When organic reach on Facebook declined in 2014, Joseph Levi lost the student media community he had spent two years building. He did not try to rebuild it. He turned the team’s social media fluency into a service. That pivot became Noise Media Group. 

Joseph co-founded the London-based digital marketing agency in 2018, drawing on experience running Student Money Saver, a student deals platform that grew to one million Facebook followers, 500,000 email subscribers, and three million monthly website visits before the algorithm change made organic reach unviable. Brands, including Apple and Just Eat, had been paying to reach that student audience. When that access disappeared, the team pivoted to video content under the name “Everything Student” before shifting entirely to agency work. Brothers Cider was the first client.

Today, Noise Media Group operates a team of 22 across London and New York, managing more than £30 million in annual ad spend for clients including GE Vernova, TaskRabbit, Vodafone, and IKEA across Meta, TikTok, Google, and YouTube. The agency holds a Drum Awards Gold and carries strategic agency designation from TikTok for Business. Joseph describes the agency’s ideal client as a well-funded challenger brand with proven demand and a clear proposition that needs to scale. “We like to work with brands that are doing something interesting, who are disruptive,” he says.

Joseph recently announced “Vudo,” an AI system built inside Noise Media Group that audits competitor ads, identifies category trends, drafts scripts, and generates AI-assisted video creative for the agency’s team. The driving observation: producing social ads has become straightforward, but knowing which ad to produce has not.

The Full-Funnel Case Noise Media Group Brings to CFOs

The most consistent problem Joseph observes is budget misallocation between awareness and conversion. Brands with strong name recognition can sometimes invest directly in lower-funnel conversion campaigns. Those still building that recognition need both layers running at once, and underinvesting in awareness typically shows up in conversion results.

A campaign Noise Media Group ran for TaskRabbit demonstrates the model. The agency created a parody song lyrics campaign distributed on buses and trains across London, then expanded the work to seven European territories. Running concurrently was a paid search campaign and a retargeting program for site visitors who had not completed a booking. “If people are searching and five competitors come up, if they’ve seen really cool song lyric parody campaigns, they’ll remember your brand and click on you above the others,” Joseph says.

The awareness investment produced a 370% increase in branded search for TaskRabbit, according to Joseph. “When you’ve got case studies like that, it can go a long way to showing a CFO how it could be effective,” he says. 

The diagnostic Joseph applies when conversion underperforms: if lower-funnel ads are not hitting targets despite sound structure and targeting, the signal is usually that awareness investment needs to increase. “If you test that and the ads aren’t performing as well as you’d like, it’s normally saying that you need to invest more in the awareness side of things,” he says.

Creators Are Part of the Mix, Not the Whole Mix

Joseph sees creator partnerships as a meaningful layer within the marketing stack but is cautious about brands treating a single large creator deal as a self-contained strategy. “A lot of brands might place too much faith in just one big creator partnership and hoping that works,” he says. “It can, but it might not necessarily.”

What Noise Media Group has found more consistent is routing creator-produced content into the paid media engine. For Jiffy, a Canada-based on-demand services platform, the agency produces content with creators and pushes the best-performing assets into paid placement. That approach drove a 470% increase in conversions for the brand, according to Joseph. A similar model has been applied to VOXI, a Vodafone-owned product. Creator content carries an inherent advantage in performance placements because audiences extend trust to creators they follow in a way that does not transfer to standard ad formats. “Something that a creator says would carry more weight than just a random ad,” he notes.

Platform allocation determines how that content gets deployed. As Joseph explains, search serves lower-funnel users already in purchase mode. TikTok reaches a younger and highly engaged audience, making it well-suited for awareness campaigns. Meta operates effectively across both awareness and conversion depending on campaign configuration. 

For e-commerce brands deciding between TikTok Shop and their own websites, Joseph frames the trade-off as friction against data: Shop reduces checkout friction but limits retargeting capability. Directing users to a brand’s own site enables richer first-party data collection, though it adds a step that Shop removes. “There’s definitely not a one-size-fits-all,” he says. “It really depends on the brand.”

Vudo and the Division of Labor Between AI and the Team

The pressure to produce high-volume, platform-native creative across a roster of brands led Noise Media Group to build Vudo internally rather than license an external tool. Nothing available, Joseph says, could perform the specific function the team needed: auditing competitor ads and category-level trends at scale, then translating that intelligence into a usable creative brief.

The system’s design preserves human judgment at each stage. Vudo surfaces competitor ads and category trends, while the team evaluates which apply to a specific brand. The system shapes selected concepts into a script outline, while the team refines the output, meaning the final video production remains labor-intensive. “It’s not a product where you click one button, and it does everything,” Joseph says. “It’s more a case of helping our team.”

The distinction Joseph draws is between intelligence and judgment. “AI is really strong for certain intelligence. Human judgment is also really powerful,” he says. “The best situation is when you have AI carrying out intelligence, but experts carrying out that judgment layer.”

LLMs as an Emerging Layer in Brand Strategy

A newer question Noise Media Group is fielding from clients is how brand content performs when large language models surface it. Consumers are increasingly asking tools like ChatGPT and Claude comparative questions about which service to hire or which product to buy. Brands that appear prominently in those AI-generated responses gain visibility that operates outside traditional search and social channels.

Joseph believes this warrants attention but not a reallocation of primary budgets. “It’s certainly like one element,” he says. “It’s not like you forget everything else and just focus on that.” 

His current guidance: maintain the human-facing strategy that generates the majority of demand, while beginning to invest in AI-generated visibility as an emerging surface. “Brands need to continue as they are, appealing to humans because the majority of demand is humans on social or other channels,” he says. “But it’s something to start thinking about and start investing in.”

What Noise Media Group Is Building Toward

Over 70% of the agency’s revenue runs through retainers structured as minimum 12-month engagements, a model Joseph says reflects a conviction about what effective brand marketing requires. Short cycles do not allow the time needed to test, learn, and scale what works. “Our business doesn’t work well on working with a brand for a few months,” he says. “It’s about growing with the brand in the long term.”

Beyond the core agency, Joseph also runs Noise Ventures, an investment and incubation arm, with Vudo as its first internal build. Looking ahead, he expects creators to remain commercially valuable as audiences grow more skeptical of automated content, and sees physical events gaining ground as digital environments become more saturated. 

The goal for Noise Media Group is a position at the leading edge of each shift. “I’d like Noise to be at the cutting edge of all evolutions and help brands be really dynamic and at the front of consumer attention,” Joseph says.

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