Swan Studio’s paid media division grows to 7 figures in less than a year

Swan Studio’s paid media division has passed seven figures in annual revenue in less than a year, growing more than 150 per cent over the period, with recent clients including Retail Apparel Group, Bow Wow Meow Pet Insurance and Blue Light Card Australia.

Swan Studio started as a creative-only social agency, and added media buying when clients asked the team to run the spend behind the work it was already making. Most performance agencies build the media offering first and try to bolt creative on afterwards. Swan built it the other way around.

Co-founders and co-CEOs Josh Israeli and Dean Gruskin hired Vatsal Prasad to lead the division. Prasad’s remit is advisory work rather than campaign management and execution: he starts with the client’s business objective, then ties capital allocation and channel execution back to the P&L or revenue target. The team buys across various digital channels, primarily Meta, TikTok and Google, and have recently added Snapchat, Pinterest, and Reddit to the roster.

Says Israeli: “Lots of agencies offer media buying. Almost nobody builds it around the creative, and creative is the biggest lever left on these platforms.”

The paid media team sits alongside the creative team on the same accounts, reading results as they come in and building the next round of creative off the back of them.

Says Prasad: “The business objective and the creative decision get made in the same room, on the same day. When the data tells us something isn’t working, the next round of creative is already in production, not sitting in another agency’s queue.”

The division is channel agnostic and works across all the major digital channels.

Adds Prasad: “There are a lot of good channel executors out there. However, we make every decision through the lens of our client’s bottom line, not channel-level metrics. We’re not tied to any one platform. The job is working out which channels will deliver the best ROI for a client, then doubling down on those. Our own infrastructure tells us what’s working and why.”

Israeli said the model only works if the agency holds itself to the same numbers as the client: “Our clients see paid as a meaningful channel for driving business growth, and we tie our work to their objectives like they are our own, and we have the results to show for it.”

Bow Wow Meow Pet Insurance increased their monthly quote volume by ~60% in 6 months. Naked Biltong are making 5x the revenue they were just 4 months ago. Blue Light Card Australia achieved a 400% increase in paid members within 2 months of working with Swan Studio.

Says Prasad: “It’s been amazing to see some of our clients double, triple, even 5x in size. We’re not locked into one category either. We’ve got a real mix of B2B and B2C on the roster, and the discipline is the same across both, just applied differently.”

The team has also built proprietary tools in-house to support how the division plans, tests and scales.

Says Israeli: “We’ve invested heavily in our own technology, but the point of it is to sharpen how the team works, never to replace them.

Gruskin said the division has changed the kind of brief Swan is considered for: “We’re now in conversations that would have gone to a media agency and a creative agency separately. Brands want one team accountable for both, and very few agencies can actually do both well. That’s our advantage.”

He said the agency will keep investing behind the division: “Vatsal and his team have built something exceptional in a short space of time and the numbers speak for themselves. We’re going to keep putting money and people behind it. We’ve always said we want to be the best at what we do, and putting creative and media under one roof only gets us closer to being the best-in-class performance agency.”

Pictured (L-R): Joshua Israeli, Vatsal Prasad, Dean Gruskin

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