Get the Upper Hand.
Most digital agencies sell you a senior team and staff the work to juniors. We don't. The people you meet are the people doing the work. Twenty years and $1B+ in paid media across 56 countries. Up to $50M a year under management. Every dollar tied to an outcome you can measure.
01 · The Practice
Our vision
A digital advertising and marketing agency built for the AI era. We grow brands and organizations across paid media, search, and AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, with strategy and SEO tied to measurable results.
Our Services
Index · Eight Disciplines
Search is moving from ten blue links to answers written by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude. We were doing Generative Engine Optimization before it had a name, shaping how brands show up inside LLM answers. The on-site and off-site SEO fundamentals still apply, and we run those too.
Twenty years across almost every major vertical and 56 countries. Strategy here means a media plan tied to your real business math: contribution margin, MER, payback, retention.
Ads, landing pages, blogs, and social content that sound like your brand and get people to act. Creative is a performance lever. We write and direct it with the campaign math in view.
Hundreds of lead-gen programs across B2C, B2B, advocacy, and trade associations. Volume is the easy part. Cost per qualified lead is the real work. So is what happens after the form fill. That's where we focus.
Attribution that holds up, dashboards people actually read, and analysis that ends with a recommendation. We'll show you what's working, what isn't, and where the next dollar should go, in plain language.
Issue campaigns, coalition work, and reputation defense for companies, trade associations, and advocacy groups. We target policymakers and their staff by committee, agency, and district, put paid weight behind earned coverage, and time the buy to hearings, markups, and fly-ins. Years of running the digital practice inside a Washington public affairs firm taught us what that audience responds to.
Custom tools, reporting automation, content and translation pipelines, and private LLM setups for marketing and communications teams. The proof is on this site: a search tool covering 950,000 third-party audiences, a mockup generator that renders 39 placements, a full reference library, and the homepage, service pages, and tools in 12 languages. The person who plans your media builds the tool, usually in days.
Client & Industry Experience
By Industry · SelectedMore than two decades of work across the industries below. A selected view.
B2B & Associations
- American Beverage Association
- American Gas Association
- Diligent
- IDme
- Specialty Food Association
- Tetra Pak
Beauty
- Amorepacific
- Bumble and bumble
- Dr. Jart+
- L'Oréal
- Saturday Skin
- SkinMedica
Finance & Fintech
- Blackstone
- JPMorgan Chase
- Nasdaq
- PayPal
- Visa
Food & Beverage
- Birds Eye
- Cape Cod Potato Chips
- Dream Non-Dairy
- Duncan Hines
- Vlasic
- Voss Water
Health & Pharma
- American Diabetes Association
- Biogen
- Compass Health Center
- Johnson & Johnson
- Natera
- Pfizer
- PhRMA
- VSP
Luxury & Hospitality
- Accutron
- EDITION Hotels
- Frette
- Moxy Hotels
- Nobu Hotels
- The Peninsula Hotels
- PS (The Private Suite)
- Watches of Switzerland
Media & Tech
- CBS
- DirecTV
- eBay
- Meta
- OpenAI
Real Estate
- Lightstone Group
- Moinian Group
- TF Cornerstone
- Two Trees Management
Retail
- Crayola
- Dean & DeLuca
- Samsonite
- ShurTech (Duck Tape)
- Simon Malls
- Sonix
Spirits
- Basil Hayden
- Canadian Club
- Jägermeister
- Jim Beam
- Knob Creek
- Maker's Mark
- Red Stag by Jim Beam
Platforms + Tech Stack
Platforms · ChannelsA selection from a longer roster. Wherever your audience actually is, we can plan it, buy it, and measure it.
The graphic lists example platforms in each category. Data management platforms include LiveRamp, SEMCasting, Experian, and Epsilon. Supply side platforms include Magnite, PubMatic, OpenX, and Outbrain. Demand side platforms include StackAdapt, GroundTruth, Nexxen, The Trade Desk, Simpli.fi, AdRoll, IQM, Amazon Ads, Basis Technologies, and Sharethrough. Search advertising covers Google Ads, Microsoft Bing Ads, and Apple Search Ads. Out-of-home and rideshare media include OUTFRONT Media, Clear Channel Outdoor, Uber, Octopus Interactive, and Lyft. Audio covers Spotify, SiriusXM, and Pandora. Verification partners include DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Boltive. Website placements range across The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, CNN, Fox News, the Boston Globe, The New York Times, Yahoo Finance, Nasdaq, TechCrunch, People, and Fandom. App inventory includes Words With Friends, CBS Sports, the Associated Press, The Weather Channel, Meetup, TuneIn, Flipboard, and popular puzzle and casual games. Connected TV spans Roku, Sling, Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, Paramount Plus, Disney Plus, Discovery Plus, Spectrum, ESPN, fuboTV, DIRECTV, Samba TV, VIZIO, and the major broadcast and cable networks. Social advertising covers Facebook, Instagram, X, Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok, Reddit, YouTube, Pinterest, and Twitch.
Blog: The Signal
RecentNotes on media, search, and measurement, written by the founder.
October 16, 2026
ChatGPT Is an Auction the Midterms Can't Enter. Test It With a Holdout.
OpenAI banned political ads this cycle, so ChatGPT's auction sits outside the midterm surge. Its new measurement partners make a real holdout test possible.
Read the note
September 28, 2026
A Free Reference Library for Digital Advertising, and Five Other Things We Give Away
501 defined terms, 22 platform profiles, sourced benchmarks, current ad specs, calculators and templates. Free, ad-free, no gate, CC BY licensed.
Read the note
September 18, 2026
One Image In, 39 Placements Out. A Free Ad Mockup Tool Built to Current Specs.
One square and four lines of copy become 39 ad mockups across every major channel, rendered to current specs and exported for a deck. Free, in the browser.
Read the noteComplimentary Resources
Open to everyoneTools and references we built for our own work and publish for the trade. No sign-up, no gate.
Reference library
Reference
501 terms, 22 platform profiles, channel benchmarks with sources, ad specs, calculators and CSV templates. Ad-free, CC BY 4.0.
ToolAudience Finder
Search 950,000 third-party audiences from 287 data providers, plus the native segments inside Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok and Amazon.
ToolAd Mockup Generator
One square image and four lines of copy become 39 placements across every major channel, rendered to current specs.
RegisterAI Regulations Register
Worldwide AI laws and regulations, cited and kept current.
RegisterCrypto Regulations Register
Crypto and digital asset rules by country, in one register.
RegisterDigital Privacy Regulations Register
Data privacy laws of all 197 jurisdictions, in one place.
The Founder
Stephen Bowles
Before Echelon, I spent more than twenty years in New York and Washington, DC, buying media for brands that could not afford to guess and turning that spend into measurable growth. I've managed more than a billion dollars in spend across 56 countries, ran performance teams inside large agencies, and grew a digital practice from nothing into eight figures of annual client investment. I was optimizing for AI answer engines before the industry had a name for it, and I still write the strategy myself.
I started Echelon because of a pattern I kept seeing from the inside. Agencies win the work with senior people in the room, then quietly hand the execution to whoever costs the least. We close that gap. The person you meet here is the person doing the work, and every channel and every dollar stays tied to a number that actually moves your business: revenue, margin, retention, risk. I would rather be judged on those than on impressions, and I suspect you feel the same.
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