Marcus and Muse is an independent media buying agency in Ottawa that plans and buys advertising across streaming TV, programmatic display, video and audio, digital out-of-home, search and social — for Government of Canada departments, national associations, B2B tech companies and consumer brands across the country. The difference is structural, not rhetorical: no platform kickbacks, no undisclosed rebates, no reselling margin. One disclosed fee, and every media dollar traceable from your invoice to the publisher.
That model exists because of where we came from. Before starting Marcus and Muse, I spent years on the supply side — at Sharethrough and Samsung Ads — watching agency dollars arrive at publishers after four or five intermediaries had each taken a cut. This page explains what a modern media buying agency actually does, what happens to your money inside a typical one, and how we run it differently.
What does a media buying agency in Ottawa actually do?
Two things, and they’re not the same job: planning and buying.
Planning is deciding where money should go before a single impression is bought: which audiences, which channels, what weight, what you’ll measure. A good plan is channel-agnostic — it starts from the audience and the business problem, not from whichever platform the agency has a deal with.
Buying is execution: negotiating rates, setting up campaigns in the platforms, managing pacing and frequency, catching problems mid-flight. For most advertisers today that means:
- Programmatic media buying — display, online video and audio bought through demand-side platforms, with deliberate control over the supply path
- Streaming TV advertising — CTV on the platforms and apps where TV viewing actually happens now
- Digital out-of-home — programmatic DOOH across transit, street-level and place-based screens
- Paid search and paid social — where they belong in the plan, which is usually capturing demand the other channels create, not carrying the whole strategy
The honest version of this job is refusing to let any channel become the default. Search and social are easy to buy and easy to report on, which is exactly why plans over-invest in them. A media buyer in Ottawa or anywhere else should be able to tell you why each dollar sits where it sits — and move it when the answer stops holding up.
Why does the independent, no-rebate model matter?
Because agency incentives quietly shape media plans, and most clients never see it happen.
When an agency earns volume rebates from a platform, that platform shows up in more plans. When an agency buys inventory as principal — purchasing it themselves and reselling it at a markup — the plan drifts toward whatever inventory the agency is holding. None of this requires bad people. It just requires a compensation structure the client can’t see, and industry transparency studies (the ANA’s work is the best known) have documented how common those structures are.
The fix is boring and structural: get paid one way, by the client, and disclose it. We charge a fee you can see, media costs pass through at actual cost, and you own the seats, the data and the vendor relationships. If we recommend more CTV or less social, the recommendation carries no hidden payload.
For CFO-minded buyers — and in this town, that includes every public servant who has to defend a media line item — that’s the difference between an agency you manage and an agency you audit.
What happens to a media dollar inside a typical trading desk?
This is the section most agency websites won’t write, so here it is.
Say a client approves $100,000 in programmatic spend through a conventional holding-company structure. The agency fee comes off the top — visible, fine. Then the money enters the trading desk, where the visible fees end. The desk may apply an undisclosed technology or data markup. Some spend may be routed to inventory the agency bought earlier as principal, resold at a price the client never sees broken out. At year end, platforms pay the agency volume rebates — AVBs — based on how much client money flowed through them. And the dollar still has to pay the DSP, the exchange, and any resellers in between before it buys any actual attention.
From my time on the supply side, the pattern I saw repeatedly: two paths to the same publisher’s same inventory, one direct and one through two resellers, with meaningfully different prices — and the buyer’s money taking the expensive path because nobody on the buy side was looking. That’s not fraud. It’s what happens when no one is paid to care about the route.
Here’s the structural comparison:
| Where the dollar goes | Traditional agency stack | Marcus and Muse pass-through |
|---|---|---|
| Agency fee | Disclosed | Disclosed |
| Trading desk / tech markup | Often undisclosed | None — platform fees at cost |
| Principal buys / resold inventory | Possible, rarely broken out | Never — we don’t own inventory |
| Volume rebates / AVBs | Retained by agency | We don’t accept them |
| Supply path (exchanges, resellers) | Rarely audited | Audited and pruned — direct paths preferred |
| Log-level data access | Sometimes withheld | Yours by default |
Before you sign with any agency — including us — ask these questions in writing:
- Do you receive rebates, AVBs, or any compensation from media vendors or platforms? Will you contractually confirm you don’t?
- Are any buys principal-based? If so, will you disclose the markup on each one?
