The revealing thing about a marketing agency is not its cleverest slogan. It is what the agency does when the slogan stops working. In 2020, a Maine printer called Checks For Less had traffic. People were entering its checkout. Then they disappeared. The purchase path was twelve steps long, but the worst damage happened at steps five and six, where buyers typed the wording for their checks, saw an ugly automated preview, and were asked to approve it.
The checks themselves would have printed correctly. The website merely made them look wrong. Customers could not know this. At the “proof approval” screen, 40.1 percent abandoned the process. The obvious agency answer was also the expensive one: rebuild the preview tool.
Ethos | Vont recommended something smaller. Explain that a human designer would fix the layout before printing. Remove the phrase “proof approval.” A few weeks later, abandonment at that screen had fallen to 26.4 percent, and total checkout abandonment moved from 68.0 to 61.9 percent. The costly machine remained. The doubt did not.
The most interesting agency work often begins where the expensive answer loses to the observable one.
A brand shop meets the browser
Ethos began in 1999, founded by Glenn Rudberg, Ted Darling and Judy Trepal. The early proposition was classic brand work: research what is true about an organization, decide how it should be positioned, and express that truth through identity, advertising, packaging and public relations. In 2007, when “digital” still sounded like a department rather than the atmosphere, Ethos launched Vont to handle websites, search, social media and online campaigns.
That decision explains where the company fits now. It is broader than a design studio, more brand-minded than a performance shop, and much smaller than a global network. The clients tend to have complicated choices to explain or real behavior to change: colleges looking for students, public agencies promoting health, banks selling trust, food companies distinguishing one blueberry from another.
For Hobart and William Smith Colleges, that meant a full-funnel campaign joining search, display, YouTube, streaming television and social ads to a purpose-built landing page. Slate CRM integration and household-level matchback reporting linked marketing exposure to applications and enrollment. The agency reports a 40 percent increase in applications, a lead-to-application rate above 10 percent, and nearly 25 percent growth in organic traffic.
For Community Health Options, a Maine nonprofit insurer, the problem was less technical and more emotional. Health insurance is an object people buy while wishing they did not need it. Ethos found the useful truth in the ownership model: this insurer served members instead of shareholders. “Made for Members. Powered by Mainers” became the platform, carried through identity, advertising and a new website. The agency reports a 33 percent increase in on-exchange membership and a 28 percent rise in aided awareness in 2024.
Community Health Options
Hobart and William Smith
Checks For Less
Then the agency became the case study
The unusual decision came in 2017. Ethos had already combined the instincts of a brand agency with Vont’s appetite for measurement. Now the founders had to solve the succession problem familiar to every independent firm: sell to a larger group, sell to another owner, wind down, or arrange for the people already carrying the business to inherit it.
They chose an Employee Stock Ownership Plan. The transaction converted a closely held partnership into an S corporation owned entirely by its employees. Shares are held in a trust and allocated to eligible employee accounts at company expense. The practical promise was continuity. Clients would keep the team and approach they knew; employees would gain a financial stake without writing a check.
This is not decorative ownership. An ESOP is a retirement benefit, a financing structure and a governance commitment. It also makes the company’s sales pitch oddly testable. When Ethos says it knows what it means to build, worry over and nurture an organization, the copy points back at the copywriter.
What the work costs
Agency profiles love to discuss philosophy and become shy around invoices. Ethos is unusually legible because it sells services to the State of Maine. An April 2025 vendor list gave its blended rate as $146.33 per hour. The published menu ran from $130 for project management and creative production to $180 for marketing strategy. Copywriting and graphic design were $140; web development and broadcast production were $150; public relations was $160. Media buying carried a 15 percent commission, while outside services were billed at cost plus 20 percent.
These are public procurement rates, not a promise that every private engagement is priced identically.
The business model is otherwise familiar: projects and ongoing relationships, with specialists assembled across research, strategy, creative, media, web and measurement. The difference from hiring a cluster of boutiques is integration. The difference from hiring a giant network is attention. Ethos describes that trade in six words: “Big enough to deliver. Small enough to obsess.”
The part worth copying
There are three transferable ideas here. First, organize around a loop instead of a launch: learn, plan, execute, improve. Second, watch what customers do before asking what technology to buy. The Checks For Less fix worked because session recordings exposed a trust problem disguised as a software problem. Third, make succession a design brief. The ESOP aligned independence, continuity and employee reward in one structure.
None of these ideas is automatic. Small experiments fail when traffic is too low to produce a meaningful signal. Integrated agencies become expensive when a client needs only one narrow specialty. Employee ownership is a poor fit when cash flow cannot support repurchase obligations, leaders will not share information, or employees have influence in name only. And “truth” is a thin strategy when a product has no meaningful distinction to uncover.
But under the right conditions - a durable business, patient leaders, measurable customer behavior and a problem worth investigating - the approach has a certain Maine practicality. Look closely. Spend carefully. Fix the sentence before replacing the machine. Then let the people doing the work own a piece of what happens next.