About
I’m Alex Langton. I’ve been in paid media since 2014 — eight years inside agencies and four years in-house, currently leading a paid media team that runs over a million dollars a month across Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, TikTok, programmatic display, and trade publications, in hyper-competitive B2B e-commerce and lead generation.
This site exists for one reason. Over the last decade I’ve watched, from inside and outside agency walls, how easily a client can be quietly under-served while the monthly report keeps showing green arrows. The mechanics are usually not malicious. They’re structural — staffing models, profitability targets, junior analysts repeating senior scripts they don’t fully understand. But the cost lands on the client.
I’m not building an agency. I don’t take referral fees. I won’t recommend a replacement agency unless you ask me to, and even then I’ll lean toward telling you the questions to ask rather than the names to call. I work with a small number of clients each year on retainer or project work, and I answer one-off questions for free with no follow-up — because some percentage of the people who get a free straight answer today turn out to need real help six months later, and the rest go back to their day. Both outcomes are fine.
The lane
I work across paid media in B2B: Google Ads (search, shopping, Performance Max), Microsoft Ads, paid social on Meta, LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, and TikTok, plus programmatic display and trade-publication placements. Across both demand-capture and demand-generation, prospecting and remarketing, lead gen and e-commerce. I do not do SEO, organic social, creative production, or full-funnel attribution-platform implementation. If your situation drifts into any of those, I’ll tell you and refer you to people who do, with no fee involved.
The Red Flags library starts with Google Ads paid search because that’s where the most spend, the most opacity, and the most agency mischief tend to live. The patterns repeat across channels, and the library will grow accordingly — but every entry will be from real account experience, not borrowed from somewhere else.
How I work
Plain-English first. Specific over general. Numbers and ranges instead of “it depends.” If I don’t know something I’ll say so on the call rather than mid-paragraph in a follow-up email. The whole point of being a practitioner on the client’s side of the table is that you stop having to translate. So I do the translating.
How to get in touch
The fastest way is the free question form. One question, one answer, no catch. If your situation is bigger than one question, say so in the question and I’ll suggest the right next step.