The first thing you need to know about Scott Ensign is that he doesn’t flinch. Not when you poke, not when you prod, and definitely not when you suggest—half-jokingly—that indie agencies like his are stealing the holding companies’ lunch money and eating it on a rooftop with a smug little grin. When I said as much, Ensign just smiled and replied, “I don’t know if smug is the right word… but I feel very good about being part of the independent agency community, now more than ever.” That pause? That was the polite version of hell yes.

Scott is the Chief Strategy Officer at Butler/Till, but titles barely scratch the surface. If you walked into a room full of ad execs pitching for a nine-figure account, he’s the guy quietly flipping through the bloated media plan the last agency left behind—pulling out the parts that matter, circling the waste, and plotting a total reinvention before your PowerPoint even loads. There’s no flash, no jargon gymnastics. Just sharp, efficient, scalable rebellion.

And it works. Really well.

He told me about a recent win with a pharmaceutical giant—“a client with media budgets approaching, and potentially above, the nine-figure mark,” he said, casually. No hype. Just fact. His team came in against a holding company incumbent and, in his words, “took a look around at what they were doing on the media side, and it was clear there were a lot of things they weren’t paying attention to in the way that we would.”

That included the basics—yes, basics—like paid search, appropriate placements, and actual strategy. “We were able to remix that pretty quickly and tell a really compelling story,” he explained. If that sounds like a mic drop, it is—just delivered with the restraint of someone who doesn’t need to perform for applause.

Here’s the thing: Scott doesn’t claim the holding company model is evil. He doesn’t need to. He simply points out what’s no longer true. “The idea that bigger is always better—that’s the myth,” he said, thoughtfully. “The holding company model has been built in many cases on the concept of buying power and arbitrage… but things like up-fronts are hardly important at all in most cases.” In other words, media buying isn’t about how long you’ve been at the party. It’s about how fast you can move when the music changes.

And Butler/Till moves fast. While others are negotiating twelve-month commitments and pre-approved CPMs like it’s still 2014, Scott’s team is operating on the belief that media plans should be as fluid as the market they serve. “We can buy media for ten minutes if we want to,” he said.

Let that sink in: ten minutes. Meanwhile, legacy shops are still celebrating their ability to ‘pivot’ once a quarter.

Scott’s perspective isn’t driven by ideology—it’s driven by necessity. The world moves too fast, the stakes are too high, and the brands that survive will be the ones who can change direction without convening a summit. “The best media plans are the ones you rip up one week into a campaign,” he told me.

And he meant it.

Not because they were wrong, but because they had the nerve to evolve. There’s no heroism in sticking to a blueprint when the building’s on fire.

His approach is what happens when you stop pretending that marketing is predictable. It’s less Mad Men, more MythBusters—with budgets. And Scott seems content to let others cling to the nostalgia of upfronts and inflated impressions. He’s busy doing what works. “There’s a lot about Butler/Till that works really well for the right client,” he said. “That larger public companies just aren’t able to deliver.”

Don’t mistake “independent” for underdog. Scott is clear-eyed about the tradeoffs. “We still do compete on rates sometimes,” he admitted. “And if there’s a particular client where a rate with a larger publisher is really important, that can be a challenging conversation.” But he’s not trying to win every battle—just the right ones. “Some clients are not a fit,” he said. “And that allows us to focus in on the right client profile for us.”

That’s not a limitation.

That’s a strategy disguised as humility.

The revolution he’s talking about isn’t loud. It doesn’t wear a beret or hold a protest sign. It’s a Slack channel, a direct SSP relationship, and a media plan with enough clarity to make a CMO question everything they thought they knew. It’s indie not as a vibe—but as a vehicle.

And in case you were wondering, yes—he does play guitar.

But he's not trying to be Weezer.

He's trying to be right.

And so far? He is.

Let’s see who figures that out too late.

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Let’s talk about one of the ad industry’s favorite bedtime stories: that scale equals strength.

For decades, holding companies have sold clients on the idea that bulk media buying power guarantees results—that bigger always means better.

But Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer of Butler/Till, has a different read. And he’s not just pushing a contrarian narrative—he’s making the case with client wins and operational proof.

“If I had to find a myth,” Ensign told us, “it would be that bigger is always better.” That’s not to say the holding company model is obsolete. But the traditional logic—that you need a giant agency for the biggest impact—is starting to collapse under the weight of modern media realities.

A lot of this shift comes down to what Ensign describes as the crumbling relevance of bulk commitments. “Things like up-fronts are hardly important at all in most cases, and certainly not what they were,” he said. “We can buy media... for 10 minutes if we want to.” Ten minutes. That’s not a metaphor—that’s operational reality for agencies that have built their tech stack and culture around responsiveness instead of procurement cycles.

At Butler/Till, that flexibility isn’t a side benefit. It’s the core offer. “The best media plans,” Ensign explained, “are the ones that you rip up one week into a campaign.” Not because they were wrong—but because something changed. A channel started underperforming. A message didn’t land. A competitor launched a surprise campaign. And if you're stuck in a year-long media commitment? You're toast.

For brands in regulated and high-sensitivity sectors—think pharma and health—this kind of adaptability isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a survival mechanism. Ensign pointed out that some of their most impactful wins came in exactly these verticals, where rigid plans and slow pivots can tank performance. “There were a lot of things [the incumbent agency] wasn’t paying attention to in the way that we would,” he said, referencing a major pharma client whose media budget flirted with the nine-figure mark.

