The Agency That Keeps Buying New Ingredients

In the beginning, there was a car pointed south toward Columbus and a Macintosh waiting at the other end. It was 1989. Joe Kubic and Mark Nuss, two college friends starting an advertising agency in Cleveland, had decided that the unfamiliar machine mattered enough to go and get it. This is how Adcom now tells the story, and it is almost suspiciously tidy: founders acquire new tool; company spends the next 36 years acquiring new tools.

But tidy stories sometimes reveal a real habit. Adcom added an early digital business called Optiem in the late 1990s, opened a Phoenix office, launched the production company Uppercut Motion & Sound in 2005, and absorbed Cleveland agencies including Fitzsimmons, Landau, Stein & Company and Arras Keathley. In March 2025 it bought Spark Your Brand, a specialist in branding and the unglamorous final yards of commerce - wholesale, retail displays, ecommerce taxonomy and the work that gets a box onto a shelf or into a cart.

The acquisition prices were not disclosed. Neither is Adcom's rate card. This is a private, proposal-driven services business, not software with three cheerful pricing tiers. The more revealing cost is organizational: every new discipline has to work with the ones already in the room.

The full-service agency, with the vague part removed

“Full service” is one of advertising's foggier phrases. At Adcom it has a fairly literal meaning. The company maps customer journeys, studies competitors, builds brands, writes campaigns, buys search and social media, recruits influencers, shoots video, designs packaging, develops ecommerce programs and tracks what converted. Its focus industries are transportation and mobility, healthcare, home and construction, consumer products, financial services and nonprofits.

The customers make the range concrete: Cleveland Clinic and Medical Mutual on one side; RIDGID, Viega and Western Star on another; Five Star notebooks, Great Lakes Brewing Company, GetGo, TravelCenters of America and VeloSano elsewhere. These are organizations with long journeys between attention and purchase. A hospital visit, truck order or plumbing-system specification cannot be explained by the last banner ad someone clicked.

Adcom's position in the market sits between two familiar alternatives. A client can hire a broad national network, gaining scale and layers. Or it can assemble specialist shops, gaining depth and a calendar full of coordination calls. Adcom's wager is that an independent agency in the Midwest can hold the specialists under one roof and make their work accountable to the same business result.

“Plans change. Goals don't.”Optiem Analytics

The dashboard is not the product

Optiem Analytics is the sharpest version of that wager. The platform pulls fragmented marketing sources into one interface, automates ingestion, follows performance from brand health to conversion and keeps the client's data visible. Yet Adcom is careful to place people and process beside technology. A dashboard that announces a red arrow is merely a more expensive way to feel anxious. A strategist has to explain why it moved and what should happen Monday morning.

This also explains what failed first in several client stories: the neat, linear model. RIDGID had long marketed product features and benefits. That language served established tradespeople, but an aging base of plumbers meant the brand needed younger entrants to care. Adcom changed the center of gravity from specification to identity. The RIDGID Experience combined digital media, social, trade shows and B2B creators around belonging to the trade. The product still mattered; it was no longer asked to do all the emotional labor.

For Western Star, the change was even hairier. Adcom created Star Nation, an owner-and-driver community with an experiential event and a mascot called STARSQUATCH. User-made content and trade-show activation turned pride into distribution. Adcom reports millions of cross-channel impressions and engagements, thousands of leads and increased market share. The ridiculous name did serious work.

The Five Star back-to-school assignment is the cleaner performance case. Most annual sales arrive inside five weeks. In 2024 the budget stayed flat while the parent audience expanded 63 percent and the student audience 37 percent. Adcom used retailer sales data and regression analysis to identify which media actions correlated with sales. Impressions rose 108 percent, engagements 114 percent, and the brand recorded positive unit growth and improved retailer sell-through. Same wallet, larger room.

A culture made of verbs

Agencies like nouns: the lab, the studio, the methodology. Adcom chose a verb, “stir,” to describe its culture. The office has a Maker's Lab, theater, game room and a gathering space called STIR that can hold more than 100 employees. There are lunch-and-learns, an onboarding buddy system and the usual signs that adults have tried to make an office sociable: chili, chess and a beer tap.

The more persuasive evidence is the four-week Future Marketers program. Students are paid $1,200, attend in person, learn across messaging, social, search, analytics and strategy, then present real client work. Sixteen students joined the 2025 edition. Engage! Cleveland named it the mid-size Program of the Year. For an agency whose history depends on noticing the next discipline early, a talent program is not charity around the edges. It is research with name tags.

What to borrow - and what to distrust

The portable lesson is not “acquire four agencies.” Integration works here because Adcom appears to buy adjacent competence: Arras Keathley expanded an established agency; Spark supplied merchandising depth in tools and building products, already one of Adcom's stronger categories. Spark kept its name and Randy Golenberg kept leading it. The target was useful knowledge, not a press-release headcount.

• Start with the business event. Define the sale, lead, visit or preference shift before choosing a channel metric.
• Connect the specialists. Brand, media, commerce and analytics should share a brief and a measurement plan.
• Use data to narrow judgment, not replace it. Regression can improve a media mix; it cannot invent Star Nation.
• Add capability where customers already have friction. Spark made sense because Adcom's building-products clients also need help at retail and ecommerce.

Adcom competes with Cleveland and Midwest full-service firms such as Falls & Co., Marcus Thomas, Fahlgren Mortine and thunder::tech, as well as the specialist shops a buyer could bundle together. Its case is not that one roof automatically makes better work. It is that the handoff between roofs is where learning gets lost.

Thirty-six years after the Macintosh trip, the agency is still putting unfamiliar things in the car. Some become companies, some become departments, some become dashboards and one became STARSQUATCH. The consistent move is to treat the finish line as information. Then stir again.

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