Bruce Marjoribanks
Built an agency. Sold it. Spent 27 years inside the machine. Then AI made the machine unnecessary.
The meeting where I did the arithmetic.
Zoom call, five specialists from the agency plus an account manager, and the client — a national roofing company — sitting through all of it. SEO. Social. Facebook Ads. Google Ads. A strategist.
Six people. Two hundred an hour each. Twelve hundred dollars for “this went up 5%, this went down 5%,” delivered by five people who hadn’t spoken to each other before the call started.
And I sat there running numbers I couldn’t un-run. Every job on that call was one I could do. Not adequately — better, because I’d see how each piece affected the others. And roughly five times faster, using tools none of them had opened.
That wasn’t a judgment about them. It was arithmetic about me.
How I got here.
I started in 1998. Dial-up modems. Internet Explorer 2. Netscape Communicator. If you wanted a website doing real work, you learned to code it, design it, run the server it sat on, and market the thing yourself. No SEO specialist. No paid media strategist. Just you, the project, and whatever you could teach yourself.
Twenty-seven years later, I still work that way.
In 2008 I started Digital Organics — team of twelve, websites and SEO back when paid traffic was still a sideshow. Ran it four years. Sold it when I moved countries.
Then Head of Search and Performance Media at First Digital, one of the most disciplined data-driven shops in New Zealand and a genuinely good company. Real attribution work. Real conversion work. Harmoney, Contact Energy, House of Travel, Dymocks, The Co-operative Bank.
And even there — at one of the best shops in the country — the analytics team and the paid team barely shared data on the same client. Not through carelessness. Through structure. Every good specialist I’ve worked with was heads-down on their own numbers because that’s what the org chart paid them to do. Nobody was assigned the whole picture. So nobody had it.
Across all of it: $47M+ in personally managed ad spend across finance, retail, travel, energy, and home services. Both sides of the Tasman.
The Google moment.
In 2018, Google published an Insights case study on machine learning in Search. The case study was Harmoney. The campaign was mine — one of the first Target ROAS lead-generation builds in New Zealand. We doubled qualified loan applications year-on-year at a 37% lower cost per acquisition.
Here’s the part that didn’t make Google’s write-up. I was sitting in a Google Ads team of ten. Not one of them asked how I’d done it. They went back to their own accounts and ran what they’d always run.
I stopped being annoyed about that years ago. It taught me something more useful: the advantage isn’t knowing a technique. The advantage is being structured so you can actually use one.
What I learned in 27 years.
The specialist model wasn’t a mistake. It was a correct answer to a real constraint.
For most of my career, one person genuinely couldn’t run paid, content, email, creative, video, and analytics at the same time. Not competently. The work was too manual. So the industry split it five ways, and five invoices, five dashboards, and five sets of incentives came along as the cost of doing business.
That constraint is gone. And when a constraint disappears, the structure built around it stops being necessary and becomes overhead.
One brain with the right architecture now beats five specialists who can’t see each other’s screens. Not because the specialists got worse. Because the ceiling moved.
Why "AI-powered" means nothing, and what it should mean.
Eighty-one percent of IT professionals believe they have the AI skills their job requires. When researchers tested them, twelve percent did.
That gap is the whole game right now. Most agencies claiming “AI capability” bought a ChatGPT subscription and called it transformation. Glass facade on a 1970s building. The org chart didn’t change. The billing model didn’t change. The six-week production timeline became five weeks.
For three years I’ve been rebuilding the marketing workflow from the foundation instead. Every client gets what I call the Compounding Brief — a living knowledge base of brand voice, audience research, past performance, creative guidelines, and offer language that the AI works from, not toward. Generic AI output needs 80% human rewriting. Output running through the Compounding Brief needs 20% refinement. The difference isn’t the model. It’s the architecture underneath it.
Concretely, that means:
- Video ads in hours, not weeks — Seedance 2.0 generation, professional editing, ElevenLabs voiceover, one pipeline. Not “AI → upload.” AI → craft layer.
- Creative variants at volumes a freelance designer can’t reach — Midjourney through Nano Banana through Photoshop. Not Nano Banana through publish.
- Customer research that used to take three months and $75K, done in days — and deeper, because the AI reads every review, every transcript, every competitor page in parallel.
- Campaign analysis and reporting automated end to end — so my hours go to decisions, not screenshots.
There’s a clean test for whether someone is actually AI-native. If they cancelled every AI tool tomorrow, would their pricing, their timelines, or their headcount have to change? If not, AI was decorative.
Most consultants are still learning to prompt. I built the architecture that makes the prompt almost incidental. That’s the reason one brain now covers what used to take seven — and why the maths that felt impossible on that Zoom call is just how I work.
27 Years
Industry experience (AU/NZ)
Since 1998
$47M+
Ad spend personally managed
Google Insights
Featured case study, 2018
Harmoney
50 → 4,500
Leads per month
RoofBuddy
Built & Sold
Digital Organics
2008–2012
Strategic Marketing
Diploma, NZMA
How I Work.
- Strategy before spend. No dollar moves until we’ve agreed where it’s going and why.
- One point of contact. Me. No account managers, no juniors, no handoffs. The person you brief is the person doing the work.
- Two meetings a month. At my last agency I had weeks where I couldn’t find two hours between internal meetings to do the actual work. Your budget goes into the work, not the calendar.
- AI integrated end to end. Structural, not decorative. It’s the reason the numbers above are possible at one person’s price.
What it's like on your side of it.
One person who can see every channel at once. One report that agrees with itself. One name to call when something’s off, and no chance of being told it’s another team’s column.
You get an operator who’s been in the room for $47M+ of decisions, who knows what makes an ad work and what makes a meeting waste, and whose delivery model runs on architecture you won’t see but will feel inside the first month.
Want to see what that looks like on your accounts?
You'll leave the call knowing what to fix first - whether you work with me or not.