MT North

Paid social that holds up when the spend goes up.

MT North is an independent paid social practice in Charlotte, North Carolina. I build the strategy, I buy the media, and I'm in the accounts every day. No account managers, no phone tag, no black boxes. Just a direct line to the person actually doing the work.

Platforms MetaTikTokYouTubeLinkedInSnapchatPinterest

The problem

I spent ten years inside the bloated agency model I'm now the alternative to.

A decade inside top agencies and ad-tech platforms in paid media: large-scale plans, high-value e-commerce accounts, the buy side as well as the sell side. That decade taught me what works. It also taught me exactly what's broken.

  • Smaller budgets get parked. If you're not the biggest spender in the building, your account is there to fill a slot. Set up, switched on, and left to the platform's autopilot. Set it and forget it. It happens constantly, and it's the most expensive thing on this list.
  • You pay for the meetings. Status calls, recaps of the status call, internal reviews you never see. All of it billable, none of it moving your cost per acquisition.
  • The pitch team isn't the delivery team. You're sold by a director and serviced by a coordinator six weeks later.
  • Percentage-of-spend billing. The agency's incentive is a bigger budget. Yours is a lower cost per acquisition.
  • Nobody owns the number. Forty slides of platform metrics, nothing reconciled to what the business actually banked, and no single person accountable for the result.

Services

Four things, done well, instead of a menu.

Everything below is delivered by me. Meta is where I'm deepest and where most budgets belong, but the practice covers paid social end to end.

01

Account build & restructure

Rebuilding the account around how the platforms actually buy today: consolidated campaigns instead of scattered boosts, clean conversion events, Pixel and server-side tracking installed properly, and a naming convention you can still read six months from now.

Pixel & CAPICampaign structurePlacementsExclusions
02

Hands-on buying across paid social

Meta first, then TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Pinterest where the audience and the math support it. I'm in the accounts every day, making the calls myself. The most expensive mistake I see is handing the platform the keys and taking whatever it recommends. Those defaults are tuned for the platform's convenience, not your margin. Automation is a tool, not a media buyer. Something has to be steering it, and that's the job.

MetaTikTokYouTubeLinkedInSnapchatPinterest
03

Creative strategy & testing

Creative is the targeting now. I write the briefs, run four to six variations against your best performer, and kill concepts on evidence rather than opinion. Hooks, formats, offers and angles, one variable at a time, cut to each platform's native shape.

Concept briefsHook testingUGC directionIteration cadence
04

Measurement you can act on

One dashboard, one set of definitions, one weekly note explaining what changed and why. Platform-reported numbers get reconciled against what the business actually banked, so the reporting and the P&L tell the same story.

Attribution windowsBlended CACWeekly noteIncrementality

Industries

CPG
Trial and household penetration. Social is where someone decides to try you for the first time, and where retail velocity gets built before the shelf ever notices.
E-commerce & Retail
Revenue tracked to the order, at a cost per acquisition the margin can carry. The core of the practice and where the measurement work matters most.
Entertainment, Music & Sports
Releases, tours, seasons and sponsorships. Campaigns with a date attached and no second chance at it. Artist and label work is a real part of the book: rollouts, tour support, and independent artists building an audience from nothing.
Media & Personal Brand
Distribution and audience growth for publishers, founders and people who are themselves the product. Different success metric, same architecture.
SaaS & Tech
Qualified pipeline over raw volume, longer consideration windows, and the one place LinkedIn genuinely earns its budget.

Across all of it the job splits two ways: driving e-commerce revenue, and building brand. Those need different architecture, and I'll tell you plainly which one your budget is actually buying.

Beyond social: I've bought CTV and out-of-home where a plan genuinely needed it. More useful than that. After this long in the industry I have strong connections across most of the advertising landscape. If you're weighing something and it isn't obvious I'd be the one to help, ask anyway. Between what I do myself and the people I'd trust with it, the answer is usually yes.

Performance

What the work has actually returned.

Client names are withheld by agreement. Categories are real, and every figure below covers a full engagement rather than a cherry-picked month.

Client A · DTC e-commerce

More than doubled the spend without moving the cost per order.

