Promoted
Promoted is a founder-led paid media agency, not a software tool. It sets go-to-market strategy, then buys and runs campaigns across paid social, search, developer ad networks, podcasts and newsletters. Pricing starts at 2,500 USD monthly.
What is Promoted?
Promoted is a paid media agency operated by Promoted Agency, LLC from Roswell, Georgia. It is a human service, not a piece of software: there is no application, no API and no self-serve account, and the site claims no AI functionality of its own. Artificial intelligence appears here only on the client side, among the platforms it advertises.
The agency grew out of BuySellAds, which began in 2007. The services page dates the launch to late 2024, the site's structured data records a founding year of 2025, and the public announcement was published on 17 February 2025. The homepage nonetheless leads with "Since 2008" and "17 years of proven results, hundreds of millions in ad spend" — figures that belong to that BuySellAds lineage rather than to the agency itself.
Its defining choice is founder-led delivery. Matthew Kammerer, who spent sixteen years at BuySellAds running a twenty-person media team, handles engagements himself: "No account managers. Just Matthew, working directly with your team."
The work splits in two. Capture Demand covers intent-based advertising — pay-per-click search, remarketing, and installing or managing attribution infrastructure. Create Demand covers sponsorships, partnerships, sponsored content, influencer campaigns, newsletters and online communities. Formats run from native and in-app ads to host-read podcast sponsorships, hackathons and event sponsorships. Named platforms include Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, X and Apple Ads, alongside developer-facing inventory such as Carbon Ads, BuySellAds, Ethical Ads, Mozilla Developer Network, Stack Overflow and Product Hunt.
Method is presented in three beats — strategy first, then execution, then weekly iteration — and direct buying follows two phases: strategic planning, covering objectives, RFI sourcing, analysis and negotiation; then execution, covering placements, publisher payments, asset coordination, proof of publication, monitoring and campaign insights.
Promoted claims 1000+ clients, 1500+ publishers and 250+ active campaigns, and publishes three case studies: AppSignal, Bolt.new and Agent.ai. It targets post-product-market-fit companies from Series A to IPO with a defined ICP and a real budget, and says plainly that it is the wrong fit for pre-revenue teams.
What it does
- Map go-to-market strategy — ICP, channels, messaging and success criteria — before any spend
- Plan media and buy placements directly from publishers, from RFI to signed insertion order
- Run paid search and paid social campaigns across multiple platforms at once
- Open niche channels: developer ad networks, podcasts, newsletters, communities and event sponsorships
- Negotiate rates, handle publisher payments and centralise creative assets
- Install or manage the client's attribution infrastructure
- Report every week on what worked, what did not and what is being tested next
When to use Promoted / When not to
A quick filter to help you decide if Promoted is the right fit.
When to use Promoted
- Series A companies with a two- or three-person marketing team and a mandate to scale
- Developer tool and B2B SaaS vendors trying to reach technical audiences
- Founders past product-market fit who need execution rather than another hire
- Established brands testing an unfamiliar channel for the first time
- Fintech, e-commerce and consumer app marketers with a real media budget to deploy
When not to use Promoted
- Pre-revenue companies still deciding what they sell and to whom
- Teams whose media budget is too small to justify a 2,500 USD monthly retainer
- Anyone looking for self-serve software: there is no account, no app and no API
- Marketers who want to build paid media expertise in-house rather than outsource it
- Buyers shopping for AI automation, which this agency does not claim to offer
How to use Promoted
A typical end-to-end flow, from setup to results.
