From Startup to Scale / Deep dive 03 · Creative Agency
An in-house agency, built to scale.
I grew the creative team from four freelance banner designers into a 40-person, full-service in-house agency producing roughly 20,000 ads a quarter across every omnichannel format. The unlock wasn't more people — it was systems: a shared identity, an atomic production framework, and a culture worth staying for.
The creative team — hired for character, built to stay.
Thinking Atomically
A production system, not a pile of files
In 2016 we rebuilt banner production on an atomic design framework — atoms to molecules to organisms to templates to pages. Instead of opening and editing a dozen separate files, every client request became a change to a single atomized system. Update an asset once, and every size updates automatically.
The Numbers
What systems made possible
Systems let a small team behave like a much bigger one. Banner builds dropped from four hours to ninety minutes, and the whole operation sped up about 2.7× — without adding headcount to match the volume.
BEAMD — The Agency Identity
A creative team with a name of its own
The in-house agency earned its own identity — BEAMD — alongside a feedback framework that gave the whole team a shared language for evaluating creative work. Here are the logo explorations we put to a team vote.
BEAMD logo concepts — options put to a team vote.
The Output
Sample ads
A slice of what the team produced across display, video, CTV, audio, social, SEM, email, and native — on brand, on time, at scale.
