The number that explains Roar Media is not 50 billion, though that is the quantity of impressions the agency says it has served. It is not 200, the number of clients it says it has empowered. The useful number is $10,465.80. That is what one client, a maker of high-protein foods, spent on a campaign Roar described in public - right down to the last eighty cents.
Agency case studies usually arrive freshly scrubbed. The verbs glow. The client was transformed. The audience was delighted. The budget, meanwhile, has left no forwarding address. Roar did something more revealing. For a Powerful Foods campaign running from February to August 2020, it published the investment, impressions, website sessions, transactions, revenue and return on ad spend. The yogurt maker had been losing ground in a crowded category. Its new products lacked awareness and distribution, and its website was not ready for serious ecommerce. Those were the first things that failed - not the color palette, but the commercial plumbing.
Powerful Foods campaign, February 1 to August 24, 2020. Figures are reported by Roar Media.
Roar rebuilt the job around two outcomes: sending shoppers to stores and creating repeatable online sales. It ran full-funnel targeting, added social content and influencers, and connected the campaign to ecommerce measurement. Data then changed the campaign while it was live. The published result was 1.25 million impressions, 38,852 sessions and 404 transactions. The decimal point matters because it exposes the agency’s central idea: creativity should have to survive contact with a receipt.
“A website is like a baseball stadium - without players and fans, there’s no game.”Jacques Hart and Jolie Balido, co-founders
Two people, two halves of the problem
Jacques Hart and Jolie Balido met at a Miami Beach karaoke event in 2000. It is the sort of origin detail that sounds reverse-engineered by a publicist, except that it is too odd to improve. Balido came from traditional public relations and media strategy. Hart came from digital media and marketing. When they founded Roar in 2008, their thesis was that a client should not have to choose between earning attention and measuring what that attention did.
That sounds ordinary now because the agency world has spent years stapling “integrated” to every capabilities deck. At the time, the seams were conspicuous. PR teams pursued coverage; web teams built sites; media buyers bought reach; creative shops made the artifacts. The client carried the brief from room to room and paid for the misunderstandings between them.
Roar built a broad shop instead. Its menu runs through research, positioning, public relations, crisis work, content, design, advertising, social media, websites, ecommerce and analytics. The company describes its method as moving from data to insight, from insight to a brand truth, and from that truth to a concept and campaign. Strip away the feline copy and it is an operating system for fewer handoffs.
One brief, four accountable moves
The customer moved first
The pattern is easiest to see in Roar’s client work. Lennar’s Southeast Florida division watched homebuyers move online and began retiring traditional advertising. But dozens of communities still needed weekly sales support. Roar joined in 2016, giving each community a distinct identity and then carrying it through launches, emails and campaigns. The agency attributes more than 1,500 home sales and 10,000 leads to the resulting work.
A law firm presented a different blockage. Greenberg Traurig had tried local PR firms and in-house work, then gave Roar a six-month Miami assignment. Roar learned the practice groups, built a targeted media plan and wrote the unglamorous material that professional-services marketing depends on: attorney biographies, award submissions, practice descriptions, releases and policies. The test expanded into a four-year agency-of-record relationship across the Southeastern United States.
In both cases, the thing that changed minds was not an agency brainstorm. It was customer behavior. Homebuyers had migrated online. Journalists needed a cleaner, more useful story. Ecommerce made sales traceable. Travel bookers wanted direct, digital paths. Roar’s current push into destination marketing follows the same logic. It combines visitor data, creative production and distribution to help tourism boards and hotels fight seasonality and dependence on online travel agencies.
A Miami agency with a long passport
Roar sits in Coral Gables, a few miles from Miami’s airport and inside a regional economy shaped by tourism, property, finance and Latin America. Its portfolio reads accordingly: Royal Caribbean, World of Hyatt, LATAM Airlines, Diageo, Lennar, CEMEX, Aventura Mall, FIU’s CasaCuba and public agencies. The company says its work spans the Americas, and a 2024 post described teams in the United States and Argentina.
This is where Roar fits in the market. It is larger and broader than a boutique PR practice, but independent of the giant holding-company networks. Its competition includes South Florida firms such as rbb Communications, Max Borges Agency, Republica Havas, Newlink, Schwartz Media Strategies and Avenue Z. The other alternative is not an agency at all. It is a small federation of specialists - one for PR, another for paid media, another for the site - coordinated by the client.
Roar sells relief from that coordination tax. An ongoing retainer or project can put strategy, execution and measurement with one accountable team. Public material does not reveal standard fees. It does reveal scale: a 2024 public proposal described more than $30 million in annual billings and more than 50 full-time employees. The company is privately held, with no disclosed outside funding, and made the Inc. 5000 in 2021 at No. 3,122.
The part worth stealing
A reader does not need an agency, much less a lion motif, to copy the most useful part. Begin with the conversion. Name the behavior that is currently failing. Instrument the path before making the campaign. Give every channel a job. Then preserve enough flexibility to change the media, message or budget when the evidence arrives. Roar’s own formulation is more colorful, but the logic is severe: the message is owned; the medium is rented.
Copy this
Write the scorecard before the creative brief: cost, qualified action, conversion and the next decision each number will trigger.
Check this first
Make sure sales, media and web data can actually be joined. Integration without shared measurement is just a larger meeting.
There are limits. A full-stack model is wasteful when a company needs one narrow deliverable, already has strong internal channel owners, or cannot share the data required for attribution. Regulated or deeply technical work may call for a specialist with category knowledge that breadth cannot replace. And a 3.52 return reported in one food campaign is evidence of one campaign, not a universal rate card for success.
That last distinction is why the precise numbers are so persuasive. They are modest enough to interrogate. They let a prospective client ask what counted as revenue, which transactions were incremental, and whether the same system could work with a different margin or buying cycle. Huge impression totals end the conversation. A receipt begins one.
The lion gets the logo. The spreadsheet earns the sequel.The Roar Media proposition, in one line
Eighteen years after the karaoke introduction, Roar’s original marriage has become the default ambition of modern marketing: story on one side, evidence on the other. The difficult part was never putting them on the same slide. It was making them answer to each other.