The AI-Powered Agency Revolution: How BaD Mktg is Breaking the Holding Company Model

By Michael Bürgi | October 13, 2026

In the rapidly evolving landscape of modern marketing, the traditional agency model—defined by bloated staffing, billable hours, and agonizingly slow creative cycles—is facing an existential threat. This threat isn’t coming from a massive tech conglomerate or a global consulting firm, but from a two-man shop in Toronto.

Ian Buck and Yotam Dor, the founders of BaD Mktg, have spent the last three years proving that the future of advertising isn’t just about artificial intelligence; it’s about using AI to fundamentally dismantle the inefficiencies that have plagued the industry for decades. By integrating proprietary AI tools into every facet of their operation, the duo has generated over $2 million in revenue while operating with the output capacity of a dozen staffers, all without a single junior hand-off or traditional retainer agreement.

The Genesis of Agility: From Notch Video to BaD Mktg

The story of BaD Mktg is one of evolution through frustration. Buck and Dor first joined forces in 2011 to launch Notch Video, an agency designed to bridge the gap between burgeoning social media demand and the inability of legacy ad agencies to produce agile, cost-effective content.

"Video was just starting to hit," Buck recalls. "Clients were saying, ‘We need video for social, and our ad agency can’t do it.’ We filled that gap. We were able to start doing beautiful, cinematic work at a fraction of the price of the big shops."

Their success with major clients, including a decade-long partnership with a prominent credit card firm, eventually drew the attention of holding companies. However, the acquisition process served as a harsh awakening for the founders. The rigid, bureaucratic nature of the holding company model—specifically the obsession with time-entry systems—clashed violently with their lean, project-based philosophy.

"We found out later we were the only two people in the entire holding company who didn’t do time entry," Buck explains. "The solution was to get an admin to fill out eight hours of time for us every day. They literally couldn’t pay us otherwise. We were profitable in month one—the CFO loved us. Everyone else hated us."

Breaking the Mold: The 2023 Pivot

The friction between their high-speed, output-focused approach and the archaic structures of the holding company led to their departure in 2023. This split was the catalyst for BaD Mktg—a boutique agency built from the ground up to leverage AI not just for generative marketing, but for operational excellence.

While the rest of the industry was fixated on generative AI as a tool for surface-level creative content, Buck and Dor looked inward. They asked a fundamental question: "Can an agency run more efficiently as a business?"

They turned to a college student to help them build their first proprietary tool, "Goody." This system connects their disparate business systems, automating priority management, payments, vendor coordination, and administrative tasks. By keeping human financial checks in place, they created a back-office engine that allows them to function at a scale typically requiring twelve full-time employees.

Operational Anatomy: How BaD Mktg Functions

The secret to BaD Mktg’s success lies in the synergy between human expertise and machine intelligence. The agency employs two distinct layers of AI integration:

1. The "Goody" Back-Office Engine

This proprietary tool manages the administrative burden that usually drains the productivity of creative agencies. By automating the "boring" aspects of business—vendor management, payments, and scheduling—Buck and Dor are able to dedicate their time to high-level strategy and creative development.

2. The Creative Brain-Trust

The duo has essentially digitized their collective 15 years of experience. By feeding their past campaigns, strategic frameworks, and even transcripts of their own internal brainstorming sessions into a locked-down, private AI instance, they have created a "creative helper."

"We put our brains into AI," says Buck. "We brief it before we get briefed by the client. If I need 100 headlines, it feeds them back. Are they all great? Absolutely not. Most of them are terrible. But there are 100 to choose from. It sparks an idea that I didn’t think about, and then I take that in three directions."

The Economic Implications: Faster, Cheaper, Better

The financial results of this approach are stark. In just three years, the agency has surpassed $2 million in revenue. The model is built on three core pillars that challenge industry norms:

• No Retainers: By moving away from the traditional retainer model, they maintain total focus on project success and value-based pricing.
• No Junior Hand-offs: Because the AI handles the bulk of the "heavy lifting" in ideation and administrative tasks, the founders remain involved in every pixel of the creative process.
• Drastic Time Reduction: The creative process, which traditionally takes weeks of concepting and rounds of revisions, is now compressed into days or even hours.

"Instead of a week-long process, which is a normal timeline, we can come back in two hours," Buck notes. "I can tell the client exactly why this will work because of our experience. Our budgets are low because we aren’t spending two weeks of human time on basic grunt work."

The "Experience" Advantage

A common fear regarding AI in marketing is that it will lead to a homogenization of creative quality. Buck disagrees, arguing that AI is a force multiplier for the experienced practitioner.

"If you have that experience, it is miraculous," he says. "We now don’t pitch a concept without giving them the actual full spot. We show them the shot selection, the VO, the music. The client doesn’t have to imagine it anymore. They can see the final product."

However, Buck is quick to distinguish between the generative capability of AI and the craft of storytelling. While AI can version content 100 times in seconds, the final "nugget" of quality still requires the seasoned eye of a human strategist.

Industry Implications and Future Outlook

The success of BaD Mktg serves as a warning shot to legacy agencies. When a two-person team can deliver enterprise-level creative work at a fraction of the cost and time, the value proposition of large, multi-layered agencies becomes increasingly difficult to justify.

The Shift in Power

The traditional agency model relies on billable hours, which effectively penalizes efficiency. If an agency gets faster, they make less money. BaD Mktg has inverted this: by using AI to become faster, they become more profitable and more attractive to clients who are tired of paying for overhead.

The "Holdco" Dilemma

Holding companies, as Buck experienced firsthand, are often structurally incapable of adopting this level of agility. Their business models are tethered to headcount, time-tracking, and complex hierarchies. For these firms, adopting AI at the scale of BaD Mktg would mean cannibalizing their own revenue streams.

A New Standard for Boutique Agencies

As the industry watches BaD Mktg, it is likely that we will see a surge in "AI-native" boutiques. These agencies will not look to hire more account executives or junior designers; they will look to hire developers who can build proprietary AI systems to augment the creative process.

Conclusion

Ian Buck and Yotam Dor have proven that the future of marketing is not about replacing humans with robots; it is about empowering humans to operate at a higher level of complexity and velocity. By shedding the skin of the traditional agency—the time sheets, the layers of management, the bloated timelines—BaD Mktg has defined a new blueprint for the agency of the future.

As Buck puts it, "What you see today with AI is the worst it’s ever going to be." If that is true, the industry is not just witnessing a temporary trend; it is witnessing the beginning of a total systemic shift. Agencies that refuse to evolve may soon find themselves not just obsolete, but entirely invisible in a world that moves at the speed of artificial intelligence.