Managed vs Self-Service Advertising: Should You Hire an Agency?

The short answer

Hire help when advertising starts taking more than you can give it: more than one or two channels, media you cannot buy without a vendor relationship, or more hours a month than you have.

Most agencies then add a management fee on top of your media. Working with Local Advertising & Marketing, you do not pay one. Campaign management and monthly reporting are included in the channel rate — no management fee, no retainer — and you work directly with the person who plans, buys and runs your campaign: Jarrett Phillips.

Every number below is cited, including the ones that make the case for doing it yourself.

What working with Jarrett gets you

• One person who owns the whole budget. Jarrett plans the mix, places the buys, coordinates the creative, sets up tracking and writes your report. You never get handed off to an account coordinator, and you never have to repeat your business to someone new.
• No fee on top of your media. There is no line on the invoice for management and no retainer to cover before your first ad runs. The channel rates in your plan are the cost.
• Your plan before you commit. The free planner shows the full channel mix on real rate-card pricing before you talk to anyone, and every number in it is sourced.
• Channels you cannot buy on your own. Streaming TV, geofencing, streaming audio, targeted email and, in Rapid City and the Black Hills, radio on Haugo Broadcasting's four stations — KICK 104, 95.1 KSKY, HITS 102.7 and ESPN Rapid City — alongside search, social, display and YouTube, all on one plan. Local Advertising & Marketing buys its radio through Haugo, where Jarrett also works as an Account Executive.
• Local knowledge, nationwide reach. Based in Rapid City, with the same digital channels run for businesses anywhere in the United States.
• A report that tells you what to cut. Every month, in plain English: what worked, what did not, and where the money should move next. If something is not earning its place, you hear it from Jarrett first.

What most agencies charge

For comparison, the industry standard for managing advertising is 10-20% of monthly ad spend, billed on top of the media itself — and the smaller your spend, the bigger the bite:

The median US agency retainer is around $3,000 a month. Many agencies also set a minimum fee, which is why a $1,500 budget frequently attracts a $500-plus charge — about a third of the money.

At $2,000 a month in spend, a 20% fee is another $400 a month just for management. That is the main reason small businesses are told agencies are not worth it — and it is a cost you do not carry with us.

A fee of 5% of spend or less is a red flag at a fee-based agency. Nobody can afford to do real work at that margin — it usually signals set-and-forget management, where a campaign is switched on and then ignored.

Fee-based is the dominant structure — 82% of surveyed advertisers use it in at least one agency agreement — but it is not the only one. Whoever you talk to, ask which structure you are in and what the total comes to each month, then compare total cost for the same plan.

Quality matters more than any fee

Underneath any fee sits a bigger number: how much of your media money buys an impression a real person can actually see.

The ANA studied 21 large advertisers' actual impression-level data and found that about 36 cents of every dollar entering a demand-side platform reached the consumer as a fraud-free, viewable, measurable impression that was not on a made-for-advertising site. Transaction costs took 29 cents; another 35 cents went to non-viewable, invalid, unmeasurable or junk-site traffic. That was the December 2023 baseline — the ANA's quarterly benchmark has since put the market-level figure at 43.3% in Q1 2026.

• The gap between the best and worst advertisers is a quality problem, not a cost problem. Transaction costs differed by just 2.4 percentage points between the top and bottom cohorts. Media productivity losses differed by 19.4.
• Cheap media is not cheap. Adjusted for quality, the higher-performing cohort paid $7.46 per thousand genuinely qualified impressions against $19.04 for the lower — a $1.95 difference in headline CPM becoming an $11.58 difference once waste is counted.
• The ANA's own conclusion: quality, not cost, is the primary differentiator in programmatic performance.

That is why Jarrett builds plans from known, rate-carded channels rather than the cheapest impressions available — and why the planner shows you exactly what you are buying.

Why owners hand it off

1. The channels you cannot self-serve. You can open a Google Ads account tonight. You cannot open a radio account, and CTV, geofencing, streaming audio, and email deployments all run through vendor relationships with minimum buys attached. If your plan calls for those channels, "self-service" is not an option that exists — the choice is a managed buy or no buy.

2. Multi-channel coordination. One channel is manageable. Five channels — with different reporting, different attribution, different creative specs, and a budget to balance across them — is a job. The complexity is not linear.

3. Your time has a price. If you bill $150 an hour and campaign management takes eight hours a month, that is $1,200 of your own capacity every month. It never shows up on an invoice, but you pay it.

4. Mistakes get expensive as you grow. A wrong channel, a broken conversion tag or an ad left running against the wrong audience costs more the more you spend. Catching those is the job.

When you might not need us yet

To be straight with you: if your plan is one simple self-service channel — a Google Ads search campaign or a Meta campaign, one service, one location — and you have a few hours a month and patience for the learning curve, you can run it yourself. Google, Meta and TikTok build their tools for exactly that, and plenty of owners do it well.

The planner will tell you when that is the case. When the plan grows past one channel, or needs media you cannot buy on your own, that is when working with Jarrett pays off.

Three questions to ask anyone

Managed help is worth it when the results it delivers, plus the time it gives you back, plus the media you could not otherwise buy, are worth more than its total cost.

1. What is my total monthly cost, and is anything billed on top of it? Our answer: one total built from the channel rates — no management fee, no retainer.
2. What can you buy that I cannot buy myself? Ours: radio, streaming TV, geofencing, streaming audio and email, on one plan with search and social.
3. What will you tell me when it is not working? Ours: every monthly report says plainly what to cut and where to move the money.

Start with your plan

Run the free advertising budget calculator — no email required, no form, no call. Enter your goal, industry, market, and budget, and it returns a real channel allocation on real rate-card pricing. Then send it to Jarrett and he will build it out with you — he follows up within one business day.

Every number the calculator uses is sourced.

Related reading: How Much Should a Small Business Spend on Advertising? · How to Know If Your Advertising Is Working · How to Split Your Advertising Budget Across Channels