Media Buying Briefing: How Acadia is winning over creative work as well as media

Fiercely independent media agency Acadia, founded by Jared Belsky and Sean Belnick in 2021 and based in Atlanta, specializes in all manner of social, commerce/retail media and other digital media work, and has grown through acquisitions (in April it bought e-commerce agency Crush) to hit mroe than 250 staff.

Digiday has learned that Acadia has picked up creative duties from a few of its clients that are leaning heavily into paid and organic social efforts. And they’re finding it’s easier to work directly with their media agency than with separate media and creative shops. 

“For so long, organic social was in a box, and now we’re seeing these media pitches where we bring to the table all these creative campaign ideas,” said Margot Eddy, a partner and head of social at Acadia, whose agency Imagine Media Consulting was purchased by Acadia in 2021. “They are always tied into media objectives and the audience that they’re trying to reach, but those big ideas are grabbing the client’s attention, and as we’ve gotten a few wins in that realm, we’re able to build out a creative team to meet those demands.”

Eddy said Acadia has hired a creative director with a media background to have that expertise sitting at the table with the client. “Clients will come to us new business opportunities that have been spending so much on the larger creative holding company [agencies]. And they’re looking for a solution to the problem of going to a two-day shoot, and just getting one video out of it.”

Acadia, she said, will organize the shoot with a content creator, a videographer and a photographer present as a way to amass “hundreds of assets that they can use for various media, as opposed to focusing on one campaign at a time.” 

Applying social strategy to the creative is what makes the difference for clients, “You can’t win on Instagram or Tiktok by purely media,” added Eddy. “There’s got to be the organic social presence. There’s got to be a higher creative campaign you have to be able to adjust.”

It’s worked for smaller startup clients as well as established brands.

TruBar, a startup protein bar brand, initially put out an RFP for separate media, creative and retail media agencies, but ended up consolidating all of it with Acadia built mostly around social. 

“I’ve always felt that you lose so much when there are separate agencies,” said Natasha Port, the startup’s vp of marketing, who acknowledged she’s working with a small budget and needs to get near-instant results. To her, Acadia came “fully loaded with expertise and a built-out infrastructure and agility. That really is the most important part, creating that cohesive model … It wouldn’t work with a mega creative agency, where we need to wait to get media performance back and then brief them for the next quarter, and then they take those considerations into account.”

According to Port, the results have been strong, as the protein bar brand hopes to break through on a consumer basis with an awareness campaign launched last week, but also by securing more distribution with major retailers including Costco and Target. And Acadia has been testing out different ways to directly drive sales across different retail media platforms, such as  recommending exactly what the product detail pages should look like. “”Where, if you’re with a traditional retail media agency, they’re very much numbers focused,” added Port.

Restaurant chain Perkins turned to Acadia to handle all its social media work, realizing it needed to adapt from a TV-first strategy. Acadia “reduced the amount of time and resources we spend internally on areas that quite frankly aren’t our areas of expertise and in return we are getting better quality ideas, content, and partnerships,” said Kimberly Bean, vp of marketing at Perkins. Resultingly, “we’ve never had so much organic engagement on these channels as we have in the past three weeks.”  

Acadia has helped Bean flip the creative and production script and approach. “For so long, I have seen the content and assets get developed for linear first and then social or digital would get the leftovers, but this provides a space for cost effective production that can still be used in other channels as appropriate,”

Anush Prabhu, the former chief strategy officer for EssenceMediacom, who earlier this year started his own consultancy, Braindrops Strategy, to help brands and agencies work more effectively together, has long advocated for both sides to come back together again. 

“[agency] culture today is still very reliant on being channel first and ad first, rather than people first. Insights and strategies to create an idea and inform where it lives need to be integrated to every aspect of the brand’s approach to their market,” said Prabhu. “But currently, the way it is fragmented — where we have created worlds of creative, media, social, commerce, and hundreds of different agencies that brands have these days —  make it very hard to integrate. And that, to me, is what is required for the culture moving forward.”

Color by numbers

On top of recent revised ad estimates for 2025 from the likes of Brian Wieser and WPP Media, IPG’s Magna is also downshifting its expectations for total ad revenue growth by 1.2 percentage points — from 6.1% growth to 4.9%, equalling $979 billion. Some details in the Magna report: 

• Traditional media ad revenue is expected to drop 3% to $261 billion;
• Digital pure play revenue will account for 73% of all ad revenue, growing 8% to $709 billion;
• The U.S. market is forecast to grow 4.6% to $398 billion, while most international markets won’t exceed single-digit percentage growth, with slower growth in markets affected by trade disputes (Germany and Japan especially).  

Takeoff & landing

• Independent media agency PMG purchased retail media and commerce company Momentum Commerce, known for its marketplace intelligence offerings. Momentum Commerce’s CEO and founder John Shea will oversee a newly formed commerce center of excellence at PMG.
• Hotel chain Marriott launched its own retail media network Marriott Media, which targets its 237 million Bonvoy customers. 
• Horizon Media’s commerce and retail media arm Night Market, founded in 2020, has been rebranded as Horizon Commerce.
• Kantar hired Dentsu’s chief client officer Jeff Greenspoon to be its new CEO for the Americas, effective Aug. 4. 
• Account moves: Dentsu X landed workflow management provider ServiceNow global media agency duties … Independent Involved Media won media AOR duties for online gambling brands ResortsCasino.com and Stardust Online Casino, owned by Boyd Interactive.

Direct quote

“In an era where media budgets rival asset portfolios, clients increasingly expect more than just transactional delivery — they want partnership. Whether you trust your media investment to a giant or choose an indie, the question remains: Who will really have your best interest at heart?”

\—Crossmedia co-founder and global CEO Kam Asghar from a LinkedIn post differentiating holdcos from indies.

Speed reading

• Last week was filled with news around WPP, spearheaded by Seb Joseph. First came the news that the holding company lost its Mars media business to Publicis, followed by analysis of who might replace global CEO Mark Read at the end of 2025. Joseph captured the thoughts of clients on that move. 
• Tim Peterson’s latest Future of TV briefing addressed the impact of measurement currency changes to the dragged-out upfront marketplace this year. 
• Sam Bradley profiled the behind-the-scenes Svengali of the media business, MediaSense chief strategy officer Ryan Kangisser. 
• I covered the research that led to Omnicom making the pursuit of live opportunities on behalf of its clients its main strategic message at Cannes Lions this year.