The Agency That Wants to Be the Whole Funnel

There is a particular kind of corporate diagram that executives adore. It is a neat funnel: awareness at the top, purchase at the bottom, gravity doing the work in between. Real customers have never respected this geometry. They see a founder quoted in a newspaper, ask an AI assistant a suspiciously specific question, watch a stranger unbox the product, click an Instagram ad, abandon a cart, return through Google and finally buy on a Tuesday because the email arrived between meetings. The funnel is less a funnel than a pinball machine.

Avenue Z has built an agency around this nuisance. Founded by Jeffrey Herzog and headquartered in Miami, it combines strategic communications, public relations, paid media, creator programs, AI search optimization and ecommerce development. The pitch is not merely that clients can buy all those things from one place. Large agencies have sold big menus for decades. The sharper claim is that the handoffs are the product.

A credible article can become a better advertisement. A better advertisement can reveal the product angle that deserves more content. Better content can make a brand legible to ChatGPT or Gemini. A cleaner Shopify experience can convert the attention. Then the purchase data returns to the media team, which starts the loop again. Avenue Z calls this influence. A less ceremonial word would be continuity.

A company assembled like a sentence

Herzog had seen a new front door appear before. In 1998, he founded iCrossing, a search-marketing company, when getting found online was still an exotic corporate concern. Hearst later acquired it. Avenue Z is his second wager on a changing entrance to the internet. This time the doorway is split among social feeds, creators, commerce platforms and answer engines.

He did not build every capability from scratch. In June 2023, Avenue Z acquired The Snow Agency, a DTC-focused social and influencer shop founded by Jonathan and Daniel Snow. In July came Bevel, a strategic communications firm known for technology, finance and venture clients. In September came Designzillas, an Orlando digital marketing and SEO agency. Three acquisitions in roughly four months gave the young company three different dialects: performance, reputation and search.

That last part mattered. Herzog later acknowledged that merging distinct cultures was difficult. This is the unglamorous hinge in every roll-up. A client does not care that one parent company owns four specialists if the specialists still pass work through four inboxes, four dashboards and four definitions of success. The acquisition prices were generally not disclosed when the deals were announced. A later sell-side report estimated the Bevel transaction at about $75 million, but Avenue Z never published a public rate card for its services or a detailed bill for assembling the platform.

By 2024, the acquired brands were being pulled under Avenue Z. In 2025, Herzog completed the purchase of the remaining ownership interest and became sole owner, according to the company's later announcement. Then, in February 2026, Avenue Z bought Varfaj, a Shopify design and technology specialist. Varfaj brought storefront development, UX and conversion-rate optimization. If the earlier deals built the journey to the store, this one added the cash register.

The first thing to fail is usually the signal

The company's case studies are most interesting when they stop sounding like agency copy and start describing small mechanical failures. TWICE, an oral-wellness brand, had not identified its hero product. Its ad spend was scattered, its customer picture was blurry and its cost per purchase was high. Avenue Z studied reviews, comments and spend history, chose a product around which to concentrate the story, and tested customer profiles and creative angles. The company reports that store revenue rose 174 percent in four months while cost per acquisition fell 36 percent.

Saranghae, a skincare brand, had a less philosophical problem. Its signup flow pushed customers to enter both an email address and phone number, irritating people who did not want SMS. Avenue Z made the text opt-in optional, changed the incentive and rebuilt holiday messages. The agency reports a 15.27 percent increase in signups and a 332 percent increase in abandoned-cart revenue. Sometimes strategy is simply the courage to stop annoying someone.

At KYU, the restaurant group, the misleading metric was a reservation. Reservations cancel. Diners fail to appear. Avenue Z connected media exposure to confirmed seated guests and counted revenue from completed visits. The reported result was $1.54 million in attributed first-visit revenue, with repeat-guest rates rising across Miami, New York and Las Vegas. The important move was not buying another ad. It was deciding what counted.

These are company-reported results, not controlled experiments, and the engagements differ in length and scope. Still, the pattern is useful. What failed first was often the connective tissue: no single product focus, a signup form that created friction, a proxy metric mistaken for revenue, press coverage left idle instead of recycled into paid creative. Avenue Z's answer was to make the system observable before making it larger.

Old authority, new robots

AI search gives the model its most timely expression. Avenue Z sells Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO, intended to improve how brands appear in systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity. Its AI Visibility Index evaluates more than 20 signals and produces a proprietary Z-Score across sectors including fintech, beauty and consumer electronics.

The amusing discovery is that the road to an AI answer often runs through decidedly human institutions. Large language models draw on sources that look authoritative: respected publications, useful listicles, consistent expert commentary and technically accessible pages. So Avenue Z joins PR, content structure and technical optimization. In its own case study, the agency says it increased its AI visibility by 250 percent and generated dozens of inbound leads from AI platforms. Profound, an AI-search analytics company, named Avenue Z a certified agency partner in 2026.

This is where the company's difference from a pure SEO shop becomes clearest. It is not merely trying to tune a page for a query. It is trying to create enough corroborating evidence that a machine will describe the brand accurately and confidently. The old PR objective was to enter the conversation. The new one is to enter the training-shaped memory of the conversation.

What is actually worth copying

Few companies need to buy four agencies. Many can borrow the operating logic. Start with the decision, not the channel. Decide whether the real objective is discovery, trust, conversion or retention. Clean the measurement until it records the behavior that matters. Find the product or story with enough traction to concentrate effort. Reuse evidence across the journey: a review can shape creative, a press mention can become an ad, sales objections can become an FAQ that an answer engine can parse.

The model has conditions. It works best when a client shares data, lets teams collaborate and has enough customer volume to learn from repeated tests. It is less persuasive for a tiny business that needs one narrow deliverable, for a regulated team that cannot connect systems, or for a brand whose product has not yet earned repeat demand. Integration cannot rescue weak economics. Nor does adding AI to the vocabulary make thin evidence authoritative.

That restraint is central to understanding where Avenue Z fits. It competes with global communications firms, performance agencies, Shopify specialists and a growing crop of AEO consultancies. Its advantage is breadth only if the pieces truly exchange information. Its risk is the same breadth becoming expensive choreography. The company is selling custom projects and retainers rather than a standardized software product, so execution remains stubbornly human.

Yet the wager feels properly timed. Customers do not separate reputation from performance when deciding what to buy. AI assistants do not politely honor the org chart. A favorable story, a useful answer, a persuasive video and a frictionless checkout are not four campaigns to the person moving through them. They are one impression of a company. Avenue Z's bet is that the agency should finally behave that way too.