The agency model is broken. Here's what's replacing it.
from the author of Hacking Advertising
The $500M Playbook for Producing World-Class Ads at a Quarter of the Price
The Head of Advertising at Microsoft, L.L.Bean, and Redfin wrote the playbook your agency prays you never see. It's called Hacking Advertising.
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"I've spent over $20M on advertising and worked with a dozen agencies. This book describes exactly what's wrong with the model—and exactly what to do about it. Should be required reading for every CMO."
The Problem Nobody Talks About
The Agency Model Was Built in the Mad Men Era. It Hasn't Changed. And It's Failing You.
Here's how it works. You hire an agency. You pay a premium for their creative talent and strategic thinking. They pitch you a concept you love. Then they farm out the actual work to a network of vendors you've never met.
Production goes to one company. Post-production goes to another. Visual effects to a third. Finishing to a fourth. Each vendor adds their own team, their own timelines, their own interpretation of the brief. By the time the work comes back, it barely resembles the concept you approved.
Where your money actually goes:
Concept
Vendor+25%
House+20%
Studio+15%
Half the quality
5 handoffs. 4 markups. 1 diluted concept.
How long it takes:
The timeline? Months. What should take weeks takes quarters. There are layers of account managers, project managers, creative directors, and producers—each adding cost and complexity without adding quality. You're paying for a massive organizational chart, not better advertising.
And the incentives are misaligned. Agencies optimize for winning awards, not for driving your KPIs. The work that wins at Cannes is rarely the work that moves your business. But that's what gets prioritized, because awards bring the agency more clients. Your results are secondary to their reputation.
The cost structure is equally broken. You're paying agency rates for work that gets subcontracted at a fraction of the price. Every layer takes a margin. By the time you add up the agency fee, the production vendor, the post house, the effects studio, and the finishing house—you're paying four times what the work is actually worth.
"You fell in love with the concept at the pitch. By the time it went through production, post, effects, and finishing—across four different vendors—you didn't even recognize it."
— Jon Sneider, Hacking AdvertisingIf you've felt this frustration—watching budgets balloon, timelines stretch, and creative quality erode with every handoff—you're not alone. And you're not wrong. The model is the problem.
The playbook for producing better ads at a fraction of the cost.
The New Model
The Creative Production Model: Everything Under One Roof. Nothing Farmed Out.
There's a reason the biggest brands in the world are quietly moving away from traditional agencies. They've discovered something better.
It's called Creative Production—and it works like this: small, expert teams handle creative, production, post-production, and visual effects all under one roof. No subcontractors. No vendor chains. No handoffs where quality goes to die.
The concept you approve is the concept that gets produced. The team that comes up with the idea is the same team that executes it. There's no game of telephone across four different companies. The person who designed the shot is sitting next to the person who's editing it.
The result? Work that's dramatically faster and dramatically cheaper—without sacrificing quality. In most cases, the quality goes up, because there's no dilution through layers of middlemen.
What the Creative Production model delivers:
- Advertising produced at 1/4 the cost of the traditional agency model
- Campaigns delivered at 4x the speed—weeks, not months
- Creative that actually looks like the concept you approved
- No bloated teams. No bureaucracy. No farmed-out production.
This isn't a theory. Jon Sneider developed this methodology after 25 years of frustration on both sides of the table—first as Head of Advertising for Microsoft, L.L.Bean, and Redfin, then as the founder of Wild Gravity, where Microsoft and Amazon were his initial clients.
He put the entire system into a book. It's called Hacking Advertising. And it will fundamentally change how you think about producing advertising.
"We cut our production budget by 60% and started launching campaigns in weeks instead of months. The Creative Production approach changed everything for our team."
Inside the Book
What You'll Learn in Hacking Advertising
This isn't a textbook and it's not a platform-specific tutorial. It's a practitioner's playbook, built from decades of experience managing hundreds of millions in advertising spend.
- How to produce better advertising at 1/4 the cost and 4x the speed
- How to find small, hybrid shops that run circles around big agencies
- How to bring the best parts of the agency model in-house
- How to launch campaigns in weeks, not months
- A foolproof system to make sure your ads perform before they go live
- Why most major brands are already moving away from traditional agencies—and what they're doing instead
- The Creative Production model explained step by step, so you can implement it immediately
- How Jon applied this at Microsoft, L.L.Bean, and Redfin—and the results it produced
Every chapter is grounded in real experience: real budgets, real brands, real campaigns. This is what Jon learned managing hundreds of millions in ad spend—and it's the methodology he used when he left corporate to build something better.
25 years of hard-won advertising expertise. Yours in minutes.
Is this for you?
Who This Book Is For (and Who It's Not For)
This Is For You If:
- You spend on advertising and feel like you're consistently overpaying for what you get
- Your agency takes months to deliver what should take weeks
- You've watched creative concepts get diluted through layers of production vendors
- You want to bring creative capabilities in-house but don't know where to start
- You're tired of paying for bloated teams, account managers, and overhead that add no value
This Is Not For You If:
- You don't run advertising of any kind
- You're genuinely happy with your current agency and the results they're producing
- You're looking for a platform-specific ads tutorial (this is about the production model, not Facebook settings)
- You're not willing to challenge the traditional way things have always been done
"Finally, someone with actual Fortune 500 experience explaining why the agency model doesn't work—and what to do instead. I bought this for my entire marketing team."
About the Author
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