Services
Paid Media
Media buying is the easiest service to sell and the hardest to staff. GulfStar gives your agency experienced buyers across nine platforms, working inside your client accounts under your brand, so you can take the retainer without hiring for it.
Why Outsource Paid Media
Media buying looks like leverage until you try to staff it. One client needs a Meta buyer, the next wants Google and TikTok, a third asks for Pinterest for a seasonal push.
Hiring for each is slow and expensive. Handing all of them to one generalist is how accounts quietly underperform and clients start asking why.
GulfStar gives you experienced buyers for each platform, on call by the hour and working inside your clients' accounts under your brand — so you can offer paid media on nine channels without building a media team to match.
Meta Ads
Meta Ads covers paid campaigns across Facebook and Instagram — feed, Stories, Reels, and Advantage+ shopping catalogs. It does not include organic posting or community management; this is the buying, not the page.
Our buyers work inside your client's Business Manager as a partner, so the ad account, pixel history, and custom audiences always stay with the client. They own campaign architecture, budget pacing, and the daily auction adjustments that keep cost per result from drifting as Meta's algorithm relearns.
Creative can come from your team or ours, but it never runs set-and-forget. New concepts go out on a testing schedule, losers are cut, and winners are scaled — because on Meta the creative is the targeting now, and a stale ad set decays fast.
You get campaigns live in the client's account, a weekly pacing note against spend and target, and a clear read on which creative won so you know what to brief next. A dedicated Meta buyer rarely pencils out for one client; sharing one of ours for twenty hours a month lets you take the retainer without carrying the salary.
Google Ads
Under Google Ads sits the entire paid side of Google — Search, Performance Max, Shopping, and Display — kept deliberately separate from the organic work in our SEO practice, though the two inform each other. Scope runs from a single Search campaign to a full account spanning every format a client's budget can support.
The account is run by buyers who have managed spend through enough auction-price swings to tell when a dip is noise and when it needs a hand. Work happens in the client's own Google Ads and Merchant Center, tied to their conversion tracking, so attribution stays clean and nothing is trapped in an account you don't control. Search terms are mined weekly, negatives maintained, and bidding tuned to the margin target you set rather than a generic return figure.
What you receive is a structured, documented account plus a plain-language summary your account manager can forward without translating it first. The people on your Google accounts are senior buyers who have spent seven figures before — not a junior running someone else's template.
ChatGPT Ads
Advertising inside ChatGPT and the emerging AI-answer surfaces is new enough that most agencies have no one who has run it — the paid placements and sponsored results in AI assistants, a channel with its own formats and measurement that don't map onto search.
We set up the account, structure campaigns to what each surface supports today, and instrument tracking so spend is accountable from day one. What you get is a live test in market, documented so you can show a client you moved early, and a weekly read while the benchmarks are still forming. Saying yes to this in a week, instead of spending a quarter finding someone who understands it, is the whole advantage.
Criteo
Retargeting and commerce media are what Criteo does — the dynamic product ads that follow browsers back to a store, plus placements across the Criteo retail-media network. Scope is the buying and the feed that powers it, for ecommerce clients with a catalog large enough to make dynamic creative worthwhile.
It rewards operators who know its catalog feeds and bidding behavior, which is exactly the platform an agency struggles to justify staffing for a single account. Our buyers connect and maintain the product feed, build the dynamic creative rules, and manage bids against return on ad spend rather than clicks. When a feed breaks — and feeds break — someone who has seen the failure before fixes it the same day.
What reaches you is a running lower-funnel engine in the client's Criteo account, reconciled against their actual ecommerce revenue so the numbers survive a finance team's questions. You are handing this to someone who works in Criteo every week, not to a generalist learning its quirks on your client's budget.
Bing Ads
The deliverable is a second search channel — one producing conversions your client did not know they were leaving on the table, reported in the same format as the rest of their paid media so nothing looks bolted on.
That channel is Microsoft Advertising, still Bing Ads to most people: search across Bing plus the audience network, reaching a demographic that frequently converts at a lower cost than Google. It usually runs as a companion to an existing Google program rather than on its own.
In many cases we import and adapt the client's Google structure instead of rebuilding, then manage it with its own budget, negatives, and pacing. It is rarely a client's biggest line item, which is exactly why it gets neglected — and why that cheap, steady stream sits there unclaimed. The whole thing ships under your agency's name; the client sees one team running their search, and it is yours.
LinkedIn Ads
For B2B clients, LinkedIn Ads is where the qualified leads are — reached through sponsored content, message and conversation ads, and document ads, aimed by job title, company, industry, and seniority. Scope is the paid program; it does not include organic company-page management or personal profile work.
It is expensive per click, so the margin for wasted spend is thin and the targeting has to be right the first time rather than corrected after a month of burn. We build and refine the audiences, manage the lead-gen forms and the routing that carries a lead into the client's system, and pace budgets against cost per qualified lead instead of raw volume that looks good and closes nothing.
The leads land in the client's CRM directly, with the audience logic written down so nobody has to reverse-engineer it next quarter. The people configuring your LinkedIn targeting have spent real budget on the platform and watched it go wrong — the fastest way to lose money here is to hand it to someone still learning.
Pinterest Ads
Pinterest Ads works for the brands people plan purchases around — home, wedding, fashion, food, travel — where a pin is saved months before it becomes a sale. Scope is standard, video, and shopping ads, together with the catalog setup that turns product pins shoppable.
Our buyers handle the feed, the creative sizing Pinterest actually rewards, and keyword-plus-interest targeting tuned to a far longer consideration window than most performance channels assume. The common mistake is judging Pinterest on a two-week attribution window and switching it off before its slow-burn conversions ever land; we manage and report against the cycle the platform really runs on.
The deliverable is campaigns live in the client's Pinterest account, plus a report that frames results against that longer horizon so a working campaign doesn't get killed for being patient. This is capacity you rent for the seasons a client needs it and stand down when they don't — no full-time hire to justify through the quiet months.
TikTok Ads
On TikTok, paid media means Spark Ads that amplify organic posts, in-feed video, and the tools that connect campaigns to TikTok Shop. Scope is the buying and the campaign management; it assumes a supply of video to run, whether that comes from the client, a creator, or your own team.
The platform burns through creative faster than anywhere else, so the work is as much about feeding fresh video every week as it is about bidding and targeting. We manage the ad account, the creative rotation, and the pixel and events setup, and we brief against the native, fast-cut style that survives the feed instead of the polished spot that gets skipped.
What you get back is a campaign that keeps pace with the platform's appetite for new cuts, with tests turned around in days rather than the weeks a slower channel tolerates. Iteration speed is the entire game on TikTok, and it is precisely where an under-resourced team falls behind without noticing until performance slides.
YouTube Ads
Video bought through Google runs under YouTube Ads — skippable and non-skippable in-stream, in-feed, Shorts, and the connected-TV inventory that increasingly behaves like broadcast. It sits alongside your Google Ads work but is planned around watch behavior, view-through, and reach rather than the immediate click.
We handle media planning, audience building, and the frequency management that stops a campaign wearing out its welcome and turning a brand into an annoyance. The work runs from your creative, or from cutdowns of an existing spot into the lengths each placement needs — a six-second bumper reads nothing like a fifteen-second skippable, and treating them the same wastes the buy.
You receive a running video program in the client's own account, with view-through and brand-lift reporting your account manager can present as their own analysis. Every deliverable — the plan, the account, the report — carries your brand and no trace of ours; the client is buying your agency's video team, not discovering a subcontractor.
What Every Engagement Includes
The Standards Behind Every Engagement
However many platforms you hand us, the terms of the engagement stay the same.
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