What changes when the account moves?
A media buyer plans campaigns, builds them, watches them as often as their retainer allows, and reports on results with an attribution model. A Performance Ads Digital FTE on ftes.ai watches every day against each campaign's brief and its success criteria, proposes budget shifts inside caps it cannot raise, drafts launches from the brief template for approval, and reports attribution from the ad platform and the analytics tool side by side without blending them. The migration moves the daily operation and keeps the creative and the strategy with the buyer.
The comparison piece on a media buyer FTE against an agency sets out the division; this guide is about the move.
What should you keep with the buyer?
Creative and its testing, audience strategy, the platform relationships that get a rep on the phone, and any campaign whose craft the buyer's experience is the point of. Keep the buyer as the approver for launches during the first quarter, so the launch briefs are reviewed by someone who has built campaigns. Keep the buyer's knowledge of the account's history, captured into the Brand Brain. And keep the buyer through the first seasonal peak on a reduced retainer, as the story of a day with a Performance Ads FTE illustrates.
The guardrails piece lists what the FTE can and cannot do in an ad account; the buyer keeps what it cannot.
What moves to the FTE, and in what order?
First, set the caps at the ad platform on a dedicated account for the FTE with a spending permission the FTE cannot raise, and record the baseline: spend, results by the buyer's report, and the days the account was actually touched. Second, write one campaign's brief with the buyer from the template, with caps and success criteria, and connect the account and the analytics tool with scoped accounts. Third, run the FTE on that campaign for a cycle, approving shifts inside caps and reading the dual attribution. Fourth, at the first review, compare with the buyer's parallel campaigns, and move the next. Fifth, after a quarter, narrow the buyer to creative, strategy, and craft campaigns.
The campaign brief template gives the fields, including the caps and what the FTE will do if criteria are missed.
- Caps set at the platform on a dedicated account
- One campaign with a brief, run for a cycle
- Next campaign after a clean review; buyer narrowed after a quarter
What breaks in the first month?
The attribution number. The buyer's report showed one figure; the FTE shows two, from the ad platform and the analytics tool, and they disagree, which they always did. The growth lead has to decide what to do with two figures, and the honest answer is to read both, run a holdout for incrementality if the question matters, and stop presenting one as the truth. The assumption of daily attention also breaks: the days-touched measure shows how often the account was actually looked at before, which is usually less than assumed. And the brief breaks in a good way: writing success criteria before launch is a discipline most accounts never had.
The whitepaper on trust architecture describes why the cap lives at the platform, not in a setting the FTE could change.
What does the record show after a quarter?
Results against each brief's criteria, from the sources the brief named. Spend inside caps per campaign, with every shift proposed and approved in the trail. Days the account was touched, against the baseline. Dual attribution, side by side, with the holdout's result if one was run. The role's own token usage, separate from the ad spend the platform billed. Cost per outcome for the campaign's stated outcome against the buyer's retainer plus their days. And an unmeasured list that says incrementality is unmeasured where no holdout ran.
The honest report is the migration's most visible change, and the one finance notices first.
What should you refuse during the migration?
Connecting the FTE to an account without a cap set at the platform. Promoting launches to autonomy ever, or budget shifts before a clean cycle under the Promotion Standard. Blending the two attribution figures into one for a slide. Moving every campaign at once. And ending the buyer's creative scope, because the FTE executes creative and does not make it.
The persona piece for CMOs describes the measurement standard the migration should hold to.