The challenge

Colton Childers joined SCG at the end of last year to develop and improve their analytics functions. As a marketing and PR agency, SCG has to report ROI on ad spend back to its clients.

Rather than commit to a heavy enterprise platform with a large up-front cost, Colton wanted something a fast-growing team could start with immediately and scale as demand grew.

Why Bruin

Colton had extensive prior experience with dbt, and his original plan was to pair Airbyte Cloud for ingestion with dbt Cloud for transformation. As he researched the market, Bruin stood out because it collapsed that multi-tool plan into one.

The deciding factor was built-in ingestion. A few lines of YAML define an ingestr asset that runs on a schedule, with no separate orchestration layer to buy or maintain. Because ingestion and SQL assets live in the same project, Bruin builds the lineage between them automatically, removing the need for a standalone orchestrator like Airflow.

“Bruin Cloud removed the need for both Airbyte Cloud and dbt Cloud, as well as investment in an orchestration tool. We were able to build everything internally at a significantly reduced cost.“

Colton was clear that this was not a trade-off in capability: for SCG's use case, Bruin was comparable to dbt Core on transformation while adding the ingestion and scheduling that would otherwise have required extra tools.

How SCG uses Bruin

Bruin ingests raw data from SCG's ad platforms into Snowflake, then powers a layer of SQL models and marts on top. Because SCG serves distinct business lines, Colton builds reporting models that adapt to each:

• Ingestion from the ad platforms (Snapchat Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Indeed, Google Analytics, Facebook Ads, and more) into the Snowflake warehouse.
• Client- and business-line-specific SQL models and marts, with tailored logic for traditional consumer marketing versus recruitment marketing, which use different sources and reporting methodologies.
• Python assets dropped directly into the flow of a project for custom transform or load steps, with downstream assets picking up seamlessly.
• Quality checks and alerting across the pipeline, so failures surface automatically instead of being discovered in a report.

“It's so simple to insert whatever script you need, and the python assets work seamlessly alongside the SQL assets.“

The results

A real platform in three months. Colton had basic reporting running within about a month, and most of what SCG needed in place, including its first client-facing dashboard, within three.

From weekly tables to self-service BI. SCG went from, at most, weekly aggregated performance tables to self-service BI. Omni sits on top of the Bruin-powered Snowflake models, so clients can explore their data visually and drill down on their own.

Thousands saved per year. Volume-based ingestion tools priced fine for aggregated data, but marketing performance data explodes in volume once it is broken down by demographics or geography. Airbyte alone would have run a minimum of a few hundred dollars a month for just one piece of the pipeline. Other enterprise focused tools would cost substantially more annually.

“That's thousands of dollars a year, easily, that we're saving by switching to Bruin.“

A three-tool stack, not six or seven. A typical modern data stack stitches together separate ingestion, transformation, orchestration, and reverse-ETL tools. SCG runs on three: Bruin, Snowflake, and Omni.

“Bruin handles so many of the problems other tools aim to solve. We're managing only three tools, as opposed to the amount you see others invest in these days.“

Reliability he can trust. After weeks of pipelines running green with quality checks and alerting in place, the platform earned Colton's confidence.

A partner, not just a vendor

Early in SCG's trial, Colton identified a media source that was a must-have to ingest from. The Bruin team built a brand-new ingestr asset for that platform in under a week.

“That blew my mind very early on. Knowing that we have not just a vendor but a partner we can work with when we have a need to improve our services is absolutely phenomenal.“

Would he recommend it?

“Absolutely, yes. Especially for midsize agencies, it's the perfect tool for their needs. Every other tool out there is going to be not as cost effective, and it doesn't really make sense for the volume and type of data agencies are pulling.“