Fire Your Media Buyer — The in-house paid-ads loop
Fire your media buyer. Keep the leads, the numbers, and the control. This is the loop Brad Hart (Optimus, Make More Marbles) runs on his own Meta account right now, in-house, with agents: cold lead magnets at $2 to $5 per lead, and close to 4x on the best mid-funnel offer (3.7x this week). The kit is the loop written down, plus the copy-paste prompt that hands it to your agent. Free.
What an agency actually does, as a job list
- Creative — an agent drafts five different angles per magnet, renders the statics from HTML, and only cuts video after the statics prove.
- Audiences — written automatically at opt-in; the email list and the Meta audience get the contact from the same point in the code; buyers become the exclusion and the lookalike seed.
- Launching — an agent builds every campaign paused, budget on the campaign, $10-a-day probes; Brad turns it on.
- Reading the numbers — an agent pulls the account and writes the report: flags, a gut read, threads to pull, one table.
- Trimming — kill gates are written down: click-through under 4.5% past 1,000 impressions; magnet cost per lead over $3.50 with $15 spent. Judged on complete weekdays.
- Reporting — the weekly trim report is the report; no monthly deck.
The loop
- Cold magnet: a free tool a stranger wants, at $2 to $5 per lead.
- Same moment, two writes: the opt-in goes onto the email list and into the Meta retargeting audience from the same point in the code.
- Mid-funnel offer: retargeting ads to the people who opted in, with a paid offer. Best on Brad's account this week: 3.7x on ad spend.
- Buyers move: a purchase adds them to the buyer audience, which is the exclusion on every mid-funnel ad and the seed for the next lookalike.
- Removers: refund pulls them out of the seed; unsubscribe pulls them out of every audience; a reconciler repairs what the real-time writes missed.
The rules
- Statics first — $0.21 per lead against $0.60 for video in the first probe. 9x16 beats 1x1 in every paired test.
- The $50 test — $10 a day per magnet, five days. The full test is free at fiftydollartest.com.
- Kill gates — click-through under 4.5% past 1,000 impressions; magnet cost per lead over $3.50 with $15 or more spent.
- MOFU first for a new offer — retargeting to the warm list first, the email list only after the ads prove, then cold with the winning creative.
- The weekly trim — classify each campaign's job before judging it; count each lead once; flags, gut read, threads to pull, one table.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Fire Your Media Buyer?
A free kit that lays out the paid-ads loop Brad Hart runs on his own Meta account, in-house, with agents, so your team can run it without an agency: cold lead magnets at $2 to $5 per lead, the same-moment write to the email list and the retargeting audience, mid-funnel offers to the people who opted in, and buyers becoming the exclusion and the lookalike seed. It comes with a copy-paste agent prompt that audits your current agency’s job list and maps each job to an agent or a $50 test.
We don’t have a media buyer on staff. Who runs this?
An agent, with one person on your team reading a weekly report. On Brad’s account the creative, the audiences, the launches, the daily numbers and the trim are all run by agents on a $300-a-day cap; Brad reads the report and turns campaigns on. The kit includes the report standard and the prompts.
Is $2 to $5 per lead realistic for us?
That is what Brad’s own cold campaigns are doing right now on Meta: lifetime $2.82 blended across 8,032 leads and $22.7K spent as of September 2026. Yours depends on your magnet and your market. The kit does not promise a number; it tests one. $10 a day per magnet, five days, and a kill gate at $3.50 per lead, so you find out for $50, not for a retainer.
What happens to the agency?
That is your call, and you should make it with numbers in front of you. The kit does not ask you to cancel anything on day one. It asks you to write down the six jobs your agency does, put each one next to what an agent does on Brad’s account, and run one $50 test on your own account. Then decide.
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