marketing
(22)
Empathy Lab wants marketing to think
EPAM’s agency pairs creative teams with software engineers to connect marketing, commerce and loyalty. Its most revealing work starts with the small things customers struggle to do.
Good marketing starts with a better question.
Marketing Against the Grain turns HubSpot’s working marketers into a public classroom. Its most useful lessons begin where the tidy success story falls apart.
Aris finds the business hiding in the paperwork
A vegan bakery and a telemedicine startup have more in common than you might think. Rome’s Aris works on the financing, systems, and decisions that turn very different ambitions into workable businesses.
ACC wants its agencies to stop competing with each other
Michael Nyman built Acceleration Community of Companies around a deceptively difficult idea: give specialists a reason to help one another. A hotel takeover, a dancing vending machine, and a growing entertainment business show what that looks like in practice.
Gra Fika Graphics and the case for a brand that travels
A logo, a brochure, a website: Gra Fika Graphics puts them on the same service menu. The interesting part is what happens between them.
( iii ) DESIGN put its town in the picture
A snack-bar startup, a college bond website, a procession of downtown banners. For more than 15 years, this San Luis Obispo studio gave local ideas a public face.
COUPAR sells the help behind the beautiful room
A design firm can have exquisite taste and a very ordinary staffing problem. COUPAR built a business around the drawings, deliveries, and publicity that turn creative ambition into finished work.
789 makes the complicated worth a second look
Water districts, recycling companies, and a Microsoft campus have something in common: they need people to understand them. Covina’s 789, Inc. turns that assignment into names, campaigns, websites, and places.
Shocase wanted the people behind the ads to get the credit
The marketing network put portfolios, collaborators and industry insiders in one place. Its 2015 launch asked a useful question: why should the brand be more famous than the people who built it?
The Portland Agency Named After a Fish That Swims Upstream on Purpose
For nearly three decades, Sockeye has sold its clients on a strange idea: that the safest thing a brand can do is refuse to be boring. Here is how a 57-person shop in Oregon turned a point of view into a business.
The Birmingham Shop That Bags National Brands Without Leaving Alabama
For 30 years, a shop 800 miles from Madison Avenue has been quietly landing the kind of clients that usually skip the South. Here's how Big built it - and what a mid-market agency can steal from the playbook.
Ad Age Keeps Score on the People Who Sell You Everything
For nearly a century a Chicago-born trade paper has counted the ad industry's biggest spenders and sharpest talent. Its data desk is the reason Madison Avenue reads it before breakfast.
Share One
Share One is a Round Rock, Texas company that turns customers into storytellers by producing verified video testimonials. Founded in 2020 by Dan Lievens, it pairs professional human interviewers and editors with a tracking platform to capture, verify, and distribute authentic customer stories, positioning genuine human narratives as a trust signal in a market flooded with AI-generated content.
Playbook
Playbook is a San Francisco-based software company building a visual, AI-powered cloud storage and digital asset management platform for creative professionals. Founded in 2019 by Jessica Ko, it blends a Pinterest-style gallery with Dropbox-style storage, adding automatic AI tagging, GPT-powered search, real-time review, and workflow automation so designers and marketing teams can find, organize, and share images and video without digging through folders. Backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Founders Fund, Playbook has grown to millions of registered users managing hundreds of millions of assets.
Rev Intelligence
Rev Intelligence (formerly LeadCrunch, also known as Rev / GetRev) is a San Diego-based AI sales intelligence platform that helps B2B teams find companies most likely to buy. Its signature approach, exegraphics, models how companies actually operate - their execution, culture, and momentum - instead of relying on firmographics alone.
Nutshell
Nutshell is an all-in-one CRM and growth platform built for B2B small and mid-sized businesses that are tired of overpaying for software they barely use. Founded in 2009 in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Nutshell combines sales pipeline management, email marketing, and customer engagement tools into a single subscription — with free live support on every plan. Acquired by digital marketing agency WebFX in 2022, Nutshell now serves over 5,000 companies across 50 countries, competing against industry giants like Salesforce and HubSpot by doing less, but doing it better.
Sage CRM
Sage CRM is a customer relationship management platform built by Sage Group plc, designed to help small and mid-sized businesses manage sales pipelines, marketing campaigns, and customer service from a single hub. Deeply integrated with Sage's accounting suite, it lets growing companies turn contact records into revenue without the complexity - or cost - of enterprise alternatives like Salesforce.
Flam
Flam is an AI-native mixed reality publishing platform that turns ordinary brand touchpoints - TV spots, magazine pages, posters, packaging, WhatsApp messages - into instant, app-less 3D experiences via a QR scan or link. Used by 100+ global brands including Google, Samsung, Emirates and Mahindra.
MarketerHire
MarketerHire is a San Francisco-based talent marketplace that connects companies with pre-vetted, on-demand marketing experts - from fractional CMOs to paid-media specialists - typically matched within 48 hours via its proprietary MarketerMatch algorithm.
Windfall
Windfall is a San Francisco-based people intelligence and AI company that estimates the net worth, career signals, and giving capacity of every U.S. household, then plugs that data into the workflows that go-to-market and fundraising teams already use. Founded in 2016 by Arup Banerjee, Cory Tucker, and Dan Stevens, it serves more than 1,500 organizations - from Make-A-Wish to the University of Michigan - and raised a $65M Series B from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital in 2025.
Webflow
Webflow is a San Francisco-based SaaS platform that lets designers, marketers, and developers build production-ready websites without writing code - or with it, if they want. Founded in 2013 after three failed attempts and a near-bankruptcy, the company grew into a $4 billion business serving over 300,000 teams including The New York Times, TED, Dropbox, Dell, Discord, and Monday.com. Its visual editor outputs clean HTML, CSS, and JavaScript automatically, while its built-in CMS, hosting, ecommerce, and now AI-powered tools make it a full-stack web platform. In 2025 and 2026, Webflow pushed deeper into enterprise with a next-gen CMS, AI prompt-to-production site building, answer engine optimization (AEO), and the acquisitions of animation library GSAP and AI content platform Vidoso.ai.
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is the flagship product of Zoho Corporation, a bootstrapped Indian SaaS powerhouse founded in 1996 that has never taken external funding yet grown to over $1.4 billion in annual revenue and 1 million+ paying customers. Zoho CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management platform used by 250,000+ businesses in 180+ countries, offering AI-powered sales automation, marketing automation, and omnichannel communication—all at a fraction of competitor pricing. Zoho Corporation's wider suite of 55+ integrated business applications makes it one of the most comprehensive software vendors in the world, competing simultaneously with Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, and SAP while championing privacy, rural employment, and long-term independence over short-term shareholder returns.