How Brands Media built an AI-powered client platform with Funnel

Executive summary:

Brands Media, an Australian advertising agency, wanted to move beyond static client dashboards. Founder Cam Brands built FoxFlow, a proprietary client platform powered by trusted marketing data through Funnel MCP, which lets AI tools query prepared data in Funnel.

Clients can now explore their marketing data conversationally, and report drafts are generated in seconds. FoxFlow has become more than a reporting tool, it is a proprietary platform Brands Media can use to improve service delivery and compete for larger pitches.

Key results:

• Built a client-facing AI data product without a data engineering team, with Funnel as the trusted data foundation
• Cut weekly report drafting to 20 to 30 seconds, with the team reviewing before delivery
• Turned reporting, client workspaces and internal workflows into a proprietary agency platform
• Created a point of difference Brands Media can take into larger pitch conversations

Company profile:

Brands Media is a senior-led growth advertising agency based on Australia’s Gold Coast, partnering with ambitious brands across the country to deliver media strategy, media buying, ecommerce growth, data and analytics, custom dashboards, and programmatic media solutions.

Founded just over two and a half years ago, the agency has grown quickly into a team of five experienced specialists. During that time, Brands Media has delivered campaigns ranging from state election campaigns to nationally recognized brands, building a reputation for strategic thinking and measurable commercial outcomes.

The challenge: Static dashboards were not enough

Like most agencies, Brands Media delivered client reporting through dashboards that were slow to build and static to use. Cam knew the ceiling well from years of cleaning data and pushing it into Looker Studio: duplicating a dashboard for a new client meant reconfiguring widgets by hand, and the result rarely landed.

"Every dashboard we'd handed over, clients seemed a bit bored by," Cam recalls. "They'd seen it in pitch decks before, so it wasn't anything new. You'd put in a lot of manual work for very little client feedback."

At a larger agency, the answer might have been a data team building a custom client portal. Brands Media had five people, client work to deliver and no engineers to spare.

The solution: Turning agency know-how into a product

Cam could have kept refining Looker Studio setups. Instead, he started building around the way Brands Media actually worked with its clients.

He had a clear view of what clients needed, years of experience working with marketing data and a curiosity about what AI tools were making possible. The idea quickly grew beyond reporting. Cam wanted one place where clients could see performance, ask questions, access workspaces and connect insights to action. Internally, the same platform could help the team manage client tasks, generate reports, track time, manage work-in-progress documents and reduce time spent moving between tools.

"It's been my early mornings and late nights for a while," Cam says. "Just me."

The missing piece was trusted marketing data. At first, Cam stored the raw platform data which was stitched together on request. The product looked promising, but the numbers started drifting.

"When I stored the data myself, I was getting different numbers from what was in Funnel," he says. "Once I started pulling data straight via the Funnel MCP, the numbers matched. Now I keep everything tied to that source."

Funnel MCP gave FoxFlow a way to query prepared Funnel data without copying it into a separate system. Cam could keep mapping, cleaning and verifying the data in Funnel, then build a new client and team experience on top.

That mattered because Cam did not want AI deciding how to transform or interpret raw channel data. He wanted FoxFlow working from the custom dimensions and metrics he had built and vetted in Funnel, so channels, products, creative formats and KPIs could be broken down in ways that matched each client’s business.

FoxFlow became the operating system for Brands Media: a bespoke agency platform that replaces static dashboards with a client-facing AI data experience, while bringing reporting, workspaces and task management into one system.

The results: Faster reporting, deeper client engagement and a platform the agency owns

Although FoxFlow is still early, the first proof points are strong. In the first couple of weeks of testing with a handful of clients, some users spent as much as three hours a day in the tool. Cam expects that to settle after the initial testing period, but the behavior was different from a dashboard handover. Clients were not just looking at reports, they were engaging and chatting with their data.

The clearest example came from a client’s boardroom. "I got feedback from a brand manager," Cam says. "She was in a board meeting and she was just talking to it, asking it for a breakdown of leads, spend and website sessions month on month, and it was just giving it to her."

Internally, the biggest impact has been reporting. A weekly client report the team used to assemble by hand can now be drafted in 20 to 30 seconds, with the team reviewing and refining the output before delivery.

"We're taking 95 percent of the workload off the team and automating that," Cam says. "That's completely changed how quickly we're turning around our client-facing reports."

Cam is already developing FoxFlow beyond reporting, with creative suggestions, media planning recommendations and scenario planning based on channel performance. The goal is not to replace strategic thinking, but to give the team faster starting points grounded in the same Funnel data they already trust.

For Brands Media, the bigger opportunity is commercial. FoxFlow gives the agency a product it owns, with Funnel keeping the numbers correct and consistent behind it. For a five-person agency, that creates a point of difference the agency can bring into bigger conversations.

"When you're a small agency, it's just getting the invites to those bigger pitches," Cam says. "We're hoping this is a point of difference to get the agency on some of those pitch lists and in the room with the bigger clients."

The direction is clear enough that Brands Media has already re-signed with Funnel for the coming years.

"This is a piece of tech we own," Cam says. "The application is ours, and we think it's going to be a key proposition for us to win new business."