Your media agency costs €3,500 a month. Here's what we're building instead.
Season 2, Episode 1 of "Superpowers" – documenting how we replace the media agency for smaller businesses, so they can capture leads they would otherwise never have found. Follow Season 2 here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/superpowers. Season 1 of 5 Minutes is here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/5-minutes-series
Last week we landed the 5-minute promise: anyone can now launch their first AI sales agent in under five minutes. That was the goal for all of Season 1. Now we go to the next level.
A small business paying €3,500 (kr 38,500) a month to an agency gets roughly this: someone to set up the ads, someone to report on them, and a monthly meeting where the numbers get explained.
Is that a fair number? It's the conservative end of a real market. Pricing surveys published this year put the most common small-business agency retainer at $2,500–$5,000 a month for a meaningful scope, and paid media management typically adds another 10–20% of your ad spend on top. Other benchmarks land higher — a 2026 guide covering the US, UK and Western Europe puts most small-business retainers in the $5,000–$10,000 range. So €3,500 isn't the horror story. It's what an ordinary, competent arrangement costs before anyone oversells you.
It isn't bad work. It's just work that in 2026 can largely be done by an agent that doesn't sleep, doesn't take holidays, and gets better every week it runs.
The price isn't the only problem. You're also renting something you could own.
Four jobs that should have been one loop
Set up campaigns. Follow up leads. Report. Adjust. Each one is a good fit for automation – but only if they connect into a single loop.
The agency can't close that loop, because it never sees what happens after the lead is handed over. Whether the lead became a meeting, and the meeting a customer, is information that never travels back to the ad account. That's where most of the value sits.
We run SMOC on SMOC
A year ago we did exactly the job an agency does: Google and Meta ads, with our own conversational flows catching and qualifying the traffic. 4,422 sessions, 25 qualified leads, €1,440 (kr 15,836) in ad spend. Six kroner back in sales for every krone spent. The full case study is here.
Measured on sales over the same period: CAC of €660 (kr 7,300) per new customer, a 40% win rate, one month payback. Nobody on the team booked a single one of those meetings by hand.
All of those numbers are a year old. They're the baseline we measure from, not today's scoreboard – and that's exactly why I'm running this season in the open.
That isn't because we're better than the agencies. It's because the agent learns from every conversation, while the agency effectively starts over every month.
"Can't I just build this myself with Claude?"
Yes. And some of you should. But three things are worth knowing before you start.
You don't have 10 million conversations with stated buying motivations to learn from. That's what our agents stand on, and the learning travels across them – what one agent works out reinforces the rest. That advantage isn't something you can prompt your way to.
Building it yourself takes setup, maintenance, and a real understanding of how ads, follow-up and CRM connect. That is precisely the job you pay an agency to take off your desk. Trading the agency invoice for an internal engineering job isn't owning anything – it's moving the cost.
And if you want to build anyway: SMOC supports MCP. Plug straight in and build on what we've already learned instead of starting from zero.
The next 15 weeks
Getting started is solved. The question now is what the agent does in the six months after it's live – and whether it can do enough to make the agency invoice optional.
One episode a week through December. Each one covers a single thing we're building, with the numbers attached:
- Agents that get reinforced with every iteration
- Ad algorithms optimising toward qualified leads instead of form fills
- Meta, Google and LinkedIn in one reporting surface
- Meetings that book themselves, straight into the calendar
- AI that writes and builds the ads
To be clear about one thing: not all of that list is finished today. A lot of it is already running – ads, follow-up and qualification are automated and live with customers right now. The rest we're building as the season goes, and the goal is to have the whole list covered by the end of the autumn.
That's why I'm documenting it weekly instead of waiting until everything is done. Some episodes will be about things that didn't work. Those are usually the useful ones.
The goal is that a company with five employees can do what an agency does for €3,500 a month.
The leads our customers would otherwise never have found, we're already capturing today. That part isn't a promise about something coming. What happens over the next six months is that it gets smarter, covers more channels, and asks less of you.
👉 Follow Season 2 here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/superpowers. Season 1 of 5 Minutes is here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/5-minutes-series
Shipped this month — September 2026 release log.