Inherited an account with no real prospecting engine and a remarketing campaign leaking budget at more than twice the account's own cost per order. Rebuilt acquisition around Advantage+ Shopping, capped the remarketing spend, and put the account on a seasonal creative cycle with new concepts entering every four weeks. Average order value rose 27% across the same period, and cost per order finished within a few cents of where it started.

2.4×Monthly spend scaled
3.1×Monthly revenue
+28%Return on ad spend

Client B · B2B SaaS

Cut cost per signup 42% by changing what the campaign was optimizing for.

Inherited a greenfield account with no pixel history, no audience data, and a campaign optimizing for clicks instead of completed signups. It was finding people who browsed and never converted: cheap leads, expensive customers. Switched to completed-registration optimization, rebuilt the creative around a single direct-to-camera angle, and concentrated budget into the two formats actually producing signups. One of those creatives went on to drive 68% of conversions in the second phase.

−42%Cost per signup
+53%New subscribers, year over year
+6%Same metric, the month paid went dark

Client C · Music & entertainment

Quadrupled an audience from a standing start, at a falling cost per follower.

The brief here was audience, not direct response, and the account was judged on reach and cost rather than revenue. It launched with no paid infrastructure, no creative testing and a cost per follower swinging week to week. Built a structured testing framework across several releases, isolating creative performance and tightening targeting as signal accumulated. Cost per follower fell 44% from the early period to the later one, part pixel maturity and part the testing calls made along the way.

Audience growth
−44%Cost per follower, early to late
6,400+Post shares, no influencer spend

Figures are as reported in-platform, or confirmed against client billing where the metric is a subscriber or a sale, across full engagements rather than a best month pulled out of a run. I'll walk you through the working behind any of them on a call.

The Audit

Every engagement starts the same way.

Before anyone signs anything, I go through your account and write up what I find. You keep it either way.

Account audit

A written read on where your money is actually going.

No charge
Account structure: what's boosted, what's managed, what's competing with itself
Tracking: Pixel, CAPI, event hierarchy, and what's silently missing
Creative: concentration of spend, what's being tested, what isn't
Audiences: targeting, overlap, exclusions, market splits
Placements: where the budget leaks and what to switch off first
The fix list: every change I'd make, in priority order
Turnaround: 72 hours from account access. If you take the findings and run them yourself, that's a fine outcome. Request yours

Process

What the first ninety days look like.

In order, because each step depends on the one before it. You'll know at every point what I'm doing and what I need from you.

01

Audit

The account, the tracking, the creative library and the last two quarters of spend, written up with the changes I'd make in priority order.

72-hour turnaround · free, no commitment
02

Rebuild

Tracking corrected, account restructured, placements cleaned up, baseline creative shipped. Spend stays where it is while the foundation is laid. The least exciting month, and the one that decides the rest.

Weeks 2–4
03

Test

A structured creative and offer testing cycle to find the two or three things that genuinely move your cost per acquisition. A written note every week, a call every two weeks. No standing meeting for its own sake.

Weeks 5–9
04

Scale

Budget goes behind what's proven, in increments the account can absorb, against the target CAC we set in week one. From here it's a repeating loop: test, prove, fund, repeat, with someone in the account every day rather than a set of automated rules left running.

Week 10 onward

For agencies

Specialist capacity, without the headcount.

A good part of my work comes through other agencies. You keep the client relationship; I run the paid social behind it, on contract, at the standard you'd want your own name on.

  • Overflow. You won more than you can staff and the hiring cycle is three months long.
  • Depth you don't keep in-house. Paid social isn't your core discipline, but the client expects it done properly.
  • Cover. A departure, parental leave, or the gap between someone resigning and someone starting.
  • New business. Audits and paid social strategy for pitches, so you go in with a real point of view.

White-label or named, whichever the relationship calls for. I work inside your process, report in your format, and stay entirely behind the curtain if that's the arrangement. Same responsiveness your team gets, and no poaching, ever. Your client stays your client.

You won't find my agency partners named on this page. That's the point.

About

Marius, founder of MT North
Marius · Founder

You hire me, and me is who works on it.

I build the paid social distribution engines that move the needle for consumer brands, retailers, entertainment and artists. Before founding MT North I spent over ten years inside top agencies and ad-tech platforms in the paid media industry, managing large-scale media plans and driving e-commerce growth for high-value accounts.

