Running Multi-Account Marketing at Scale

Robb Fahrion co-founded Flying V Group in 2016 with $15,000, his brother, and his best friend. Ten years later, the agency is 34 people, fully independent, and managing $5M+ in annual ad spend across 450+ clients spanning healthcare, finance, real estate, renewable energy, and beyond. 

On this episode of What Gets Measured, Robb talks through what running marketing at that volume actually demands and details the operational realities, client dynamics, and experiential knowledge that keeps the multi-account engine running.

When Marketing at Scale Becomes an Operations Problem

When an agency is managing many accounts at once, Robb is direct about where the real complexity lives. Early on, he says, the team was running channels in silos — paid search here, SEO somewhere else, social doing its own thing. 

"What we saw over time was a lot of these channels work in unison together — they're leveraging one another, or they should be," says Robb. Getting omni-channel marketing to actually work together wasn't a creative challenge, but an organizational one.

"The marketing's kinda the easy part," says Robb. "It's getting it all organized — the process, the automation, the guardrails and checks and balances, which actually allows you to move in alignment fast enough to generate the desired results."

How the team facilitates work across channels — what content each platform needs, how to surface it, how to keep a team of account managers moving in the same direction — that's what consumes the most energy at scale. And Robb and his team have learned that clients feel this too. In discovery, one of the first things he's listening for is how a prospective client thinks about marketing. 

"Do they see it as an expense or an investment?" he says. "That's generally your easy tell." Clients who see it as an investment tend to understand that good marketing requires operational buy-in on their side as much as his.

The 70/30 Framework for Multi-Account Campaign Structure

After hundreds of client engagements across a wide range of industries, Robb has developed a clear view of what's repeatable and what needs to be bespoke, which he roughly states as a 70/30 framework.

"60 to 70% of campaign work, you're gonna set up conversions the same way and tie them out," explains Robb. 

"When you're creating the ads, no matter what ads you're creating, you're going to test a certain number of them as a part of that campaign to understand if it's working or not." The structural logic of a campaign, how you define a conversion, how you test creative, and manage ad spend at scale, holds across all accounts and verticals.

The other 30% is where vertical, industry-specific knowledge actually matters. 

"What changes (in these instances) is who is the consumer or who is the target customer persona," says Robb. "What expertise does the brand or the company bring to the table that can help them carve through all the noise." 

Robb and his team handle this by deliberately matching people to accounts where they have real industry familiarity. "My SME knows the jargon," he says. Working with a medical client, for example, requires a fundamentally different posture than working with an entrepreneur or an insurance firm. 

And when regulations shift, or new information comes from a source outside the agency, it’s important to have specialists who know and can pivot fast. 

"New legislature comes down, Medicare, Medi-Cal all of a sudden changes how you can even make money,” explains Robb. “Next thing you need to do is go find a brand-new ad strategy because the old one is completely irrelevant now."

Expanding The Multi-Account Mindset

One of the more vivid examples Robb shares involves a university client — a case where the multi-account marketing mindset applied inside a single organization.

On the surface, explains Robb, a university looks unified. Everyone shares the location, the mascot, the football team. But the audience inside that institution is anything but uniform. 

"You've got your band people, you've got your business guys and gals, you've got finance and accounting, liberal arts, creative writing, drama," says Robb. "Just because they're a part of the same audience doesn't mean that the same message is going to work."

Robb and his team built individual funnels for each discipline, driven by page-level behavioral data. If a visitor was browsing business school pages, they got tagged and received business content. Drama students got something else. The university had been advertising to everyone with essentially the same message — come here, we're a great school, we have a big football stadium. Segmenting by discipline and building content to match changed what the campaigns could do.

The omni-channel revelation Robb had earlier on about multi-account marketing matters here too. 

Robb describes a separate client situation — a cautionary one — where the team went heavy on a single ad channel because one thing was working. "We just burnt cash because they hit that diminishing point of return too quickly," he says. The better move would have been holding back 20% of that budget and building out optionality. "We didn't have Meta set up, we didn't have TikTok, LinkedIn — we could have diversified that spend across those channels." 

Communication and Accountability as the Retention Engine

When asked how he and his team maintain a consistent client experience across dozens of active accounts, Robb's answer is two words: communication and accountability.

"Communication is critical. Our clients know where things are at, at all times," he says. 

"Whether it's a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly meeting, we hold our team to a standard that we show up to that meeting. We not only show up, but we have the report. The report's accurate. It's been QA'd. It has the new recommendations we need for the client."

Robb is clear that a dashboard alone doesn't create trust, but the experience around that data does. 

"If you don't actually have somebody that you trust monitoring the dashboards, they're probably not giving you the right data," he says. "When something's on fire — who are you calling? Who is accountable? Who will help you through whatever that giant situation is that you didn't expect?" 

Clients who trust that someone will pick up the phone stay. Clients who are handed a login and a report don't have the same foundation of trust to stand on when things get hard.

Which ties into the final and most important piece of advice Robb has about multi-account marketing, which is the power of relationships. 

What Automation Cannot Replace in Multi-Account Marketing

Robb and his team run sophisticated automation across client funnels. His view on where automation stops is straightforward.

"We could have the best marketing system, the best drip sequence, the best retargeting, the best funnel, CTAs, whatever," he says. "But guess what? What happens when a client calls? Does someone pick up the phone? If they do have to leave a voicemail, do you call them back in an hour or three days? When they get on that first discovery call with your team — do you show up? Is your camera on? Do you even know what the call is about?"

Automation moves people and processes to a threshold. The human side, the relationship side, determines what happens as your accounts pass through it. 

Robb connects this back to a broader point about AI and marketing. “The faster AI moves,” says Robb, “the more trust becomes a competitive advantage, the more important and critical it is to build trusted relationships, and make yourself available."

His practical advice for anyone managing marketing across multiple accounts: go have the conversations before you build anything. 

"Lead with curiosity about the client," says Robb. "What are your pain points, how are you measuring, how are you not, what do you wish you have that you don't already have — all the basics.”

Robb expands on the importance of conversations, especially with different stakeholders. “Talk to the CEO and the director of marketing separately,” he adds, “because they're thinking about completely different things even when they're working toward the same goal.”

And on the question of when to expand versus when to hold — Robb's framework is crawl, walk, run, sprint. "To run accounts at scale, you gotta start small, and then grow and expand," he says. 

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