Simon Lewis launched Binary & Co in Vancouver in 2019, roughly five minutes before the world shut down. “It was a great time to start an agency,” he says, with the dryness of a man who moved from Poole, England to British Columbia for a year of climbing and skiing and never left.
The founding idea was simple enough to say out loud: bring the marketing back into digital marketing. Six years on, Binary & Co builds full-funnel digital advertising for clients across education, real estate development and ecommerce, including Silver Star and Qualex Landmark.
The team is four people, fully remote by design and increasingly pointed at high-consideration lead generation — the kind of purchase a person thinks about for months. Lewis has a favorite way to explain the role his agency plays in that.
“We are not the pizza. We’re the pizza delivery people.”
Remote before remote was mandatory
Lewis came up through the first dotcom bubble at an online PR firm, then moved through paid media, analytics and SEO before deciding he wanted to run things his way. Binary & Co opened in 2019 with remote work baked in from day one, not bolted on in a panic 12 months later.
That timing turned an intention into an identity. The agency never had to unlearn an office, which is part of why flexibility shows up in almost every answer Lewis gives about how the shop operates.
What Binary & Co is known for: full funnel, less jargon
Digital advertising accumulated a lot of technical vocabulary and lost some of the craft underneath it. Lewis built Binary & Co to close that gap — full-funnel campaigns that meet people at the decision-making stage they’re in, not wherever the platform happens to serve them.
Lately the focus has sharpened toward high-ticket, high-consideration lead generation. Education is the proving ground, but Lewis sees the same mechanics running through finance and real estate.
“We build full-funnel digital advertising campaigns for our clients that really speak to them where they are,” he says.
Three things Binary & Co does differently
Performance is the first, and Lewis treats it as table stakes rather than a selling point. Delivering high-performing advertising is the price of admission for anyone answering a media brief.
The second is translation — taking a brand’s messaging and customer journey and turning it into campaign architecture. That’s where the pizza delivery analogy earns its keep: bring Binary & Co the recipe, and they’ll get it to the right doorstep at the right moment.
The third is business fluency. “We can all be very good at ads,” Lewis says. “The next piece, where you really get that sweet spot, that’s where the magic happens — having that intimate understanding of the client business and their market.”
Why brands should call Binary & Co
The pitch is aimed squarely at marketing teams who already know their customers and need that knowledge translated into media, not reinvented in a workshop. Lewis is direct about the alternative he’s positioning against.
“We don’t want an agency that’s just going to throw ads out there and hope they stick,” he says, channeling the client side of the conversation.
The working session that follows is unglamorous and specific: personas or ICPs, stage by stage through the buying process, then the campaign architecture that carries it. The differentiation work matters most — finding what separates a client in their market and making the advertising say it.
The power of being indie (and staying flexible)
Independence, for Lewis, is mostly about the absence of structure to sit inside. There’s no network mandate steering which platforms get used or which problems are worth solving.
That shows up as range. Binary & Co works across ad platforms and marketing automation, and has moved further into SMS messaging for lead generation as clients’ needs have shifted.
“It all comes out of that ability to flex and say, okay, this isn’t working. Let’s move here,” Lewis says.
Clients rarely arrive asking for an independent agency by name. They arrive asking for something else, and Lewis has learned to hear what it means. “They’ve said, we want someone that’s going to talk to us on our level and be able to meet us where we are,” he says of the ones who came over from network shops. “In many ways they’re looking for an indie agency but they don’t necessarily know that’s what they’re looking for.”
Why talent chooses Binary & Co: autonomy over process
Lewis spends a full minute circling the idea before he finds the word for it, which makes the answer more convincing than a rehearsed one would be. The word is autonomy.
“There isn’t a hard process that you have to follow here,” he says. “If there is a way they think is better — sure. We’re always going to be open to new ideas.” He started an agency to work the way he thought made sense, and he’d rather hire people who want the same thing.
The practical version: fully remote roles, part-time arrangements for people with other things going on and a preference for retained contractors over rotating freelancers. Continuity matters more than a bench, and account directors swapping in and out was never going to work here. Call it freelance stability without the hustle.
Underdogs, and fine with it
Weirdos, misfits or underdogs? “Probably a bit of all three, really,” Lewis says, before settling firmly on underdog. Paid media is a consolidated landscape, and he’s clear-eyed about the bigger books of business assembled around him.
But he’s built a case for the position rather than an apology for it. Large agencies sell large paid media platforms with commitments to match, and plenty of small-to-medium businesses have budgets that don’t warrant the machinery.
“We don’t have all these bells and whistles that they do, but you can still be extremely effective, especially with the money you have,” he says. A recent retail client proved it — big-looking brand, budget that needed flexibility more than it needed scale. Binary & Co would have been the underdog in that competitive pitch, and by Lewis’s read, the one with more to offer.
Fractional CMOs, this one’s for you
Lewis’s first shout-out goes to Lindsay Rutherford, who pointed him toward Indie Agency News in the first place. Not a CMO, not a marketer — just someone who flagged a good channel.
The second is an open invitation. CMOs, fractional CMOs and brand marketers working in education, finance or real estate are the people Lewis wants to talk process with.
“Your ads delivered on time and to the right people at the right time,” he says. “We’re more than happy to chat.”
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Binary & Co
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