Prepared for Nick Lewis · Head of GTM Recruiting, Anthropic

Why Anthropic should hire Alex.

You asked whether I would consider the Paid Media Manager role. I would rather show you than tell you — so I built this page and instrumented it the way I would instrument one of your campaigns. The telemetry panel is scoring your intent as you read.

The job I do today Why Anthropic Contact

Scope today

Eight figures, six brands, four countries.

I am not applying toward this title. I hold it.

$13M+

Annual paid media managed

Search, shopping, social, retail media

Brands, 4 countries

US · Canada · Mexico · Brazil

Direct reports

Performance marketing specialists

12+

Years in paid search

Agency side, then in-house

About the panel

This page is instrumented the way I instrument a campaign. It classifies you, scores your intent, fires conversions at thresholds, builds a remarketing audience, and once you are warm enough it serves you an ad. A working demonstration of measurement design, not a mockup.

The telemetry is entirely local. No analytics SDK, no cookies, no fingerprinting, no storage, and the engine makes no network requests of its own — nothing it observes about you leaves your browser or is written down anywhere. The page itself loads only its own code and self-hosted fonts. Refresh and the session is gone.

Current role

Paid Media Manager

Brady Corporation

Performance Marketing · reports to Sr. Digital Marketing Manager

I own Americas paid media for a NYSE-listed industrial manufacturer: $13M+ a year across two MCCs and a portfolio of brands selling everything from handheld label printers to healthcare wristbands. I manage the three specialists who run the accounts, and I am still in the accounts myself.

Selected outcomes

Traced a reported 58% collapse in leads to a silently stale data pipeline rather than a real business problem — then shipped a daily rebuild and a health check so it cannot fail quietly again.
Audited our tag manager implementation and documented conversion-tracking defects, including internal traffic and cross-country pollution, that were skewing platform numbers. Stopped the team optimizing against them.
Found and reconciled a channel revenue overstatement in the reporting layer that had been inflating that channel's apparent contribution.
Stood up a full brand migration on my own while short-staffed: new ad account, landing pages, lead routing into Salesforce, conversion tracking end to end.
Built a first-90-days onboarding system so a new analyst ramps on documented process instead of tribal knowledge, and wrote the business case that funded the role.

Own the line, not just the campaigns

Every paid media line item in the Americas marketing budget carries my name as owner. I build the fiscal-year number bottoms-up in BigQuery, defend it to finance, then hit it. Forecast accuracy matters as much as performance here, because this year's forecast becomes next year's baseline.

Manage and grow a team of three

Weekly 1:1s on analyst-led agendas, account coverage assignments, and the onboarding system above. I also write the hiring and backfill business cases that justify the headcount.

Set strategy across two MCCs

Budget allocation, campaign structure, experiment roadmap, and the migration from manual bidding to target-ROAS — sequenced by account economics rather than done all at once, because high-consideration industrial B2B and transactional ecommerce do not tolerate the same learning periods.

Automate the repeatable parts

Search-term and negative-keyword loops across the two largest account groups, month-to-date spend pulls, a weekly reporting digest, and a documented context system so AI agents work against real institutional knowledge instead of guessing. Automation adoption is an explicit part of how I am reviewed.

The actual argument

How I would approach your paid media.

I have not seen your accounts, so these are hypotheses, not conclusions. They are the first four things I would want to look at in week one, and the reasoning behind each.

Branded search is the whole argument, and it is not free.

In a three-way category, competitor brand terms are the highest-intent and most contested inventory on the internet — and your own brand terms get arbitraged by affiliates, resellers and competitors bidding on them. The first number I would want is how much branded spend is buying clicks that would have converted organically anyway. Every account I have audited has had an uncomfortable answer to that question, and it is usually the fastest place to free budget for the tests that actually need it.

Two products, two CAC curves, one budget.

A self-serve subscription and an enterprise or API motion are different businesses sharing a brand. Blended into one account structure, blended CPA hides which motion is subsidizing the other, and the shorter-cycle one quietly eats the budget because it looks efficient on a 30-day window. I would separate them at the campaign, bidding and measurement layer before touching a single bid.

Developer audiences punish loose targeting in public.

Broad match and fully automated inventory are very good at finding cheap impressions, and cheap impressions next to the wrong content get screenshotted. For a technical audience with a low tolerance for being marketed at, I would rather run tighter, more expensive, more deliberate placements than let an algorithm optimize toward whatever is available. That is a brand-safety position that happens to also be the efficiency position.

