Admiral Media review: half a billion in ad spend. Avoid buying ASO from a media desk.

Admiral Media is a performance marketing agency, and the number that matters on its website is the ad spend: more than half a billion euros managed across 150-plus brands and 35 markets. Partner badges from every major ad platform. A Clutch rating of 5.0. If you need someone to run seven-figure monthly budgets across Meta, TikTok and Apple Search Ads, this is the kind of team you should be looking at. This page is about the other line on their services page, App Store Optimization, and why I would not buy it from them.

Media agencies run on media maths. Revenue is a percentage of spend or a retainer scaled to spend, and the best people, the best tooling and the founders’ attention go where the spend is. An organic service like ASO does not scale with spend. It is a fixed-fee, slow-moving, craft-heavy piece of work that a media desk cannot grow. So at a media agency, ASO exists for a reason that has little to do with your listing: it makes the agency full-funnel, which wins bigger accounts, and it keeps organic from being a reason a client talks to anyone else.

Here is what that means in practice. The ASO on your proposal will be competently scoped and reasonably priced, because it is not where the margin is. Once you sign, the paid team will have daily dashboards, weekly optimisations and a lot to say. The organic work will ship a rewrite, maybe a screenshot test, and then go quiet, because that is how the stores respond to good work. In a combined report, the paid section will be long and the organic section will be a slide. Attention follows movement, and movement is on the paid side by design.

There is a subtler issue. A media agency’s honest advice on organic is shaped by its business. Brand-term bidding ‘protects’ you, which is spend. Paid keyword data ‘informs’ organic strategy, which justifies the campaign. A conversion lift on the store page ‘makes every paid dollar work harder’, which is true and also a reason to increase the paid dollars. None of this is dishonest. It is what a company built on €500 million of spend sounds like when it talks about a service that costs nothing per install.

Compare that with hiring one consultant who manages no media. I have no spend to grow and no partner badges to maintain. I tear the listing down, rewrite it, run one controlled creative test, and hand the whole system over on a date we agree in advance. Reporting is a changelog. What shipped, what it did. No paid section, because there is no paid. The fee is fixed and a fraction of a year’s retainer. When it ends, your team owns the keyword map and the test log, and I will have set up your Search Ads account and shown you how to run it yourself.

In fairness: if you have a real media budget and need it run by a serious, well-connected team, Admiral Media is a strong choice and their scale is a genuine advantage there. If you are here because your organic listing is the problem, buying ASO from a media desk means buying the least important service from a company that knows it. Send me their proposal and I will show you what the organic work costs on its own, with no spend attached.