How many people does it take to run an agency? According to Bad Mktg, just two if you’re using AI
By Michael Bürgi • October 13, 2026 •
Ian Buck and Yotam Dor have been working together for at least the last 15 years, but for the most recent three years, have operated a two-man independent agency they dubbed BaD Mktg.
Working with a coterie of freelance help crafting content for a variety of clients, the pair also put several LLMs to use to run most of the agency’s back office operations, and even devised their own proprietary AI tool. Called Goodie, the tool connects business systems and automates priorities, payments, vendor management, and administrative coordination while retaining human financial checks.
As a result, Buck said he and Dor have been able to function as a shop that would have a dozen staffers. And in the three years BaD (which stands for their last names’ initials) has operated, it’s generated more than $2 million in revenue, thanks to no retainers, no junior hand-offs, and the ability to reduce concepting time from six weeks to six days or less.
Based out of Toronto, Buck was in New York recently and caught up with Digiday.
The following conversation has been edited for space and clarity.
What’s your origin story?
We started our first agency together (Notch Video) in 2011 in conjunction with a PR agency, which was great because it helped feed us clients. We grew very quickly. Video was just starting to hit as far as “We need video for social, and our ad agency can’t do it,” right? So we filled that gap — that was our goal, to create really agile production. And the technology had changed just enough so that for $10,000, you’ve got a full production studio. We were able to start doing some beautiful cinematic stuff at a fraction of the price. We just needed clients to work with us a little differently.
[A major credit card firm] was a client for almost 10 years, and and it’s so funny because we would go in with these little projects, and then it would just grow and grow and grow. And we never did billable hours; it was always project based.
Then you were bought by a holding company [Buck declined to say]. How did that go?
I quickly realized they had acquired Notch Video but didn’t know what they were acquiring, so we had a long earn-out. I spent years dog and ponying the opportunity around and it was so painful. We’d done all this BMW work in Canada, so I went to Detroit to see this client that was 99% of one of their agencies. I got up on stage, I presented all this stuff, and I showed them how much it was … and total silence. The head creative got up, said “Thank you, the work looks great.” Then literally in front of me he turned to the audience and said, “We can never show any of this to any of our clients.” And that was, in a nutshell, what happened the entire time. What we do just breaks their model.
Then another holding company talked about buying us for like six months, we eventually said, fine. And we were very clear about everything — we’re not doing time entry. We found out later we were the only two people in all of the holdco to not do time entry. 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.
Finally in 2023 you split from that holdco and launched BaD Mktg with an eye toward making use of AI.
There was no interest [at the holdcos] in understanding what the opportunity was with AI. Everyone was talking about it from a generative sense. We didn’t care. What you see today is the worst it’s ever gonna be. Our thing was, let’s think about an agency and how it runs. Can it run more efficiently as a business? So we built a very simple AI tool.
We hired a developer — we found a college student who built this in two weeks, and spent a couple grand. What we did was put our brains into AI, so we can use that as our strategy and creative helper. It was built in ChatGPT and it’s locked down so nothing’s getting out of that, whether it’s our ideas or any kind of client stuff.
When we started using it, it was magic. When these breakthroughs happen, your brain shifts and it almost hurts. But we needed to prove it out.
Can you elaborate on what putting your brains into it means?
We started with all the work we’ve done. We’ve got a specific system. We were even recording our conversations as we talked about the business and feeding that into AI. Then we put in other articles and studies we felt were relevant.
AI has a role in production, but it’s a specific role. If you want to version something 100 times, it’s amazing, but the craft is important to us as well because we want to put out the best work possible. Also, we now don’t pitch a concept without giving them the actual full spot, so we do it all in AI. And we present that. The tools are so good right now. The difference for the client sitting there, who’s trying to imagine in their mind. They see the angles, they see the shot selection, they see they hear the VO in the right way, the music’s already laid out.
Using AI on the generative side has been game-changing, but it doesn’t need to be about the final piece that goes out into the world.
That led to a second tool, Goodie?
Our second tool became this thing that we use all the time. We brief it before we get briefed by the client because they usually send over a pre-brief. It’s basically like I need 100 headlines, and it feeds them back. Are they all great? Absolutely not. Most of them are shit, worse than humans. But there’s 100 of them to choose from. I could see something interesting there that I didn’t think about but it sparks something. So then I go in these three directions and keep going. Instead of now being a week-long process, which is a normal timeline, we can come back in two hours because I can get there so quickly. I can tell them exactly why and what it’s gonna get them because of my experience.
So you use AI to make lots of options but it’s your experience that finds the nuggets of quality in it?
If you have that experience, it is miraculous. Again, that’s that brain shift. We actually have to sit on our work because we can’t send it that soon. We’ll say, “We’ll come back to you in a week with our creative ideas,” but we’ve got it figured out in like half a day. And our budgets are so low because we’re not spending literally two weeks of time on this.
