By: Eva Jones
Krista Karpan and Nicolette McIntyre have been friends since high school, which is longer than most business partnerships last. So when they started Milked Media out of a loft in 2017, with no funding and no real plan, the friendship was already there, and the company grew with it. Almost a decade later, that’s still the thing that explains how the whole place runs.
A Friendship That Turned Into a Performance Marketing Agency
Milked Media does performance marketing for e-commerce brands in fashion, jewelry, beauty, and home. The agency won the 2025 Meta Agency Award for Performance Campaign of the Year in the boutique category. Ask about that award, though, and the founders would rather talk about how they actually got there.
Krista, the CEO, is a numbers person to the core: budgets, attribution, the profitability math that nobody finds glamorous but that she loves untangling. Nicolette, the CCO, comes at it from the other direction, out of a career in fashion before she moved into product and brand work. She thinks in visuals, in what makes someone stop scrolling. Put the two of them together, and neither the math nor the creative gets shortchanged.
Why Milked Media Looks at MER Instead of ROAS
You can see this most clearly in how they pull apart a brand that’s struggling. Ask most DTC founders how marketing’s going, and they’ll give you a return on ad spend, because it’s the number every platform puts right in front of you. Krista thinks that’s the wrong place to start. “A lot of people focus on one metric, and that is definitely a mistake,” she says. “They treat ROAS as the north star when really they should be looking at their MER.”
The problem with ROAS is that it only measures what one platform is willing to take credit for, and every platform takes credit generously. Click a Meta ad, Google the brand, open an email a few days later, and all three will happily call that sale theirs. Marketing Efficiency Ratio skips the argument entirely: total revenue over total spend, no squabbling about who gets the point.
Her favorite example is one she runs into all the time. “You’re telling me someone’s going to see a Meta ad and buy a $10,000 piece of jewelry within seven days of clicking?” she asks. “Probably not.” A brand staring only at ROAS will pause the exact ads that were quietly warming up that slow, expensive purchase, then watch sales slide and wonder why.
What Makes the Creative Land
That’s Krista’s half of the business talking. Nicolette’s half asks the next question. Once you’re actually measuring things right, what moves the number?
For her, it’s creative. These days Meta’s algorithm does most of the work of finding the audience, so the ad itself is about the last thing a brand still fully controls. As she puts it, a compelling ad matters more than which levers you push or pull on the backend. Nicolette still creative-directs and designs some of the campaigns herself, including the Heretic Parfum work that won the agency its 2025 Meta award.
Part of why the creative lands, they say, is who’s making it. The team at Milked Media is almost all female, working in categories such as fashion, jewelry, beauty, and home that are mostly aimed at women. “We shop these brands, we scroll these ads,” is how they describe it. They’re not guessing at the customer.
In most of what they do, they are her. For them, that’s not a line about diversity. It shapes the small decisions that add up in a feed, the casting, the styling, the way a caption sounds when someone reads it in half a second. An ad built that way reads as though it belongs instead of like an outsider doing an impression of the audience.
Why Milked Media Narrowed Its Focus
The focus was a choice, and it took a while to make. For the first three years, they did a little of everything for anyone who’d pay, from branding and organic social to influencer management and work for local businesses. Things only really took off in 2020, when they cut it all down to paid media, email, and content production for e-commerce brands in a handful of verticals, and started turning the rest away.
“Niching down” sounds easy when you say it. Saying no to most of the work coming through the door is not. But that’s the decision that took them from two people in a loft to an award-winning agency with a fully built-out team.
How the Partnership Holds Together
What keeps it all together is the same push-and-pull they started with. Krista keeps the scoreboard honest, MER over ROAS, profit over vanity metrics, the math nobody puts on a highlight reel. Nicolette makes sure the work that the scoreboard is measuring is actually worth showing.
The friendship and recognizing each other’s strengths is what makes the agency work and brings a merging of skills that each other trusts to oversee within the company. For an agency that grew by limiting its client base, that trust might be the most valuable thing they’ve got.