- Read the pricing page and choose between the two published tiers, Get Off Zero and Growth Mode
- Fill in the "Get started" form at the foot of any page, or book a call through the Cal.com link
- Take the intro call: goals, current channels and where you are trying to get to
- If the fit is clear, agree the shape of the engagement — no six-month minimum is advertised
- Run the go-to-market session — ICP, channel priorities, messaging and success criteria — before a dollar is spent
- Let Promoted source opportunities through an RFI to publishers and influencers, then standardise and compare the responses
- Review the recommended placements, refine them and sign off the budget
- Hand over execution: insertion orders, publisher payments and a single source of truth for creative assets
- Settle into the reporting cadence — monthly on Get Off Zero, fortnightly plus weekly calls on Growth Mode
- Close each campaign with proof of publication and a performance summary, then iterate
Pros & Cons
Pros
- One senior contact throughout: the founder himself, with no account manager in between
- Sixteen years of publisher relationships inherited from BuySellAds, with 1500+ publishers claimed
- Access to inventory that rarely opens — Adobe Behance was made available for the first time in over a decade
- Documented speed: a 50,000 USD media plan six days after signature, and a plan in three days on another account
- Cost efficiency claimed at 5–7.50 USD CPM on premium developer placements against 15–30 USD search CPCs
- No six-month minimum; the engagement is structured around the client's needs
- Public, itemised pricing, which is uncommon for an agency
Cons
- High entry ticket: 2,500 USD a month in fees before any media budget is spent
- Everything depends on one person, in an agency that intends to stay small and is hiring only two part-time roles
- No terms and conditions are published, so scope, liability, asset ownership and exit terms stay unknown until contract
- A very thin privacy policy: no retention period, no DPA, no subprocessor list, no legal basis for processing
- A service, not a product: no free plan, no trial and nothing to test before committing
- No AI capability whatsoever — anyone arriving expecting automated tooling is in the wrong place
- Growth Mode charges 15% of media above 15,000 USD, so the fee grows with the spend it recommends
Pricing & Plans
There is no free plan and no free trial. The published entry point is the Get Off Zero tier, at 2,500 USD per month. The Growth Mode tier is charged at 2,500 USD per month plus 15% of media spend above 15,000 USD. Creative production is billed at an hourly rate that is not disclosed, and the fully managed offering is priced as a percentage of media managed plus hours against approved project scopes.
- two platforms
- up to 15
- 000 USD of monthly spend optimised
- monthly reporting
- no dedicated account manager and no competitor analysis
- platform and direct ad buying
- dedicated account manager
- fortnightly reporting with weekly calls
- influencer outreach and management
- competitor analysis
- content calendar alignment
- creative production at an hourly rate
- end-to-end execution
- fees set as a percentage of media managed plus hours on approved scopes
Data, GDPR & hosting
A consolidated view of how Promoted handles your data.
GDPR overview
Implementation is minimal, and stated conditionally rather than asserted. The privacy policy, effective 11 February 2025, says only: "If we serve users in regions with privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA), we will comply with applicable legal requirements regarding data protection." It adds that, depending on location, you may have rights of access, correction or deletion, exercisable by writing to hello@promoted.com. Beyond that, nothing: no Article 27 EU representative, no named data protection officer, no data processing agreement, no subprocessor list, no legal basis for processing, no retention period and no international transfer mechanism. Promoted Agency, LLC is a US company in Georgia with no European entity or address. A European client would need to request each of these directly.
Who owns the data?
Promoted publishes no terms and conditions — the terms page returns a 404 and the sitemap lists none — so data ownership is settled by no public contractual document. The privacy policy covers the website alone: non-identifying analytics data, plus the name, email and message sent through the contact form, which is handled by Resend. Promoted states it does not sell, trade or share personal information with third parties, and uses what it collects solely for internal business purposes. Nothing is published about who owns creative assets, advertising accounts, campaign data or the reports produced during an engagement. Those are questions worth settling in writing before signing anything.
Reuse rights
The privacy policy lists three uses and no others: analysing and improving website performance, replying to contact-form enquiries, and improving Promoted's services and customer experience. Promoted states it uses no cookies or tracking technologies beyond its analytics service, and protects data with SSL encryption and firewall measures. Nowhere on the site is there any mention of AI model training on visitor or client data. Because Promoted delivers a service rather than a product, there is no generated output for an end user to reuse: the reuse question really applies to campaign assets and performance reports, and the site says nothing at all about the rights attached to them.