Attribution when the product spreads by word of mouth.

When a lot of growth is peer-driven, last-click systematically over-credits paid on branded terms and under-credits it everywhere else — which leads to defunding the channels that actually created demand. The first thing I would build is not a dashboard, it is a written agreement with finance about what paid is accountable for. I do this today: the forecast I build becomes next year's baseline, so I have had to defend the methodology, not just the number.

Selected work

Things I built because they annoyed me.

Two are public. Two are internal, so they are described rather than linked.

Independent advisory · live

PPC Red Flags

“You don’t need to be a mechanic to know when you’re being upsold.”

A practitioner-led resource that teaches advertisers to spot agency mismanagement: inflated metrics, black-box Performance Max, the three flavors of wasted spend. I built a free Chrome extension that self-audits a Google Ads account in about 30 minutes, and a Google Ads script that emails a weekly waste audit. No referral fees, no agency ambitions. I built it because I got tired of watching people pay for reporting instead of results.

Chrome extensionGoogle Ads ScriptAccount forensics

Open ppcredflags.com

Tool · B2B Google Shopping

The Priority Funnel

Search-term triage sorted by intent instead of by spend.

Pull 90 days of search terms, sort by intent, route the budget. It is the unglamorous work — negative keywords, brand cannibalization, junk queries — turned into something that takes an afternoon instead of a week. I built it for my own audits, then wrote the B2B Google Shopping guide around it.

Search-term auditsShopping structureWasted-spend math

See the self-audit tool

Internal · built with Claude Code

Agent context system

Institutional knowledge, structured so an agent can actually use it.

A maintained knowledge base — role, accounts, budgets, brand standards, data-estate map, query cookbook, verified joins, known landmines — that I pair into Claude Code sessions so an agent starts with real context instead of inventing one. It has a routing table, generated manifests, a pre-commit hook that keeps the index fresh, and an explicit protocol for when an agent should write back to it. In daily use by me and my team. Happy to walk through it live.

Claude CodeKnowledge architectureAgent workflows

Internal · org-wide

BigQuery analytics assistant

So a marketer can ask the data estate a question in plain English.

A build-pack assistant over our ad and revenue data: estate map, naming taxonomies, identity spine and verified joins, a query cookbook, and a landmines file documenting every table that will silently lie to you. The landmines file is the valuable half. Also happy to demo.

BigQueryData modelingEnablement

Career

Twelve years, one discipline.

Agency side first, in-house now. Every rung of the ladder was in paid search.

Brady Corporation

Current

Americas paid media · $13M+/yr · 3 direct reports

Paid Media Manager

Rocket Clicks

from 2017

B2B and B2C · lead gen and ecommerce · aggressive ROAS and COA targets

ManagerJan 2021
Team StrategistJan 2020
Sr. Paid Search AnalystApr 2019
Paid Search AnalystSep 2017

Guarantee Digital

from 2014

30+ AdWords accounts · all SEM RFPs

PPC SpecialistDec 2016
Account CoordinatorMay 2016
Production Team Member2014

University of Wisconsin — Whitewater

2016

B.B.A., Marketing

Why Anthropic

Four reasons, no filler.

I already hold this title, at this scale.

Paid Media Manager is my job today, running eight figures a year across a multi-brand, multi-country portfolio with a team under me. This is not a stretch role or a career pivot. It is a lateral move into a company whose product I already use every day.

I already build with Claude.

Not as a novelty. I run Claude Code against a purpose-built context repo, ship internal tools with it, and restructured how my team documents knowledge so agents can consume it. I understand the product from inside a real workflow, which is the exact empathy a paid media lead needs in order to market it.

I have audited the other side.

Through PPC Red Flags I audit agency-run accounts for advertisers who suspect they are being managed badly. It has made me fast at spotting where money leaks and allergic to reporting that flatters rather than informs. If you hire an agency, you want me reading their deck.

Next step

Your move, Nick.

Let’s talk about the role.

You reached out about Paid Media Manager. I am interested, I am qualified, and I just built you a working attribution demo to prove both. Any of these reaches me.

Emaillangtonac300@gmail.com Phone(262) 271-7903 LinkedInin/alex-langton Side practiceppcredflags.com