Insights

Notes from the build.

How we think about media, software, and a model built to grow revenue instead of billing for hours.

Work through your next decision.

Practical guides and editable templates for choosing a media team, measuring a campaign, or scoping an AI build.

Agency operations

Outsource media buying or hire a team?

Compare hiring, outsourcing, and a hybrid media team with a practical cost worksheet, ownership checklist, and partner evaluation questions.

Open guide Media measurement

Write a CTV measurement brief before buying media

Define the business outcome, attribution rules, holdout design, and budget decision for a CTV campaign. Includes an editable experiment brief and reporting template.

Open guide Software development

Scope an AI agent that can work in production

Turn an AI idea into a build brief with workflow boundaries, data access, approval rules, evaluation cases, operating costs, and a launch decision.

August 8, 20267 min read

Why brands still trust clicks — and how to move past them

Clicks survive because they are fast, visible, and easy to defend — not because they prove causation. Moving past them requires experiments, business outcomes, and reporting that makes uncertainty useful.

August 6, 20266 min read

DOOH starts the story. CTV retargeting finishes it.

Digital out-of-home creates relevance in a physical moment. Proximity-based CTV retargeting extends that moment into the living room, where the message has time to become a story.

August 6, 20266 min read

AI swarms: when one agent isn’t enough

An AI swarm is a coordinated group of specialized agents working toward one outcome. The advantage is not more bots — it is useful division of labor, parallel work, and independent verification.

July 31, 20266 min read

If you think vibe coding is terrible, you don’t know how apps are made

The criticism mistakes typing code for making software. Good apps have always been built through abstraction, iteration, judgment, testing, and accountability. AI changes the first draft — not the job.

July 30, 20264 min read

We put an advertising course inside a calculator

ArcPlanner Go 1.4 ships a 30-lesson advertising course inside a free media-planning app. Why a calculator needed a curriculum — and what reviewing our own lessons taught us.

July 16, 20263 min read

The plan gets made in the room

Nobody needs a CPM at their desk. They need it in the meeting, in the hallway, on the call — which is exactly where media planning software has never been.

July 16, 20264 min read

A translate button is not a translation

Most "localized" sites are one URL wearing a language switcher. To a search engine, the other eighteen languages don't exist. We rebuilt ours the hard way.

July 16, 20264 min read

Your next client may never see your homepage

Buyers are starting to ask an assistant instead of a search engine. The assistant answers — and nobody clicks. That changes what a website is actually for.

June 14, 20264 min read

The model is the easy part

Anyone can wire up a model in an afternoon. The reason most AI features never ship is everything that happens after the demo.

June 4, 20263 min read

We prototype in days, not quarters

The biggest risk in a software build isn't the code. It's spending six months building the wrong thing. The fix is to get something real in front of people fast.

June 3, 20264 min read

Most “AI” in adtech is a wrapper

The word is on every pitch deck in the industry. Almost none of it survives contact with a live campaign. Here's the difference between a demo and a system.

May 27, 20263 min read

Good product is mostly subtraction

The instinct on every roadmap is to add. The products people actually love are defined by what their builders had the discipline to leave out.

May 20, 20264 min read

Built to build, not to extract

Most of the ad industry is engineered to bill you, not to grow you. We built Revenue Arc the other way around — and it changes everything about how we work.

May 13, 20263 min read

Reach is a vanity metric

Impressions are the easiest number to grow and the easiest to fool yourself with. If a metric can't be tied to revenue, it's decoration.

May 6, 20263 min read

Precision beats spend

How the biggest anime opening in U.S. history happened without a studio budget — with Revenue Arc as the sole media partner — and why targeting the right person beats outspending the competition every time.

April 22, 20264 min read

Why we build our own software instead of renting a stack

Every agency rents the same tools, so every agency has the same edge: none. The advantage moved into the infrastructure.

April 8, 20263 min read

DOOH is the most underrated channel in media

Out-of-home stopped being a billboard you couldn't measure. Tied to digital retargeting, it's one of the sharpest tools we have.

March 25, 20264 min read

The case for white-label media

Building an in-house media department is expensive, slow, and risky. Renting the engine and keeping the relationship is the better trade.

March 11, 20263 min read

Reach buyers before they're in-market

By the time someone is actively shopping, everyone is bidding on them. The cheaper, smarter moment is before demand forms.

February 24, 20263 min read

The audiences you should never target

Most targeting models only learn who to chase. The bigger gains often come from learning who to skip.

February 10, 20263 min read

Your media plan shouldn't live in a spreadsheet

Spreadsheets are where media plans go to break: stale benchmarks, broken formulas, and a deck you rebuild by hand every time something changes.

January 20, 20263 min read

RFP season is a tax. We automated it.

Agencies lose thousands of hours a year answering the same questions in a slightly different template. That time should be spent winning, not formatting.

December 16, 20254 min read

The middle layer is dead weight

Most of what sits between a client and the people doing the work adds margin and latency, not value. We took it out.

Notes from the build

How we think about media, software, and growth — a short email when we publish something worth your time. No spam, unsubscribe anytime.