Claire Winslow Brown and the Price of Paying Attention

Before a slogan went up beside a Texas road, it had an audition on Facebook. Claire Winslow Brown’s agency tested 15 options for Buc-ee’s, using the response to help choose words for outdoor advertising. The roadside sign would be the public performance. The inexpensive digital test was the rehearsal.

It is a useful place to begin with Brown because it complicates the familiar picture of the performance marketer. Here was a digital agency helping decide what should happen away from the screen. Creativity included the sentence, certainly. It also included finding a less expensive way to discover whether the sentence deserved a much larger stage.

For Brown, founder and CEO of Best Practice Media, the relationship between an idea and the money behind it has been a recurring concern. She started the Austin agency in 2015. Its services have expanded, its team has grown, and Brown is now based in Colorado. The underlying question has proved more durable than any particular platform: what happens after a business pays for attention?

A family business meets a very large invoice

One early lesson arrived close to home. Brown’s mother committed $100,000 to a year-long advertising contract with a Houston magazine. Brown’s concern about that expense helped motivate her to build a business offering owners another way to approach marketing.

The story gives her interest in budgets a human scale. Advertising money belongs to somebody before it becomes a campaign. An owner has to decide whether to commit it, wait for the work to appear, and live with the result. The finished advertisement can look perfectly respectable while the decision behind it remains difficult to evaluate.

Brown held an MBA from the University of Texas at Austin. Her early agency concentrated on social media: making content, managing daily engagement, running digital advertising and tending online reputation. These were practical services for businesses that needed to participate in an increasingly public conversation about themselves.

Her advice to owners was correspondingly selective. Choose platforms according to where customers spend time. Establish goals before publishing. Simply joining a network because other businesses had joined it was an inadequate reason to spend time there. Anyone who has maintained a company account out of social embarrassment will recognize the relief in that permission.

An agency, then a roomful of competitors

Running campaigns was only part of Brown’s work in Austin. In 2017, she and her agency brought Social Media Week to the city. She served as founder and executive director, taking on the considerably less tidy business of putting practitioners in the same room.

A conference gives an agency founder a curious second occupation. The company sells expertise; the event circulates it. People who might compete for the same client can compare methods, hear the same argument and leave with better questions. The value depends on what the audience takes away, rather than how thoroughly the host occupies the stage.

Brown worked in an Austin network that included Creatives Meet Business founder Ashland Viscosi. Capital Factory, The Refinery, General Assembly and Bumble Bizz were among the partners named around the conference’s next edition. Her own professional life included talks and panels for small businesses, making the event an extension of an existing teaching role.

At the 2018 gathering, Brown asked the audience to make the phone screen its starting point. The distinction concerned where the work begins. A page squeezed down after being designed for a larger screen asks the audience to accommodate its maker. Starting with the smaller screen changes the initial decisions about words, graphics and space.

“Content should be mobile first, not mobile-friendly.”

Claire Winslow, Social Media Week Austin, 2018

The next year brought a less comfortable conversation. Brown’s opening presentation addressed an industry facing Cambridge Analytica, election interference and diminished trust in social platforms. Teaching social media meant taking those conditions seriously. The tool could be commercially useful while the environment around it deserved scrutiny.

Buying expertise, keeping the people

In 2019, Best Practice Media acquired Social Distillery, another Austin social media agency. Its founder, Kristen Sussman, moved into a research and advisory role. The announcement described two firms combining experience in a field whose methods kept changing.

That continuing role matters in a service business. An acquisition can transfer a name, contracts and equipment. The judgment that made a client trust an agency is harder to put in a folder. Keeping an experienced founder involved creates a route for that knowledge to remain useful.

Five years later, Brown expanded in another direction. Best Practice Media announced its acquisition of We Wild Women on November 19, 2024. Founded by Renée Warren, the company brought public relations, coaching and training experience. Warren was to continue leading her team within the combined business.

The two deals describe different kinds of growth. Social Distillery deepened an existing specialty. We Wild Women added work concerned with reputation and media coverage alongside paid distribution. Brown’s company could take responsibility for more of the ways a brand reaches people.

There was also a moment of levity in the second announcement. Brown noted that she and Warren had discovered the deal coincided with Women’s Entrepreneurship Day. The timing supplied its own caption. Acquisitions normally arrive accompanied by solemn language about strategic fit; this one allowed the founders a small wink.

The thank-you that needed saying

Brown has been more candid about one part of building the company than an acquisition release usually permits. In a public reflection, she acknowledged that she had been slow to understand the importance of frequently praising employees. She had started the agency in her twenties and had not expressed appreciation well enough during its earlier years.

Her response was specific: weekly meetings created a place to say what she valued about the team. “My employees deserve the world,” she wrote. The sentiment was generous, but the more revealing detail was the change in routine. Appreciation had acquired an appointment.

This is a quieter business milestone than buying another company. It concerns the difference between what a founder feels and what colleagues actually hear. An owner may assume that continued responsibility conveys trust. The person doing the work may still need a clear acknowledgment that the effort has been noticed.

Brown left room for employees to judge whether the change was working. That qualification gives the admission some weight. A leader’s declaration of improvement is still only one view of the situation. The people attending the weekly meeting have their own evidence.

When the dashboard needs cross-examination

The platforms did not stand still while Brown was building the agency. In October 2022, she appeared on ClickBank’s Affiliated podcast to discuss the difficulties marketers faced after iOS 14. A business built around digital advertising had to contend with changes in how audiences could be reached and results understood.

Her November 2023 appearance on the CU 2.0 podcast took the discussion to credit unions. The emphasis was on outcomes such as new members and loans, and on the ability to follow responses and change a campaign quickly. The audience had its own vocabulary, but the need for an understandable return on effort was familiar.

More recent writing under Brown’s byline is careful about what a dashboard can establish. Her October 2026 article on purchase tracking distinguishes an order recorded twice inside a system from several platforms claiming credit for the same order. Those problems can produce superficially similar totals while requiring different investigations.

The distinction has an everyday consequence. A store can make one sale while multiple advertising reports have something to celebrate. Adding the celebrations together will not put another parcel in the delivery van. Brown’s piece asks the team to follow an individual test order, reconcile definitions and understand the discrepancy before changing the setup.

A larger budget, the same obligation

Her September 2026 guide to choosing a paid social agency asks buyers to investigate margins, measurement, creative responsibilities, scaling criteria and communication. Its advice gives prospective customers a way to question the seller. An agency should be able to explain how it reaches a recommendation, including what would cause it to hold spending steady.

Today, Best Practice Media reports a 35-person US-based team, more than 100 active clients and over $35 million in annual advertising spend under management. Those are agency-reported operating figures. The spending total describes client budgets entrusted to the firm; it is separate from the agency’s own revenue.

That larger responsibility brings Brown back to the original concern. The owner signing an advertising contract deserves to understand the decision. So does the team creating the work. So does the customer who will encounter it, whether on a phone or through a car window.

The Buc-ee’s experiment remains a compact illustration of her approach. Fifteen sentences were given a chance to meet an audience before one earned a more expensive setting. The billboard could wait a moment. There was something useful to learn first.