- Who owns the DSP seat, the log-level data, and the platform contracts — you or us?
- Can we audit the supply path — every fee between our invoice and the publisher?
- If we leave, what do we take with us?
An agency with clean answers will put them in the contract. An agency with a speech instead of answers has just told you something useful.
How does supply-side experience change the buying?
Most media buyers have only ever seen the demand side of the auction — the DSP interface and whatever the platform chooses to report. We’ve worked inside the SSPs, exchanges and CTV platforms on the other side, which changes the questions we ask.
We know which supply paths are direct and which quietly stack resellers, how CTV inventory gets repackaged before a DSP ever labels it, and why two deals with identical names can contain very different supply. So supply path optimization isn’t an add-on here — it’s how every buy is constructed: curated, audited paths, the shortest defensible route from your budget to a real screen in front of a real person. The result is less budget lost to intermediary fees, and reporting that stands up when procurement starts asking pointed questions.
Who is this for?
We built the practice around the buyers who actually drive Ottawa advertising — and it travels well nationally.
Government of Canada and public sector. GoC campaigns carry obligations most agencies treat as an afterthought: official-languages requirements mean genuinely parallel EN/FR creative and media — not a translated afterthought two weeks before launch — and French-language buys that actually reach francophone audiences in Gatineau, Eastern Ontario and beyond. We plan both languages from day one and report them separately, because a blended number hides whether the French flight actually worked.
National associations. Ottawa hosts an unusual density of association head offices, and their media problems are distinct: member recruitment and retention, advocacy campaigns aimed at a few thousand people around Parliament Hill, event-driven flights with hard dates. Small, precise audiences reward surgical buying that big-brand playbooks are bad at.
B2B technology. Kanata North and the wider Ottawa tech sector sell long-cycle products to narrow audiences. That’s account-based thinking applied to media: tight targeting, patient frequency, and channels chosen for who they reach rather than how cheap the clicks look.
Consumer brands. Retail, tourism, real estate and services across the National Capital Region — where the Ottawa-Gatineau market is really two markets, in two languages, with different media habits, and a plan that ignores that is only covering part of the region. The same discipline extends to media planning and buying across Canada when a client’s footprint is national.
How does an engagement work?
No black box, no onboarding theatre.
- Discovery call. You bring the business problem, current plan or RFP; we tell you honestly whether we’re the right fit. Thirty minutes.
- Plan. Audience, channel mix, budget allocation, measurement framework, and the fee — on paper, yours to keep whether or not we proceed.
- Buy. We execute across the platforms, in seats you own or seats we operate transparently on your behalf.
- Report and adjust. Reporting tied to what the plan promised, supply path visible. Quarterly, we re-argue the plan against the results.
Founder-led means the person on the discovery call — me, Aaron Foley — is the person accountable for the buy. I also run the Ottawa Ad Club, which is a long way of saying this city’s advertising community is where I work, not just a keyword on this page.
People also ask
How does a media buying agency in Ottawa charge?
Most agencies charge a percentage of spend, a retainer, or both — the problem is what’s underneath. Rebates, principal buys and tech markups can add undisclosed margin. We charge one disclosed fee, pass every media and platform cost through at actual price, and clients can audit the invoices.
Do you run Government of Canada and public sector campaigns?
Yes. We plan and buy bilingual EN/FR campaigns and build plans around official-languages obligations from the start — parallel creative, French-language inventory on both sides of the river, and reporting that separates the two markets rather than averaging them into one number.
What is the difference between a media buyer and a media buying agency?
A media buyer executes: negotiates rates, sets up campaigns, manages pacing. An agency adds planning, measurement and accountability around that execution. If you hire a media buyer in Ottawa or an agency, ask the same question either way: who audits the supply path your money travels through?
Do you only buy media in Ottawa?
No. We’re based in Ottawa and know the Ottawa-Gatineau market well, but we handle media planning and buying across Canada — national CTV, programmatic and DOOH campaigns, and regional flights in any market. Programmatic infrastructure doesn’t care where the buyer sits; local knowledge is a bonus, not a boundary.
Start with the questions
If you take one thing from this page, take the five questions above and send them to your current agency. The answers will tell you whether you have a transparency problem worth fixing.
If you’d rather talk it through with someone who has seen both sides of the auction, book a call directly — bring a plan, an RFP, or just a suspicion.