Straight answers
Extra Medium is a marketing agency in Chicago, built for companies that need senior marketing without the big-agency layers. We run strategy, digital, SEO, paid media, social, creators, content and creative under one roof, plus fractional CMO leadership when the seat itself is empty. You work with the people doing the work.
Most Chicago companies don’t have a marketing problem; they have a hand-off problem. One firm holds the brand, another buys the media, a freelancer runs social, and nobody owns the whole. Extra Medium runs the whole: strategy first, then digital marketing, SEO, paid search and paid social, social media, influencer and creator marketing, content, creative and branding, web design and email — with fractional CMO leadership on top when the executive seat itself is the gap. One team arguing from one strategy, measured against revenue.
This city does not buy as one city. A message that lands in Logan Square dies in Bronzeville; what works in the Loop at lunch has nothing to do with what works in Naperville on a Saturday. The industries differ just as much: finance and trading downtown, food and CPG brands built on Midwestern distribution, manufacturers and logistics companies running out of the collar counties, a media scene that still punches above its weight. Marketing here has to be built neighborhood by neighborhood and sector by sector, by people who know which Chicago they’re talking to.
Chicago has a deep agency bench, including some of the biggest holding-company shops in the country, and the pattern is familiar: senior people in the pitch, junior people on the account, and your questions routed through three layers of account management. We run the opposite shape. The practice is founder-led and senior-only, so the person in the first meeting is the person doing the work in month six. In a city that respects showing up and getting on with it, that’s the whole pitch.
Key takeaways
It depends on the shape. A full-service agency owns strategy and execution across channels: brand, digital, SEO, paid media, social, creators, content and web. The honest test is whether one team owns the outcome, or whether you’ve hired a set of vendors who have never met each other.
Size and seniority. The big shops sell you a bench; we sell you the people. Engagements are founder-led, the strategy and the execution sit in one company, and nothing gets handed down to a junior team after the pitch. Smaller on purpose, senior on purpose.
In writing, through the contact page. Tell us the project, the problem, or the seat you need filled. The first conversation is specific: whether we can help, what we’d do first, and what it would cost, in plain terms.
Let’s talk
Don’t know exactly what you need? Good. That’s our job. Tell us where the business is headed and we’ll tell you honestly whether we can help — and if we can’t, who might.
Usually replies within one business day.