That experience taught me what works, and more importantly what's broken about the traditional agency model. I started MT North to get away from the bloated version of it and work directly with good people to hit the numbers: high-level strategy meeting hands-on execution, with one person accountable from the plan to the buy to the result at the end of the month.

Right now that's five active clients. Kept deliberately small, because the alternative is the thing I spent a decade watching go wrong. Accounts parked in a queue, checked when someone remembers. Every account here gets attention every day, and that only works if there aren't many of them.

Performance and ROI are the bottom line. Whether it's an e-commerce launch, an album rollout or a brand campaign, the job is the same. Build the paid architecture that puts the message in front of the people who matter, then stay in the account and keep it honest.

Right now
Five active clients across music, retail and personal brand
Experience
10+ years, agency and ad tech
Previously
Top paid media agencies and ad-tech platforms
Based
Charlotte, NC
Focus
E-commerce revenue and brand growth
Engagement
Monthly retainer, starting with a free audit
Connect on LinkedIn →

High availability

No account managers, no phone tag, no black boxes. A direct line to the person managing your budget, and answers the day you ask for them.

Total transparency

You see the account, the spend and the reasoning. Nothing sits behind a reporting layer, and no time gets billed for meetings that exist to fill a calendar.

Mutual respect

I like working with people who share the mentality that good people build great work. You treat my time with respect, I treat your budget like it's my own, and we hit the number together.

FAQ

The questions that come up on every first call.

What does it cost?
It's a monthly retainer, and the number is built on the expected workload. How many platforms, how much creative volume, how much of the account needs rebuilding. Never a percentage of your budget, because I'd rather not be paid more for spending more of your money. There's no fixed price list and no hard gate here. I work with good people and I'd rather find a number that works for both of us than lose a good fit over a rate card, but this is my full-time living and it has to be priced like real work. You'll have an exact figure after the audit, since that's the point at which I actually know what I'd be taking on.
Is the audit really free?
Yes, and you keep it either way. It's a written read on your account (structure, tracking, creative, audiences, placements, where the money is leaking) with the changes I'd make in priority order, back with you 72 hours after I get access. If you take it and implement it yourself, that's a fine outcome.
Which platforms do you actually run?
Paid social end to end: Meta, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, Snapchat and Pinterest. Meta is where I'm deepest and where most budgets should sit, but the split gets decided by your audience and your numbers, not by habit. A DTC launch and an artist's release campaign land in very different places. I've also bought CTV and out-of-home where a plan called for it.
What if I need search as well?
I ran Google Search for five years, so it isn't a gap in the resume. I just don't enjoy the work, and you don't want someone buying your search who'd rather be doing something else. I have people I trust and I'll make the introduction. Paid social stays with me.
Is there a minimum ad spend?
No. $500 a month is a rounding error to one brand and the entire budget for another, so a blanket minimum would be meaningless. What matters is whether the account can generate enough volume to learn from, and that's a question the audit answers. If the honest read is that you're not there yet, I'll say so.
Do you make the creative?
I write the briefs, direct the concepts and decide what gets tested. Production runs through your team or through editors and creators I work with regularly, billed at cost and never marked up.
How long until we see something?
Tracking and structure problems get fixed in the first month, and those alone often move the numbers. Meaningful, defensible improvement in cost per acquisition typically shows up in months two and three, once there's real test data behind it.
Are we locked into a contract?
There's no contract. I ask for 60 days at the start, because a month isn't long enough to judge the work fairly, since the first one is mostly rebuilding. After that it's month to month with 30 days' notice. Your ad account, Pixel, creative and data are yours throughout; if we part ways, you keep all of it.

Contact

Send me your ad account and I'll tell you what I'd change.

No pitch deck, no discovery sequence. Tell me what you're running and what you're trying to fix, and you'll get a straight read on whether I can help, with the audit back within 72 hours of getting access.

Marius@MTNorth.co

Prefer email? That address works just as well.

Request an audit

Free, yours to keep, back within 72 hours.

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Goes straight to my inbox. No sequence, no newsletter, no sharing it with anyone.