That doesn't mean there aren’t trade-offs. Ensign is candid about the moments where Butler/Till has to compete on pricing alone. “We still do compete on rates sometimes,” he admitted. Especially in deals with large publishers, where scale does still matter in very specific ways. “If there’s a particular client situation where a rate with a larger publisher is really important, that can be a challenging conversation for us.”

But even that, he argues, is about picking the right partners—not trying to be everything to everyone. “Some clients are not a fit,” he said. And in a world where many agencies are still clinging to client rosters that don’t align with their capabilities, Butler/Till’s selective approach stands out.

In Ensign’s view, flexibility has become the defining edge. Buying power doesn’t mean much if your campaign can’t adapt. “Circumstances are going to change,” he said plainly. “Things are not exactly static. And neither should media plans be.”

That’s the quiet revolution happening beneath the surface: not louder, not flashier, just faster. And for clients tired of waiting weeks to shift a line item, that might be the most valuable asset of all.

🧠 TL;DR:

The classic media playbook—locking in massive, year-long buys—is becoming obsolete. Today’s advertisers want out clauses, not commitments.

Keeping a portion of the budget fluid isn’t indecision—it’s strategy.

Take Butler/Till, for example—one of the agencies pioneering adaptive, week-to-week media strategies.

Flexibility isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s becoming essential to survival in an omnichannel world.

Agencies can no longer coast on volume buys alone. The advantage has moved upstream—into tech, analytics, and adaptation.

Scale isn’t dead—it’s just been redefined. The new currency in media buying is adaptability: the ability to turn on a dime, reallocate dollars mid-flight, and hit precise targets at exactly the right moment. Agencies that embrace this shift aren’t just “efficient”—they’re outperforming the giants on every meaningful metric.

In an era of volatility, real-time wins. And the ones who win don’t buy big—they buy smart.

Curation in programmatic advertising has gone through a familiar cycle: hyped, overused, misunderstood, and—if you ask some DSP veterans—quietly shelved. But Scott Ensign, Chief Strategy Officer of Butler/Till, is making the case that we’ve been looking at it all wrong. The issue isn’t with the concept of curation. It’s with how sloppily it’s executed.

“Some people have a point,” Ensign admitted when we asked whether curation was just media planning dressed in new acronyms. “If you're talking about curation as just selecting what media you want to run on programmatically—yeah, that does feel a lot like what an agency should’ve been doing all along.” But Butler/Till doesn’t treat it as an afterthought.

For them, curation is a tool for solving real structural problems in digital advertising—scarcity of quality contextual inventory, lack of purpose-driven supply, and the rising cost of endemic buys in health and finance.

Butler/Till’s “conditions marketplace” for healthcare clients is a prime example. Rather than fight over the same handful of expensive placements on endemic platforms like WebMD or Healthline, they built a curated PMP seeded with high-performing placements and machine learning inputs—then trained it to find similar contextual environments elsewhere. “It’s addressable, it’s measurable, it’s flexible,” Ensign said. “And it works.” The company even took home an AdExchanger award for this approach—one built on the belief that ethics, scale, and automation can co-exist.

Curation, in their hands, becomes a balance of targeting precision and moral clarity. “We made a commitment to spending 10% of our programmatic dollars within purpose-driven marketplaces,” Ensign told us, “whether that’s other employee-owned companies, B Corps, minority-owned, women-owned, or other underrepresented groups.” The problem? That inventory is hard to find. So Butler/Till partnered with platforms like Audigent to help locate and package it into viable marketplaces—putting purpose into practice at the impression level.

Still think this is theoretical? Look at their work with SWYM.ai.

In a campaign for a financial services client targeting tight geos, Butler/Till needed more performant impressions than the DSP (Google DV360) alone could provide. “We used SWYM’s SCaLE optimization tool,” said Ryan Lammela, Group Director of Channel Activation, “to evaluate more potential impressions than we otherwise could, and to curate the ones most likely to convert into a PMP sold through Index Exchange.” That PMP was optimized daily—fusing sell-side signals from the SSP with buy-side learnings from DV360 and Floodlight conversion tracking.

The result? A 56% increase in conversion rate, a 26% drop in cost-per-conversion, and a 52% reduction in domains. “That helped us cut out non-performing inventory and avoid MFA,” Lammela explained. MFA impressions, after all, “don’t perform as well—and we don’t always trust the conversion data from those sites.” No black-box mystery. Just fewer clicks. Better leads.

It’s important to separate what Butler/Till is doing from the kind of “set-it-and-forget-it” curation that’s poisoned the well elsewhere. Lazy execution turns what should be a strategic asset into a hollow tactic. Here’s how that usually fails:

In contrast, Butler/Till curates to solve, not to signal.

“We’re identifying aspects of bid requests that have performant characteristics—domains, geos, ad sizes, device types, channels,” explained Andrew Altersohn, president of SWYM.ai. Their tech packages those learnings into fresh PMPs, updated in real-time via API with Index Exchange. That means fewer wasted bids, better alignment with intent, and a far healthier supply chain.

As Ensign put it, “There’s been a lot of talk about defining curation. I’m not particularly concerned with that. What matters is whether it solves a problem.” For Butler/Till, it does—and measurably so.

So if your curated deal is just a renamed whitelist… or if it’s optimized once a quarter with no learning layer… it’s not the strategy that’s broken. It’s the operator.

The marketers who win aren’t the ones with the biggest PMP. They’re the ones who use curation like a scalpel, not a slogan.

Look, we’re not big fans of the pop-up plea. We don’t want to guilt-trip you, hound you with retargeting ads, or slap on fake urgency like a bad DTC landing page.

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