← Back to Work

Frequence / MadHive · Deep Dive 03 — Creative Agency

An in-house agency, built to scale.

I grew the creative team from four freelance banner designers into a 40-person, full-service in-house agency producing roughly 20,000 ads a quarter across every omnichannel format. The unlock wasn't more people — it was systems: a shared identity, an atomic production framework, and a culture worth staying for.

Thinking Atomically

A production system, not a pile of files

In 2016 we rebuilt banner production on an atomic design framework — atoms to molecules to organisms to templates to pages. Instead of opening and editing a dozen separate files, every client request became a change to a single atomized system. Update an asset once, and every size updates automatically.

Atomic design framework
The atomic framework
Atomic design detail
System in practice
Atomic design detail
Scaling across products

The Numbers

What systems made possible

350%
Reduction in ad production time
4hr → 1.5hr
Per banner build
4 → 40
Team growth
~20k
Ads per quarter
Lowest
Attrition in the company

BEAMD — The Agency Identity

A creative team with a name of its own

The in-house agency earned its own identity — BEAMD — alongside a feedback framework that gave the whole team a shared language for evaluating creative work. Here are the logo explorations we put to a vote.

BEAMD logo explorations
BEAMD logo concepts — options put to a team vote

The Output

Sample ads

A slice of what the team produced across display, video, CTV, audio, social, SEM, email, and native — on brand, on time, at scale.

Sample ad Sample ad Sample ad Sample ad Sample ad Sample ad Sample ad
The creative team