agency to a holding company, sat through years of earn-out, and left in 2023 to start again as a pair, with AI as the third partner. Three years on: more than $2 million in revenue, no retainers, no junior to hand the file to, freelancers when something needs producing, and BMW among the clients.
What stopped me in that interview had less to do with AI than with a timesheet story. At the group that had bought them, they were the only two people who refused to log their hours. The house solution: an assistant filled in eight hours a day on their behalf, because, as Buck puts it, "they literally couldn't pay us otherwise". Profitable from month one, disliked by everyone except the CFO, and one sentence that sums it up: "what we do just breaks their model".
Their method rests on two tools. The first is a private space inside ChatGPT, locked down for client confidentiality. What makes it useful is not the model but what they put into it: fifteen years of campaigns, their recorded conversations, the studies they chose. "We put our brains into it," Buck says. When he asks it for a hundred headlines, "most of them are shit, worse than humans. But there's 100 of them to choose from", and it is still their experience that recognises the three worth keeping. The order matters: AI does not augment these two, they augment the AI. The second tool, Goody, runs the back office (priorities, payments, vendors) with a human check on the money. The result: a concept that used to take six weeks now takes six days, often less. They even wait a week before presenting, because a client who gets the answer in two hours does not believe it.
I recognise every line, because it is the reasoning that made me build mediagentic: a strategist who has seen hundreds of media plans, agents that execute what nobody should still be doing by hand, and a price that depends neither on hours nor on volume, a set-up fee then a fixed monthly fee by media budget tier, zero commission. My agents are only worth the plan I write and what I decide to keep from their output. No junior trained on your account, and no timesheet, so no reason to make anything last.
The model also changes an agency's arithmetic. One experienced strategist, freed from execution, can support dozens of clients at once while keeping a high level of strategic quality, whereas an army of juniors, swamped with manual tasks it has no distance to question, always ends up degrading the service.
One difference, which I own. BaD Mktg sells projects, and a project ends when the campaign is delivered. Media never stops: the platforms re-optimise every night, and someone has to read the numbers every morning. That is why my model is a subscription rather than a quote, and why my agents run day and night rather than on brief.
Two-person agencies look less like an anomaly than like the beginning of a model.