If you’ve spent any time in the marketing world, odds are you’ve heard the words “innovation” and “collaboration” thrown around more times than you can count. They’re the industry’s favorite buzzwords. You can find them plastered on agency websites, dropped into sales decks, and repeated at conferences until they lose all meaning. But here’s the thing: most of the time, there’s nothing to show for it.
At Root+Beta, these aren’t words we use to appeal to a broader market. They’re the values that shape how we hire, how we work, and how we show up for our partners every single day. So instead of telling you we’re different, we’re going to show you — with a real, unfiltered look at how this agency actually operates behind the scenes.
Collaboration Isn’t a Buzzword Here — It’s the Workflow
At Root+Beta, every team member is an asset. Leadership provides direction and guidance, but every person on the team is given the autonomy to bring their expertise to the table and make a real impact. That’s not a feel-good statement. It’s how we’re structured, and it’s what drives our growth.
Being a fully remote agency means our day-to-day collaboration looks a little different from a traditional in-office setup. We stay aligned through constant communication, whether via video chats, phone calls, or Slack audio messages. It’s not all glamorous, but it works because everyone on the team is dedicated to their craft.
From small projects to large-scale campaigns, every piece of work is a cross-functional effort. Account teams manage client deliverables from start to finish, acting as a bridge between clients and internal teams. Creative crafts the visuals that stop the scroll. Digital media tracks leads and performance from paid ads, while traditional media does the same for broadcast and print. SEO and content drive organic traffic through purposeful, audience-specific writing. Everyone works together, and that’s not an accident. It’s the model.
Each person brings a distinctive perspective to the room. That’s how we orchestrated it.
How We Build Together
Building a powerful team starts with a clear philosophy. According to Root+Beta Vice President and Managing Director Andrew Levenson, his approach is straightforward: hire people smarter than you, with unique and challenging perspectives.
When you do that consistently, constant collaboration becomes the norm — and so does productive conflict. Differing opinions and challenging perspectives are inevitable when you’ve assembled a team of sharp, opinionated people. But instead of smoothing those moments over, we lean into them. One of our core values is Profound Transparency, and living that value means asking hard questions, naming what isn’t working, and not shying away from tough conversations.
That friction is actually where the best ideas come from. It’s how we spot flaws in a strategy before a client does. It’s how we refine an approach from “pretty good” to something award-winning. No one person can do that alone.
The result is work that’s stronger internally, and outcomes that are measurably better for our partners.
Staying Sharp: How the Team Keeps Up With Ag Marketing
Being an effective ag marketing agency requires more than marketing expertise. It requires being genuinely immersed in the industry — understanding the cycles, the pressures, the culture, and the conversations happening at every level of agriculture.
That education never stops.
LinkedIn is one of the best places to get real-time opinions from the industry’s movers and shakers. Conferences give us face time with big names, dealers, and decision-makers — the kind of conversations you can’t replicate through a screen. Online resources like Agweb and FarmEquipment.com keep us plugged into industry news and trends. And Reddit — an underrated resource — gives you access to communities on the platform having raw, unfiltered conversations about ag that you won’t find anywhere else.
A lot of what the team learns along the way gets distilled into our Lowdown on Ag newsletter because good information is worth sharing.
But here’s what this is really about: understanding the audience at a granular level. The smallest details matter in ag marketing. The type of grass in a photo. The style of hat someone is wearing. The terminology used in a caption. Your audience will notice, and it will shape how they feel about your brand. Getting those details right takes genuine curiosity and ongoing involvement in the communities we’re marketing to.
Staying current isn’t passive. It takes active engagement, and that’s what our Purposeful Curiosity demands.
What We’re Watching (And Testing) Right Now
Constant collaboration breeds constant innovation. And right now, there are a couple of things we’re watching closely.
The biggest shift we’re seeing is in price sensitivity and purchase considerations. More than we’ve seen in recent years, buyers are scrutinizing what they spend and why. That changes the conversation around messaging, especially when it comes to new product launches and financial promotions. We’re being more deliberate than ever about how we position value for our partners.
We’re also exploring Reddit as a legitimate paid and organic channel for several clients. It’s a test, and we know going in that Reddit requires something most platforms don’t: messaging that’s genuinely native to the community. Generic ad copy will get ignored at best and mocked at worst. The creative challenge is real but so is the opportunity to reach an audience that’s not being targeted by most ag marketers yet.
At Root+Beta, tried-and-true approaches get evaluated regularly. If something isn’t working, or if we see an opportunity being left on the table, we pursue it — testing, refining, and iterating until we find what works. That’s Positive Dissatisfaction in action.
Transparency Isn’t Comfortable — That’s Kind of the Point
Comfortable is safe, and safe doesn’t always drive the best results. That’s why full transparency is fundamental to how we operate with our team, and with our clients. Critical feedback can be tough to sit with. Sometimes clients aren’t satisfied. Sometimes results don’t match expectations. It happens, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anyone.
What matters is what you do with it. Everything is data. A campaign that underperformed is information. A client conversation that didn’t go as planned is information. The question is whether you’re willing to look at it honestly, name what went wrong, and make a real adjustment.
When something isn’t working, we evaluate the “why,” modify the approach, and keep moving toward progress. We don’t catastrophize, and we don’t brush it under the rug. Honesty from all sides is what makes partnerships stronger because it’s the only way to actually identify a problem and solve it together.
What Sets Root+Beta Apart — In Our Own Words
Ask our team, or ask the partners we work with: our level of collaboration and our commitment to actually testing new ideas is what makes us different in a crowded market.
We’re not afraid to run a strategy nobody’s tried in ag yet. We’re not afraid to expand our capabilities if it creates real value. And we’re not afraid to tell a client when something needs to change — even when that conversation is uncomfortable.
Every decision we make internally, and every recommendation we make to our partners, comes back to one question: Does this create value for them?
That’s what it looks like when an agency actually builds around its values. Not just the ones on the website — the ones that show up in the work.
Want a closer look at what Root+Beta is building? Subscribe to the Lowdown on Ag or reach out at howdy@rootandbeta.com.