Experts in DecisionOps and accelerated growth
We're an award-winning growth partner and strategic marketing firm. We help organizations understand their customers, make faster data-driven decisions, and build growth that compounds year over year instead of resetting every quarter.
What that means, specifically
MSI The Agency uses data to show organizations exactly where to spend their next marketing dollar and what it will return, then puts that money to work. We operate as two connected practices, MSIGenerate™ and MSIActivate™, and clients can use either one on its own or both together as a single loop:
MSIGenerate™ is our DecisionOps platform. It pulls together a client's sales, marketing, location, and customer data, scores every market, channel, and initiative against performance and opportunity, and tells the team what to invest in next and what return to expect.
MSIActivate™ is our marketing agency. It plans and buys media, builds creative, runs consumer research and testing, and delivers advanced analytics, so the decisions MSIGenerate™ surfaces actually get executed in market.
Our mission
To help American businesses compete by understanding their customers better, acting on that understanding faster, and combining data with hands-on marketing execution so decisions keep getting smarter over time.
Vision
A marketplace where every business, regardless of size, can act with confidence, backed by data that shows what's coming next and marketing that consistently delivers measurable results.
Built on outcomes.
Built to win.
Now built to scale.
MSI The AgencyTM is an award-winning, full-service marketing agency with a proven history of driving accelerated and sustained growth for brands. Founded in 1999 as Marketsmith, Inc., MSI The AgencyTM remains one of the country’s largest woman-owned and operated independent media and marketing agencies.
From the beginning, we were built differently. We have always believed that data only matters if it leads to smarter action, and that marketing becomes a true growth engine only when it is guided by intelligence. That belief shaped us first as a business consultancy and data-driven company and continues to define how we help clients grow today.
That same foundation powers our latest innovation. With MSIGenerateTM we’ve brought our decades of intelligence, business strategy, and marketing expertise into a predictive engine that goes beyond dashboards to deliver Action Intelligence.
With MSIActivateTM, we turn that intelligence into strategic marketing execution that performs in market and drives measurable results. Together, Generate and Activate reflect the evolution of MSI The AgencyTM: a modern growth firm built on proven business leadership to guide brands through complexity with confidence, clarity, and impact.
Built on outcomes.
Built to win.
Now built to scale.
A message from our founder and CEO, Monica C. Smith:
Marketsmith was founded in 1999 in direct response marketing, where every dollar had to prove what it did.
So we became obsessed. With the baseline. With the pattern. With knowing what changed, why it changed, what moved the outcome, and what would move it again.
We built an organization around that discipline. Data to find the truth. Analytics to see the pattern. Creativity to move people. Media to create action. Measurement to prove the result.
Then we did it again. For brands and for causes. Across hundreds of clients. Across dozens of categories, from consumer businesses to public health, government, and the public good. Across economic cycles, with $200M+ in media billings over the past three years and dozens of media channels.
We earned 5+ patents along the way. But the real intellectual property was the discipline itself: See what matters. Know what to do. Prove that it worked. Compound it.
We have brought that same rigor to every dollar, whether the north star is revenue, enrollment, awareness, or action. For more than a quarter century, we have done that for our clients. Now we are building it for everyone.
MSI The Agency is turning decades of intelligence into DecisionOps. A system that takes in extraordinary amounts of information, finds the signal, cuts through the noise, and shows an organization where to act. Regardless of its size. Regardless of its sophistication. Regardless of who is sitting in the chair.
Because when an organization can see the challenge, it can act. Action creates return. Repeated action compounds it. For a business, that compounding becomes competitive advantage, category leadership, and extraordinary enterprise value. For a mission, it becomes greater impact from every dollar, and outcomes that reach further than anyone thought the budget could carry.
Now multiply that across the American economy.
That is not a better agency. That is not another dashboard. That is not more data. That is an economic engine.
We built Marketsmith to help businesses grow. We are building MSI The Agency to make growth, and impact, compound.
SEE IT. ACT ON IT. COMPOUND IT. WIN.
— Monica C. Smith, Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Our people
We believe growth happens through partnerships. Our team works collaboratively across disciplines to understand your business, align around your goals, and become a true extension of your organization. We bring together data scientists, media planners and buyers, creative directors and producers, researchers, and business strategists who combine intelligence, experience, and hands-on execution to help clients move forward with confidence. We are smart, curious, and deeply committed to delivering work that creates measurable impact.
