Beauty founder drops ad agency, learns Meta Ads herself in a day

Allison McNamara founded the beauty brand MARA Beauty. She also, until recently, paid an agency to run its Meta advertising.

She stopped. According to Inc., which reported her account, she ended the agency relationship and spent a single day teaching herself Meta Ads Manager.

Inc. reports that her return on ad spend nearly doubled after she took the work in-house. The publication does not put a figure on the before or after.

The practice worth taking from this is narrower than the result. It is that the tool she was paying someone else to operate took a day to learn well enough to beat them.

Meta Ads Manager is free to open. The cost of finding out whether an outsourced media buyer is earning their fee is a day of a founder's attention, plus the discomfort of reading your own numbers.

That test is available to any founder running paid social through a third party. Pull the account access, look at what is actually being spent and on what, and judge whether the person doing it is making decisions you could not make yourself.

The counter-argument is real. A founder's day has a price, and time spent inside an ad platform is time not spent on product, hiring or customers. Learning the tool is only cheap if the account is small enough for one person to hold.