Bertha Featherweight
The whole agency, minus the infrastructure.
Most small businesses will never need, want or be able to afford a nineteen-service marketing platform. What they need is the judgement inside it — what works, why it works, and which tempting options were considered and correctly binned. Bertha Featherweight is that judgement, distilled into a Claude Code skill. Feed it your real documents and it works the problem the way five agency disciplines would, produces strategy by subtraction, and runs the whole plan through an adversarial red team before a penny moves.
The layer
Observe → Decide → Act. Featherweight watches your real materials, decides what the strategy should be and what it should refuse to be, and produces the artefacts — briefs, decks, media plans, reports. What it deliberately does not do is touch your ad accounts. It tells you what to say to them, with receipts.
What it is
Bertha is a marketing operating system with real infrastructure behind it — microservices, a frontend, clients. Featherweight is her essence poured into a much smaller vessel: a single Claude Code skill, installed as a folder, with a packaged installer for Mac, Linux and Windows.
Seventeen reference engines and one operating doctrine. Client materials go in; strategy, cohorts, creative, media plans, briefs, decks and reports come out — every output carrying its behavioural-science rationale, and reporting closing each cycle back into the next brief.
Why it exists
The insight inside a good agency has historically required a retainer with several zeroes on it, and it sits behind a door most small businesses are never invited through. That is a distribution problem, not a knowledge problem — the thinking is entirely transferable, it was just never packaged in anything a five-person company could buy.
This is the attempt to package it. It is a fragment, not the whole star, and it is honest about that: what ships is the methodology, not the running system. For most small businesses that fragment is still more marketing thinking than they have ever had access to.
The counterweight
Every activation machine eventually starts eating the brand that feeds it — short-term performance is easier to measure, so it wins every argument it is allowed to have. Featherweight ships with a brand-growth counterweight built in: category entry points, distinctive assets, fluent devices and a brand ledger, so the part of marketing that only pays back slowly still gets a seat at the table.
Status
Release ready — packaged, with installers, and private and proprietary. Available on request rather than on a download page. The full write-up is in The Essence of Bertha, which also carries the architecture document; if you want it pointed at your business, ask.