The clue arrived disguised as a professional annoyance. Shea Murtaugh had helped three automotive clients enlarge their advertising footprint while she sold radio airtime in Pittsburgh. Then each client hired an ad agency. This was normal enough. The odd part was what happened next: the dealers insisted that their new agencies keep working with Murtaugh.
The clients had bought airtime, but what they valued was the person explaining whether the airtime was worth the price. Murtaugh understood the inversion. If she represented the advertiser instead of the station, the relationship belonged to her. She left WDVE on Friday, July 30, 2004. Hoffmann Murtaugh opened the following Monday.
There was no capital, no agency pedigree and, on the first day, one account: Don Allen Automotive. The proposed name had briefly been “Adomotive,” a bit of copywriting that was perhaps best left in the glove compartment. The sharper idea survived. In a market where the seller knows the rate card and the advertiser often does not, information is bargaining power.
“I acted as if their money was my money.”Shea Murtaugh, on the agency’s founding rule
The first product was an allegiance
What did the agency actually do? At first, it bought media from the side of the table where Murtaugh believed she could be more useful. It compared prices, negotiated placements and tried to make a small advertiser’s budget behave like a larger one. Her sales background was not baggage. It was a map of the seller’s incentives.
The first year also exposed what the founder could not yet do. People in the industry dismissed her as a “dining room table media buyer” and a radio-only shop. Television buying was a gap, so she hired a television buyer. Strategy was another gap, so she hired a planner from MARC USA. This may be the most copyable part of the story: she did not confuse founder confidence with universal competence. The company grew by naming each missing capability and recruiting it.
Over time, that practice turned a media buyer into an integrated agency. Hoffmann Murtaugh now sells brand strategy, creative and content, paid media, analytics and attribution, influencer and social work, and public relations. It runs an in-house programmatic trading desk. Its planning reaches from broadcast television and local radio to connected TV, search, social, streaming audio, out-of-home and direct mail.
The bank account that made the case
The neatest demonstration comes from First Commonwealth Bank, a regional bank with $11.7 billion in assets and a relationship with the agency that has lasted a decade. The bank wanted more low-cost deposits while working with 17 percent less budget than the prior year. The problem, as Hoffmann Murtaugh describes it, was not a lack of advertising. It was fragmentation. Channels sat apart, and the bank could not see enough of the customer journey.
The agency unified first-party data in a customer-journey platform, identified audiences around signals such as moving or changing jobs, and sequenced messages from connected television and streaming audio through paid social, sponsored content, search, retargeting and email. In other words, awareness was asked to introduce; conversion media was asked to close; attribution was asked to remember who did what.
The agency publishes the ratios, not the client’s ledger. It says the bank reached its growth goal within nine months.
This is where Hoffmann Murtaugh fits in the agency market. A giant holding-company network can offer scale; a platform specialist can master one channel; an internal team can live close to the product. Hoffmann Murtaugh offers mid-market marketers something between those options: senior attention, traditional-media fluency, modern activation and a single view of the numbers. Its competitors include independent integrated shops, specialist media agencies and the perfectly reasonable choice to hire in-house.
A dashboard is not a decision
The firm’s toolkit includes Kantar for competitive spending, Nielsen Scarborough for local audience behavior, SQAD for radio and television cost benchmarks, Geopath for out-of-home audiences, Core Media Systems for matching spots to response, and Power BI for reporting. Those subscriptions are, after people, the agency’s largest investment. The list matters because it reveals the product beneath the services: reduce the information advantage held by media sellers and platforms.
The company calls itself the “clarity agency.” The phrase risks sounding soft until one asks what clarity permits a marketing chief to do. It lets her stop a weak display buy, defend an upper-funnel investment that assisted conversion, or show a finance team why money moved from one channel to another. Reporting becomes useful only when it ends in a verb.
Checking accounts, qualified leads and store visits are more useful than a pile of channel metrics.
Decide which channel introduces, which persuades and which closes.
If the team lacks television, attribution or creative expertise, hire it instead of improvising it.
A report should change the allocation, the message or the next experiment.
What changed - and what did not
In 2020 the agency had more than 20 specialists. In 2021 it reported that both staff and revenue had risen 50 percent since the prior year, and Pittsburgh Business Times named it among the region’s Best Places to Work. By its twentieth anniversary in August 2024, it said it had more than 25 people serving more than 20 clients. The operation is fully remote, with coworking spaces available in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Rochester and Harrisburg.
Its culture had needed deliberate work as the headcount grew. Beginning in 2019, Murtaugh introduced monthly culture meetings, rebuilt the hiring process and expanded benefits around the premise that life comes before work. A distributed model that might have looked eccentric became practical infrastructure when the pandemic arrived.
The business will not suit every buyer. A small local advertiser that needs one straightforward placement may not benefit from attribution models, scenario forecasts and six service disciplines. The integrated approach also depends on clean conversion data, permission to connect systems and enough budget across channels to make reallocation meaningful. Without those conditions, the machinery can become a handsome way to over-analyze a simple job.
But the founding rule travels well. Ask who knows the price, who carries the risk and who can explain the next dollar. Murtaugh noticed that her clients kept seeking her judgment even after they had hired somebody else to provide it. The company came from taking that awkward signal seriously. Twenty years later, the inventory is different, the dashboards glow, and the old question remains: whose money does the buyer think she is spending?