Agencies were built for a world where skilled people were the scarce input. You grew by adding them, and the holding companies built their economics on the layers that came with them. Every layer between a CMO and the media is a place for incentives to drift. We know, because before we were an agency we were the engineers hired to automate billing for the largest networks in the world. We saw where the money goes.
AI ends the scarcity of execution. Plans, reports, analysis: the volume of the work is becoming fast and cheap for anyone. What stays scarce is judgment. Knowing your business. Knowing when a campaign won’t work, and saying so. Taking responsibility for the result. None of that scales by adding juniors, and none of it can be automated.
So here is how we work: a boutique team, all senior, with technology we built and own, for a few dozen finance, health and consumer brands. Not the biggest. The best, for you.
Your client partners
Only senior people on your account. Your client partners plan your media, buy it, read the results, and answer your board’s questions. Everyone who touches your business has decades in it and will tell you no when the answer is no. Nobody learns the job on your account.
Your client partners are on our firm.
What is included
One fee, a percentage of media. Everything below comes with it. Nothing is sold separately and nobody buys a seat.
- Media planning and buying on every channel. Programmatic display and video, connected TV, paid search, paid social, audio, digital out-of-home, and direct deals with publishers. The Trade Desk, DV360, Amazon DSP and Search Ads 360; Meta, LinkedIn and Reddit; and direct deals with publishers such as NBCUniversal, Netflix, Bloomberg, CNBC, Fox, Dow Jones, Yahoo, Spotify and Clear Channel, negotiated by us in your name. Where we buy, and why.
- Your reporting, organized around your objective. Every channel in one place, correct, refreshed through the day. Built the way we describe on How We Measure: the business objective first, then the KPIs that predict it, then the media metrics that explain it.
- A measurement check before we spend. Your tagging, your conversion definitions, your privacy setup and your platform access, reviewed before the first dollar. Our reporting is only as correct as your measurement, so we fix the measurement first.
- Visibility reporting. How AI assistants describe you, what competitors are running, what search and reviews say about you, next to your media. One picture, curated, that you can take in within a minute.
- Brand studies, designed and run. Control groups, one targeting method per study, enough impressions to be sound, and the probability reported next to the lift.
- Strategy, and the planning your board asks for. Options, a point of view, and the analysis to back the call. Marketing rarely lives alone, so we help you be a good partner to your CEO, CFO and CTO.
- Every presentation, kept with your results. What we present to you is published to your reporting, beside the numbers it was drawn from, so the next decision builds on the last.
Our advice
Our largest clients have all heard us say no. We’re motivated by results, not budgets; when a plan won’t deliver we say so, and we’d rather lose a project than watch one fail. The no comes with options, a point of view, and the analysis to back the call. And because marketing rarely lives alone, we bring the planning and analysis that helps our CMO clients be good partners to their board, CEO, CFO, and CTO.
What we will say no to
Campaigns we don't believe will work, even when yes would win the spend. You get options, a point of view, and the analysis behind it instead.
Spending more than the campaign needs. We have no media of our own to sell. Our interest is the result, and the next engagement that follows from it.
Running more platforms than your measurement can read. One DSP is usually what your analytics need. We add another when there is a reason, not a rebate.
Anything your privacy policy doesn't disclose, or that breaks a platform's rules. We are conservative on compliance. In health and finance, that is the job.
More access than we need. Your accounts stay yours. Your data stays yours. We ask for what the work requires and nothing else.
How we use AI
AI is in everything we do, and it makes us fast. It doesn’t make us right. Our engineers build the agents. Our people review everything before it reaches you, make the calls, and sign the work. One standard for the people who run your media and the people who build the tools they run it with: promise less, deliver a great deal more. More on how we use AI.
The next three years
We will stay a boutique team, or close to it. We will keep building the tools we run your media with, because we automated this industry before AI existed and we carry none of a legacy agency’s habits. We will take on a few dozen brands in the three categories we know deeply, and we will grow with them rather than past them. If it ever comes down to bigger or better, we have already chosen.