I work at a big ad agency (400+ people) in BOS doing digital marketing and our team is asked to do exactly what your asking and I can tell you it's really really tough to find these people to do this sort of work. I mean anyone who has a site is looking for someone who can conjure up traffic & eyeballs for cheap, it's the holy grail of all advertising and customer acquisition based businesses.

As you probably know, there is a massive talent shortage at the cutting edge of digital marketing and driving traffic. There are tons of people in digital marketing but the vast majority of them are thinking about old ideas and the way things have been done in the past; all approaches that are contrary to any cutting edge startup.

So it kind of turns out that there are a ton of old ideas to growing traffic and rarely an original approach. This makes finding people a nightmare since with large or med budgets, millions of people have experience spending millions of dollars but only a handful have had any success designing high traffic customer acquisition programs at low to no cost.

I would guess a large part of this is due to the fact that everything is so new and experimental. Minting social media traffic into conversions & sales can be quite expensive and profitable on a case by case basis. Buying search keywords can work (it worked for Mint) but take an aggressive customer acquisition model at cost. Even targeted ad exchanges & DSPs bring guaranteed visibility but a certain gamble in overhead costs & trades. Affiliate programs have been around for years but it doesn't work across all verticals (tough to sell physical things, easy to get new sign ups). SEOs are barely worth mentioning since so much of it is now obvious.

In the big ad agency world, there are a lot of these older ideas being thrown around constantly but it's very seldom we or anyone sees a new or original theory to drive traffic to a particular project or new site. We're faced with the same problem startups are faced and it seems evident that the problem will continue. Ideas that generate incredible amounts of traffic (the Old Spice campaign) seem improbable before campaigns begin and blatantly obvious in retrospect. Additionally, past ideas to drive traffic applied to current projects have no guarantee that they will wildly inspire traffic in the future. It's quite rare to find an individual that has mastered the understanding of a few Internet ecosystems (like how travel websites churn traffic or eyeballs for moons at online retail) and simultaneously understand emerging marketing tactics to grow reach.

Hackers are in a weirdly challenging position because designing business systems often seems foreign to cutting brilliant code. Startups like Gilt & Groupon have no special approach to code but brilliant business systems and incredible customer growth curves since they inspire customers to share experiences for the sake of their own benefit. There is probably a lot more that could be said about these biz guys who can design brilliant customer acquisition systems but I would bet you probably find them in three categories: 1. they've already built something brilliant that they have a few VCs on speed dial for their next big idea, 2. they're brewing something already as an entrepreneur and lack desire for a job or 3. they're ignorant of their own brilliance and need a Steve Jobs to John Sculley speech to hop on board.

Last prediction: as the number of startup engineers & Y-comb type teams proliferate this talent shortage will get crazy. Perhaps PG will start asking for Google News links for "system to your advantage" examples.