Jeff Fagel has a neat phrase for the unit of marketing that matters: a busier Tuesday. It is deliberately ordinary. A shop has more customers. A restaurant fills tables. The phone rings. Someone books an appointment. Somewhere between a television screen and a cash register, something useful has happened.
This is the argument he now makes as chief marketing officer of JamLoop, a connected television advertising company. Streaming TV, in Fagel's telling, should stop behaving like an elegant mystery. Advertisers deserve to see where an ad ran, who it reached, and what happened next. Reach and impressions can describe a campaign. Calls, visits, and sales describe a business.
The distinction sounds obvious until one notices how much of advertising has been built to avoid it. Media produces abundant proof of its own activity. Business owners are left to decide whether that activity deserves credit. Fagel's career, from packaged goods and troubled retail brands to data platforms and streaming television, reads like a long campaign against that gap.
An apprenticeship with no obvious entrance exam
He did not begin with a glamorous brand or a celebrated agency. His first professional work was media-training physicians. Fagel later joked that his qualifications consisted of annual sinus infections and having a physician for a father. It was hardly the résumé of a natural authority, yet there he was, teaching trained specialists how to survive an interview.
The assignment offered an early lesson in translation. Expertise is not the same as explanation. Knowing a subject does not guarantee that anybody will listen, care, or act. Those three verbs would follow him. By 2011, as director of brand development at Sears Holdings, he was talking about Kmart in much the same sequence: get people to pay attention, get them to care, get them to act.
Before and around those retail years came work across ConAgra and PepsiCo businesses, including Gatorade and Frito-Lay. Fagel has summarized the range with dry economy: some assignments involved nascent ideas, such as an early shoppable Facebook video; others involved trying to rescue a declining margarine category or a damaged Kmart brand. Marketing, here, was not a parade of pristine launches. It was the less photogenic work of changing a habit or repairing a story.
The coupon was already pointing toward the television
In 2013, Fagel was vice president of marketing and brand development at edo Interactive, a startup working on card-linked offers. His advice about digital coupons was simple: any extra consumer labor, from printing to scanning, would exhaust the novelty. The more interesting opportunity was to close the loop between an online or mobile exposure and an in-store redemption.
That sentence belongs to an earlier era of adtech, but it could be pinned above his desk today. Remove friction. Connect exposure to action. Let the transaction settle the argument.
He moved from edo to G/O Digital, Gannett's local digital marketing business, and later Cofactor, a Tegna division assembled around PointRoll and Shoplocal. At G/O Digital, his team and partners won a 2015 Content Marketing Award for a sponsored-content campaign. The award mattered, but the larger idea was the blend: brand and sale, story and action, national capability and local relevance. Fagel was already suspicious of an either-or choice between building a brand and producing a result.
Eyeview recruited him as CMO in 2016 to help define outcome-based video marketing. His line at the time was unusually durable: “The future of marketing is about business outcomes, not media outputs.” Two years later, he took over marketing for Epsilon and Conversant. There he helped consolidate the businesses into one brand and culture, and shaped the “Humans over Hype” positioning before Publicis Groupe acquired Epsilon for $4.4 billion in 2019.
“The future of marketing is about business outcomes, not media outputs.”Jeff Fagel, 2016
Ten percent for poking the box
Fagel joined Madhive as CMO in late 2021. In an interview soon afterward, he described a three-part agenda for any new marketing leader: people, process, and accountability. Then he gave accountability a budget. His mix was 50 percent revenue, 40 percent strategy, and 10 percent “Poke the Box,” his phrase for trying things and pushing beyond the comfortable.
The ratio is revealing. Fagel is no romantic about experimentation. He gives most of the room to revenue and durable strategy. Yet he protects a small province where an unproven idea is allowed to breathe. Companies often declare that they want invention while funding only what already has a benchmark. Ten percent makes curiosity an operating expense.
He paired the ratio with another metaphor: people need maps. If someone is brave enough to draw one, others may follow. That combination, maps plus experiments, captures his method. Give a team a legible destination. Leave a corner of the map unfinished.
At Madhive, the destination was modern local television advertising at national scale. Fagel led brand and market storytelling as broadcasters and advertisers shifted toward streaming. He also looked for ways around the leaden conventions of business-to-business marketing, including a video series with science and technology journalist Cleo Abram. A category full of machinery still had to earn human attention.
Television's campaign for credibility
Fagel arrived at JamLoop in December 2025, calling the company a CTV-first performance platform rather than another demand-side platform with fresh paint. He was drawn to three things: technology built from the ground up, operating choices ranging from self-service to managed campaigns, and a team he described as having “no fluff, no ego.”
Within six months, he had helped articulate a new JamLoop brand around “performance CTV that sells.” The language is intentionally terrestrial. The proof should show up outside the dashboard: a test drive, a service call, a store visit. Fagel's long trip through retail and packaged goods gives the pitch its gravity. He has sat with the people who are asked to convert a marketing chart into an explanation for a general manager or chief financial officer.
The timing is awkward in a productive way. More advertisers are putting money into connected television, but trust has not risen at the same speed. JamLoop research released in July 2026 found that only 33 percent of surveyed marketers fully trusted most platform-reported performance claims. More than 70 percent said they would spend more if proof of business impact improved. The channel has already won attention and budget. Its harder campaign is credibility.
This is why Fagel has moved the conversation from attribution toward incrementality. Attribution asks what happened after an ad and assigns credit. Incrementality asks whether the ad caused something that would not otherwise have happened. The words are close enough to invite confusion; the budgets attached to them are not.
The same instinct appears in his view of artificial intelligence. He is interested in AI as a working tool for plans, creative, and optimization, not as decorative language. He expects briefs and storyboards that once consumed weeks to happen in minutes. Speed matters because it shortens the distance between an idea, a test, and a lesson. His 2026 warning was that many advertisers were unprepared for agentic AI, less because of the technology than because their processes were built for manual work.
“CTV won’t just be measurable. It’ll be predictable.”Jeff Fagel, on the next five years
A scoreboard with a sense of humor
There is a final, useful contradiction in Fagel's profile. He distrusts vanity metrics, yet he enjoys a leaderboard. JamLoop's biography notes that he is a certified Spinning instructor still chasing the top ten percent on Peloton. The joke lands because his professional life is also full of scoreboards. His objection is not to numbers. It is to numbers that flatter the person reporting them and fail the person paying for them.
That view extends beyond campaigns. In early 2026, after a period between roles, Fagel wrote candidly about how quickly a senior title's signal can vanish. Submitting applications through the usual portals produced no interviews. His answer was to manufacture clearer signal: a one-page briefing sheet describing the company's stage, the mandate, and the outcomes; work samples that reveal how a candidate thinks; a story that a recruiter or friend can forward without translation.
It is career advice in the shape of marketing advice. Activity is easy to list. Impact is harder to explain. The job is to connect the two so plainly that another person can carry the story.
Fagel predicts that within a few years nobody will bother saying “CTV campaign.” It will simply be television, measurable and increasingly predictable. If that happens, the acronym will disappear but his favorite question will survive. The screen was large. The targeting was clever. The dashboard was handsome. Fine. Was Tuesday any busier?