We focuson the PnL.

Both, but contribution margin is the master metric. ROAS tells you the ratio of revenue to ad spend; contribution margin tells you whether that revenue actually pays payroll once COGS, returns, and discount rates are netted out. We bid every campaign to contribution margin and report ROAS as a secondary efficiency signal — a 4× ROAS at 12% margin is worse than a 3× ROAS at 38% margin, and the math behind that is what we run on.

Pricing is per channel: $5,000/month management fee or 10% of ad spend, whichever is greater. So if you're running Paid Search at $30K/month, your fee is $5,000 (because 10% = $3K falls below the floor). At $80K/month spend, your fee is $8,000 (10% above the floor). Brands engage Act Bold on the channels they want — one, two, or all three — and pay independently for each. Media spend is billed separately, direct from your own ad accounts, with zero markup. Month-to-month, 30-day cancel, 10% discount on annual prepay.

No formal minimum, but the math has to work. Below $20K/month combined spend, the $5K floor consumes a large share of your budget — you're often better served with strategy consulting before scaling. Most Act Bold paid clients run between $30K and $500K/month per channel; that's the band where margin-first bidding compounds and our process pays for itself within 60 days.

No. Act Bold operates with whatever creative resources you have — in-house team, freelance roster, or no creative team at all. We brief, we test, we iterate; we work with your assets where they exist and produce briefs your team or our partners can execute against. Most clients come without a paid-media-specific creative process; we install one in the first 30 days.

Audit findings and quick wins land in week 1. Account restructure typically completes by week 4. Material CAC reduction shows up by month 2 once bid strategies and audiences are reset. Compounding revenue lift — the kind that shows up on the P&L, not just the dashboard — typically lands in months 3–6. Programmatic and CTV take longer to demonstrate incrementality, often 90–120 days, because brand-lift signal compounds over the buyer journey.

Both. Most engagements start with an audit of the existing account — about 70% of the time we recommend rebuild, 30% we recommend optimize-in-place. If the existing structure has good bones (clean conversion tracking, sensible audience layering, no policy flags), we keep it and refine. If it's fragmented or running on legacy automation, we rebuild. Either way, the recommendation is data-driven, not template-driven.

No. Pay-for-performance sounds appealing but incentivizes short-term tactics over sustainable margin growth. Outcomes depend on factors outside any agency's direct control — algorithm shifts, creative quality, your team's velocity, your COGS structure. We charge a transparent fee for the work; the work compounds. If we don't earn our fee back many times over in the first six months, you have a 30-day exit at any point — no clawback, no retainer math, no games.

Each channel does a different job. Paid Search captures existing demand — buyers who already know they want what you sell. Paid Social manufactures demand — surfaces your brand to lookalike audiences who don't yet know you exist. Programmatic reinforces demand — keeps you top-of-mind across CTV, display, and video as the buyer journey unfolds. Most $2M–$20M DTC brands need all three eventually, but not on day one. We typically start with the channel with the clearest ROI signal and layer the others as the account scales — sequential investment beats trying to fund all three simultaneously.