Kepler makes
the connections.

DoorDash had a problem that looked like a shortage of leads. Its corporate food-delivery program, DoorDash for Work, needed better sign-ups. Marketing channels were fragmented. The conversion rate disappointed. Kepler’s response was to reorganize the campaign, broaden the audience, and loosen its dependence on strict keyword matches. The reported outcome was encouraging: marketing leads rose 125%, and closed deals rose 94%.

Then comes the third number. Media spend rose 188%. Put differently, spending became 2.88 times its earlier level while closed deals became 1.94 times their earlier level. Assuming comparable periods and definitions, media spend per closed deal rose roughly 48%. That calculation does not settle whether the expansion was profitable. It does establish a useful habit: keep the denominator.

This makes a surprisingly good introduction to Kepler. The interesting question about a marketing agency is what it changes between buying attention and earning a customer. A dashboard can display those two events. Connecting them requires decisions about audiences, creative, budgets, and the information passed between teams.

01 The people between the platforms

Kepler began in 2012 with six founders who had met at MediaMath. Their experience suggested that brands needed help using the technology reshaping marketing. Software was becoming more capable. Operating it across an entire business was another matter. The opportunity lay in the gap between technical possibility and everyday execution.

Today, Kepler works across media and customer relationship marketing, commerce, consulting, analytics, influencer marketing, and creative. Public client work includes Hasbro, FILA, DoorDash, and Formula 1 Las Vegas Grand Prix. Its market is largely the organization with enough channels, customer information, and internal handoffs to make coordination a serious job.

In 2018, kyu acquired a majority stake, placing Kepler alongside firms such as IDEO and Sid Lee. The fit was straightforward: a collective rich in design and strategy gained an agency that could activate campaigns. Rick Greenberg, Kepler’s founding CEO, described its role as “the activation engine for smarter marketing.”

“The activation engine for smarter marketing.”

Rick Greenberg / founding CEO / 2018

The machinery is Kip, the Kepler Intelligence Platform. It connects audience insights, planning, campaign deployment, optimization, and reporting. Kepler also installs and integrates clients’ marketing technology. The distinction matters: it can work on the systems feeding the campaign as well as the ads leaving it. The proposition is fewer disconnected decisions.

02 A toy needs the right shelf

Hasbro’s holiday challenge was more specific than finding an audience. Shoppers were already visiting Amazon and Walmart. On Amazon, the company needed Sponsored Brands video to compete for attention. Kepler produced dozens of videos tailored to that environment, giving the toys movement and sound within a format shoppers would actually encounter.

Kepler reports a 28.6% conversion-rate increase and a 261.5% engagement-rate increase within two weeks, compared with the brands’ previous averages on the same platform. Hasbro then expanded into a global campaign at twice the magnitude, according to the case study. That result supplied a reason to expand the approach; it was evidence from the placement itself.

The portable lesson is wonderfully unglamorous: decide where the work must function before producing it. Kepler Creative offers asset creation, catalog video, dynamic creative optimization, and improved product listings. AI assists production; audience and performance information guide revisions. The ambition is a shorter distance between learning something and changing the next asset.

03 An empty seat has a deadline

For the Las Vegas Grand Prix, time was part of the inventory. Three months before race day, ticket sales still had a gap. Kepler audited digital properties, set daily onboarding milestones, and launched campaigns in under two weeks. Messaging varied by ticket class. The company says its work helped sell more than 6,000 tickets in seven weeks.

Copy the sequence: inspect the existing setup, assign launch milestones, and match the message to the thing being sold. Its usefulness depends on execution capacity. A team unable to approve assets, share customer information, or measure purchases will struggle to reproduce it. Campaign speed has organizational prerequisites.

That also helps explain where Kepler fits among alternatives. A specialist agency may handle one channel; an internal team may coordinate several vendors. Kepler sells the ability to run those connections as a service, backed by its own software. The buyer still has to decide how much responsibility to retain. Its Amazon transition offering includes three months of managed service, reporting, optimization, and training before an in-house team takes more control. This is a practical way to purchase expertise while building it internally. For a company with a simple campaign and little operational complexity, the same breadth could be unnecessary. The value depends on how expensive the coordination problem already is, and whether the proposed engagement actually reduces it.

04 Now the shopper asks a machine

Kip AIR extends the coordination problem to AI discovery. It evaluates brand recognition, relevance, and ranking in generative AI environments, then turns the findings into recommended changes. These are distinct questions: does the system identify the brand, associate it with relevant qualities, and recommend it against alternatives? An index is a diagnostic starting point, not evidence of a sale.

The newer work also includes paid placements. In May 2026, Kepler announced it was Pacvue’s first agency partner for an ads-in-ChatGPT pilot involving more than ten brands. In June, Digiday named it Most Innovative Media Agency. Both developments show where the company is directing attention as discovery moves into new interfaces.

The human work remains substantial. Kepler offers internal training, an eight-week externship, and help for clients bringing media operations in-house. Its Amazon services range from managed campaigns to supported self-service. Commercially, the offering combines services, technical implementation, and campaign operations; the appropriate scope depends on what a client can already do.

A prospective customer should start with one business outcome and the data needed to judge it. Ask how the creative will change, who can move the budget, and what counts as success after fees and media spending. Kepler’s appeal is the possibility of answering those questions together. The DoorDash numbers explain why asking all of them matters.