Meet our executive team:
Founder & Chief Executive Officer
Monica C. Smith
Twenty-seven years leading MSI The Agency, still directly involved in every client relationship.
Monica started MSI The Agency in 1999 with one idea: marketing works better when data and creative instinct sit at the same table. Twenty-seven years later, that idea has grown into one of the largest independent, woman-owned media agencies in the country. In 2015 she brought creative agency Brushfire into the fold, giving clients strategy, creative, media, and data under a single roof instead of four separate vendors.
She's still the person clients call first, and she still picks up.
Chief Financial Officer
Dominick Frandina
25+ years steering finance for some of the industry's largest media organizations.
Dom built his career on the finance side of media and advertising, with stops at Group M, MediaCom, and Universal McCann before joining MSITheAgency as CFO. Over 25 years, he's led budgeting, forecasting, cash flow management, and profitability analysis for global organizations, and he brings that same rigor to MSITheAgency — using the numbers to sharpen decisions, not just report them.
Chief Strategy Officer
Samantha Foy
Over a decade in digital strategy, with a track record of adapting to what the data shows.
Samantha cut her teeth managing performance accounts before moving into strategy full-time, and she's spent over a decade across programmatic, search, and social figuring out what actually moves the needle. As Chief Strategy Officer, she sets the direction for MSI The Agency's client work — not from a distance, but by staying close enough to the channels to know when the plan needs to change.
Executive Vice President, Client Success & Creative Services
Desiree Maurin
New Jersey expertise backed by some of MSI The Agency's most notable public-sector wins.
Desiree has run MSI The Agency's Client Success team since 2013, and her fingerprints are on some of the agency's biggest public-sector wins — including the NJ Tax Amnesty campaign, which beat its revenue goal, and GetCoveredNJ, which set an enrollment record. She's the person who knows a New Jersey audience cold, and the one clients trust to keep a campaign honest and on track.
Senior Vice President, Media Strategy & Activation
Oscar Au
Performance media leadership across healthcare, tech, CPG, and more.
Oscar has planned and bought media across a genuinely wide range of industries — healthcare, tech, CPG, financial services, education — and moves comfortably between B2B and B2C. He built his career in performance media, working up through paid search and paid social before taking on strategy more broadly, and he still thinks like a media buyer even when he's setting the plan.
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Vice President, Business Intelligence & Analytics
Amanda Simmons
25 years turning data into decisions that hold up under pressure.
Amanda spent 25 years at Epsilon before joining MSI The Agency, and she brings a rare mix of patience and urgency to analytics: patience to dig into the data, urgency to get clients an answer they can act on. She leads MSI The Agency's data team through the harder questions — audience targeting, measurement, and how to keep both honest as privacy rules keep shifting.
Vice President, Client Success
Shanna Vella
Known for the details that keep campaigns on track and ahead of KPIs.
Shanna has led client campaigns at MSI The Agency since 2016, and her reputation is built on the small things — the deadline nobody flagged, the creative note that got buried. That attention to detail is exactly why her teams tend to beat the KPIs they're given, not just hit them.
Core values
Intelligence first
We believe true advantage comes from clarity. We measure, investigate, and interpret data with discipline, rigor, and curiosity.
Action with purpose
Insight only matters when it leads to meaningful progress: aligned decisions, efficient investments, and tangible outcomes.
Human + machine
We combine technology, instinct, creativity, and expertise to unlock smarter pathways forward.
Accountability & integrity
We own our work, our relationships, and the results we deliver. Our clients trust us because we operate with transparency and follow-through.
Courage to challenge
We push beyond standard agency thinking. We bring bold ideas, ask harder questions, and lead clients toward the next decision, not the comfortable one.
Collaboration wins
We rise higher together, across functions, across disciplines, alongside our clients, so that one good decision compounds into the next.
Awards
#1 Female-Led Organization in New York Metro Area
#5 Female-Led Nationwide
#18 Agency Nationwide
Certifications & connections
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Clients & Industries
You'll be in good company. We partner with bold businesses and brands ready to move fast to help uncover what's possible and accelerate what's next.
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Culture & careers
Explore careers at MSI The Agency™ and join an inclusive, supportive team committed to equity, growth, wellbeing, and making a real impact.
What's next?
Leave the wondering to someone else. Choose action and the results you want for your business with MSI The Agency™.