The spreadsheet has a peculiar kind of job security. Everyone complains about it. Everyone keeps opening it. For a media team with budgets moving across markets, agencies, channels and currencies, the humble grid is flexible enough to survive almost any request. It is also where a campaign can slowly lose its shared meaning. One file becomes six. A naming convention bends. Results land in a different system from the plan. By the time a decision arrives, somebody is reconciling cells that were never designed to agree.
Alexander Högman knew that routine before he tried to sell an alternative to it. His early career moved through marketing, sales, consulting and business development. The names on the résumé include Volvo, Deloitte, Renault and PostNord. The useful connection is not prestige. It is repetition. He had spent years planning, executing and analyzing campaigns inside the environments that later became his customers.
The frustration was operational and oddly universal: scattered media plans, separate reporting tools, email threads standing in for process, and data that demanded organization before it could support a decision. Högman spoke with colleagues, peers and potential users. The pattern held. Global teams were not short of information. They were short of a coherent place to manage it together.
“We realised media teams were spending more time organising data than interpreting it.”Alexander Högman
In 2012, he co-founded Mediatool with Magnus Ohlin, Ludwig Magnusson and Joakim Landberg. Their responsibilities would span the commercial, product and technical sides of the company. Their shared wager was simple enough to say and difficult to deliver: a media team should be able to treat the plan, the spend, the conversation and the result as parts of one living system.
01 / The first buildA year with room to fail
The first year was bootstrapped. Personal finances tightened. The founders worked long hours for little immediate return. Högman has described investor pitches that ended in rejection and technical integrations that refused to cooperate. The product had to be sophisticated enough to connect multiple data sources and simple enough for a busy planner to use without creating a second job.
Then came the decision that separates faith in a problem from faith in a particular solution. The team scrapped its first platform and rebuilt from scratch. Högman later called the more dynamic replacement one of the company’s strengths. The important detail is the willingness to write off work. Code can become emotionally expensive long before it becomes commercially useful.
Bootstrapping gave them time to make that call. It also made every small sign of progress carry extra weight: a feature that finally worked, an early user who offered useful feedback, a pitch that broke through. Högman’s recurring advice to founders is to enjoy the journey and celebrate small wins. From a distance that sounds cheerful. In a thinly financed startup, it is a system for maintaining momentum when the finish line refuses to come into view.
02 / The useful mistakeA very short world tour
Högman’s funniest early mistake also happened to involve media planning. Eager to make a splash, the team assembled an online campaign with chosen keywords, polished copy and a video. In the setup, he misallocated budget across platforms, overestimated how long the money would last and missed part of the geographic targeting. The budget disappeared in the first week. Traffic arrived from remote places with no obvious need for a media-management platform.
Inside the company, the accidental reach became the “world tour.” The joke survived because the lesson did. Double-check the work. Ask a fresh pair of eyes to look. Bring in expertise when enthusiasm is doing too much of the driving. Expect an unforeseen result and leave enough room in the culture to laugh while correcting it.
“What seems obvious in hindsight often isn’t when you’re in the thick of planning.”Alexander Högman
There is a pleasing symmetry here. A founder building campaign-management software briefly lost control of his own campaign. The episode does not prove that tools remove mistakes. It shows why operating discipline matters and why experienced people remain part of the system. Camphouse would later make that human layer more explicit in another corner of the business.
Planning confidence is not a substitute for a fresh review.
Domain expertise catches details that a general process can miss.
Campaigns move. Budgets, markets and assumptions need watching.
Humor turns an error into shared memory without hiding the lesson.
03 / Listening as product workThe support team becomes a sensor
Early Mediatool leaned on semi-automated customer service and feedback tools. The assumption was familiar to software founders: make the interface intuitive, build a thorough help center and let the product explain itself. Users wanted something else. They wanted direct help from people who understood the work of media planning and buying.
The company invested in customer-success specialists with that background. Högman says retention and satisfaction improved. A second benefit arrived with the conversations. Customers shared richer, more specific feedback when they did not have to translate their professional context first. Support became a listening system for product development.
This is one of the more reusable parts of his story. A company can measure clicks, tickets and time to resolution. It can still miss the sentence that reveals why a feature feels wrong. Domain-fluent support shortens the distance between a user’s frustration and the team able to change the product.
The Camphouse feedback loop
04 / A wider mapFrom Sweden to the room where decisions happen
The company first sold into Sweden, then recognized that many of its ideal customers operated elsewhere. International growth changed the sales strategy and the product’s demands. A shared plan for a single team is one challenge. A shared data model across agencies, brands, countries and reporting conventions is a different one.
In 2020, after years of bootstrapping and reaching profitability, the company announced a €2.5 million round led by Newion. The capital was meant to extend its international reach. Four years later, Högman moved with his family from Sweden to New York. He framed the decision in practical terms: a global company needed to show up where ambitious brands and fast-moving conversations were concentrated.
The move did not erase the Swedish base. Camphouse now lists teams across New York, Stockholm, Malmö, London and Montpellier. Högman’s public writing folds the personal relocation into the company’s expansion: family, market and mission moving at the same time. The image is less of a remote software company floating above geography and more of a network of rooms where people still meet, compare notes and decide what to build next.
In February 2025, Mediatool became Camphouse. “House of Campaigns” widened the frame from a useful tool to a place where allocation, planning, activation and reporting could share the same data. The brand changed as artificial intelligence raised the stakes of data quality. Högman’s point has been consistent: messy foundations produce messy output, no matter how confident the interface appears.
“AI is only as smart as the data it has access to and is trained on. If the foundation is messy, the output will be messy.”Alexander Högman
05 / The next campaignStructure before spectacle
By 2025, Högman said more than 150 brands worldwide were using Camphouse. In 2026 he spoke at the ANA Media Conference in Nashville about a theme that sounds counterintuitive for a software seller: modern media complexity should be embraced, not wished away. The proposed answer is code, accelerated by AI, with a governed data model underneath.
June brought two linked milestones. Camphouse announced a Series A chapter, with public reporting putting total capital raised at $17 million. At the same time, the company said L’Oréal Groupe had selected Camphouse as its worldwide media-planning system of record across divisions and markets. The funding was earmarked for AI capabilities and customer success as large deployments expanded.
For Högman, the enterprise mandate is a test of the original idea at a larger scale. The pain that began with mismatched plans now includes governance, security, taxonomy and the problem of feeding reliable context into AI systems. The software has grown, but the job remains recognizable: help teams spend less time arranging information and more time making decisions with it.
He has another aspiration beyond the product. Asked what movement he would start, Högman chose helping young people begin entrepreneurial journeys through mentorship, resources and support networks. It fits the founder he describes in interviews: persistent, grateful to his co-founders, willing to revisit decisions and alert to the social machinery that keeps a company alive.
The campaign against campaign chaos has no final launch date. New channels appear. Data stacks grow. AI adds speed and another reason to care about structure. The spreadsheet will remain nearby, quietly offering one more blank tab. Camphouse’s opportunity is to earn the moment when a team decides it no longer needs to open it.