Data retention & training
Hosting summary
Nothing is published about data hosting. The site names no country, no region and no infrastructure provider, and the privacy policy names only two third parties: Resend, which handles contact-form submissions, and an unnamed privacy-friendly analytics service. What can be observed concerns the website itself rather than client data. The domain resolves to 216.150.1.1, geolocated in the United States on Amazon's AS16509 and flagged as an anycast node. That describes where the marketing site is served from, not where campaign data is stored. The governing jurisdiction is American: Promoted Agency, LLC is registered in Roswell, Georgia, with no European entity or address anywhere on the site. Because this is an agency engagement rather than a software product, most campaign data in practice lives inside the client's own advertising accounts on Google, Meta, LinkedIn and the rest, but the site documents neither that arrangement nor what Promoted retains of it. Anyone with a hosting or data-residency requirement will have to raise it directly.
Things to keep in mind
Risks and trade-offs to weigh before adopting Promoted.
- Fees are committed monthly before any media budget, and Growth Mode adds 15% of spend above 15,000 USD — a structure that rewards recommending more spend
- The engagement depends on one individual; illness, capacity limits or a change of direction has no obvious fallback
- Case study metrics are supplied by the agency, unaudited, and rarely carry the budget or baseline that would make them comparable
- "Since 2008" and "seventeen years" describe BuySellAds, not an agency launched in late 2024; note too that Promoted.ai is an unrelated company and should not be confused with this one
- With no published terms, scope, liability, ownership of creative assets and exit conditions are unknown until a contract arrives
- The privacy policy is minimal: a European client will have to request a DPA, retention rules and a subprocessor list rather than read them
- Outsourcing acquisition wholesale erodes in-house skill and direct publisher relationships, which is felt only once the engagement ends
Setup & Integrations
Technical difficulty
Technically, close to none. There is nothing to install: the engagement begins with a form or a call. The one technical component, attribution, is handled by the agency, which offers to install or manage that infrastructure itself. The real effort sits elsewhere and is commercial rather than technical — granting access to advertising accounts, and arriving with a defined ICP and a real media budget, since the strategy session precedes any spend. Published timelines suggest a short ramp: six days from signature to a scoped media plan in one case, twenty days to launch in another.
Integrations
Behind Promoted
Social
Resources
All the official URLs gathered for verification and reference.
Frequently asked questions
Is Promoted an AI tool?
What does Promoted actually do?
How much does it cost?
Is there a free plan or a trial?
Who will I actually work with?
Which channels are covered?
Who is it built for, and who is it not?
Is there a minimum commitment?
What does the privacy policy cover?
Are there terms and conditions?
Should you pick Promoted?
Promoted is an agency, and reading it as anything else will lead to disappointment. There is no product to log into, no trial to run and no AI to evaluate. What is on offer is Matthew Kammerer's time and his publisher relationships, sold as a monthly retainer.
Taken on those terms, the proposition is coherent and unusually legible. The pricing is public and itemised, which most agencies avoid. The channel expertise is specific rather than decorative: Carbon Ads, Ethical Ads, Mozilla Developer Network and Reddit's technical communities are not names an agency drops casually. The case studies describe speed that would be hard to fake — a fully scoped 50,000 USD media plan six days after signature — and the stated refusal to work with pre-revenue companies suggests an operator who would rather decline than overpromise.
The reservations are structural rather than damning. Everything rests on one person, in an agency that says it means to stay small; two part-time roles are open, both on a partner track, which is the honest version of that constraint. No terms and conditions are published, so scope, liability, ownership of creative assets and exit conditions stay unknown until a contract is on the table. The privacy policy is thin enough that a European client would have to ask for a DPA, a retention schedule and a subprocessor list rather than read them. And the Growth Mode fee rises with the media budget it recommends, a familiar tension worth naming before signing.
Read the headline numbers carefully. "Since 2008" and "seventeen years" belong to BuySellAds, the network Promoted came out of; the agency itself launched in late 2024. That does not diminish the experience behind it, but it is not the same claim.
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