Art Director

Mile Marker acquires LIFT to combine media and performance content. Mile Marker adds LIFT's performance creative to tighten media-to-conversion workflows in a competitive US agency market. Mile Marker has acquired LIFT, bringing a performance content and creative team into its omnichannel media agency model to tighten the link between media execution and conversion-focused creative. The combined company will operate under the Mile Marker name, headquartered in New York City, with West Coast operations based in San Francisco. Mile Marker positions the deal as a way to reduce operational friction between media, creative, and data workflows, especially for teams running full-funnel programs across offline and digital channels. Table of contents. Jump to each section: Why Mile Marker bought LIFT now. The practical bet here is that performance outcomes are increasingly constrained by handoffs. When media planning, creative production, and measurement live in separate teams and tools, speed drops and learnings do not compound cleanly across channels. LIFT adds capability where many media-led agencies still rely on partners or fragmented internal pods: performance creative systems that can be iterated quickly, plus execution that spans traditional and digital formats, including direct mail. Mile Marker has also signaled it is not anchoring the integration on a single generative AI tool, but on adaptability as channels and customer expectations shift. What changes in the combined operating model. Operationally, the combined company is aiming for a tighter feedback loop between creative inputs and media performance signals. Mile Marker says LIFT's content and creative capabilities plug into its data and media infrastructure (including Waypoint and Relay), with the stated goal of making creative testing and optimization more systematic. For marketers, the important detail is not the org chart, it is the promised workflow: faster movement from insight to new creative variants, and less lag between campaign performance and content updates. If executed, that can matter most in categories where creative fatigue and offer testing cadence drive material swings in conversion rate. How this deal fits the competitive agency landscape. The category is crowded. US-based agency-led martech services span omnichannel media, performance creative, and content execution, with competition across independents and holding-company networks. Mile Marker now competes more directly with performance-heavy independents such as Wpromote, Tinuiti, Power Digital, and Jellyfish, many of which market an integrated "media + creative + measurement" story. The differentiation, if it holds, will depend on whether Mile Marker can actually unify identity, creative metadata, and media signals into a single learning loop, rather than simply offering more services under one contract. Macro shift: integrated workflows and measurable creative. The acquisition maps to broader trends in marketing workflow automation and the continuing convergence of marketing and sales. As more revenue teams demand faster attribution, tighter follow-up, and proof of incrementality, agencies are under pressure to operationalize measurement across the customer journey, not just report on it. It also reflects a shift in how creative is evaluated. "Creative that performs" increasingly means creative that is instrumented: tagged, tested, and tied to downstream outcomes like conversion, retention, and lifetime value, rather than assessed mainly on qualitative review or channel-level proxy metrics. What marketers should evaluate next. Marketers considering an agency partner with "integrated" claims can pressure-test the model with a few concrete checks: * Creative-to-media feedback loop: How quickly do performance insights change creative, and what is the real turnaround time for new variants? * Testing methodology: Whether the team can run multivariate and hypothesis-driven testing across channels, not only A/B tests inside one platform. * Offline-to-online continuity: If direct mail is part of the mix, how identity and measurement are handled so results do not stay siloed. * Data portability: Mile Marker emphasizes an open tech approach; marketers should confirm how data is accessed, exported, and governed. Mile Marker cites a 90% client retention rate, and LIFT cites average client relationships of more than four years. Those are useful directional signals, but the business value for buyers will come down to whether the combined team can reduce cycle time and improve measurability without adding coordination overhead. This article is created by humans with AI assistance, powered by ContentGrow. Ready to automate your content marketing? Book a discovery call today.

Indie agency Wpromote dishes on how it's testing new agentic SSP tools. Tuesday, April 7th, 2026 - 1:00 am Ad agencies have an overwhelming amount of buying tools to choose from. And they're increasingly relying on AI to focus just on what will help them meet their clients' needs. Between general-purpose and specialized DSPs, social platforms, CTV environments and direct publisher deals, agencies have to stitch campaigns together across a variety of fragmented systems. Given this fragmentation, ad tech vendors see an opportunity to create a unified ad-buying platform built on agentic AI. Kargo, an SSP that specializes in high-impact ad formats for mobile, desktop and CTV, is the latest platform to launch a new agentic buying interface. It announced last Tuesday the release of Project Kera, a chat-based planning and buying environment that feels similar to consumer AI tools, but that's tuned for media buyers. The solution is currently in closed beta, with Hershey, travel media network Navigator and independent ad agency Wpromote testing full campaigns. Kargo's play is to create a unified agentic buying interface that will "aggregate all biddable and non-biddable inventory into a single platform," its CEO, Harry Kargman, told AdExchanger. But Wpromote is approaching Project Kera less as a standalone tool and more as part of a broader effort to build its own AI-powered media operating system that sits on top of all the other various platforms. "Technology and agents are really about enabling marketers to be more strategic in decision-making and orchestration across systems," said Skyler McGill, head of programmatic and video at Wpromote. "It's less about just moving faster and more about creating a step change in how we operate." Streamlining creative iteration. Wpromote has been testing Project Kera for about four weeks. According to McGill, the early testing phase has centered on enhancing the agency's existing workflows. The biggest impact so far, he said, has been in speeding up the process of going from a human-created campaign brief to a programmatically activated campaign. To start using Project Kera, buyers log in to its chatbot interface and describe a goal, such as growing brand awareness among specific audiences. They can upload brand assets, including videos, images and copy, and tell the platform where they'd like these assets to appear across streaming TV, social feeds and premium news sites. The platform then generates a plan with suggested creative uses (such as recommending pause ads, large display units or social videos) and a channel mix with the budget split across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, connected TV and the open web. Once the buyer reviews the proposed plan and hits go, the platform starts pushing ads live through Kargo's SSP integrations. "What's really exciting is the ability to operationalize a campaign brief and build creativity at scale, then optimize in real time," McGill said. "That's a big shift from the manual processes we've had." That shift has already allowed Wpromote to test and iterate on campaigns at a much faster pace and at greater scale than before, more akin to a social platform's testing workflow, McGill added. The agency has so far used Project Kera to test different high-impact CTV formats, such as pause ads and immersive overlays, as well as bespoke display units. Concrete performance results are still a few steps away. McGill said it's too soon to see measurable outcomes from these test campaigns. But Wpromote anticipates that Project Kera could drive meaningful lift once the agency's workflows and prompts are more fully refined. Building the OS, not buying it. While Kargo envisions a unified buying environment, agencies like Wpromote are more likely to treat Project Kera as one piece in their arsenal of AI tools. For instance, Wpromote built an internal AI tool, Polaris IQ, which handles bid management, budget allocation, media planning and measurement. The agency's goal is to create its own centralized decisioning layer that sits above DSPs, SSPs and other buying tools. That approach also explains how Wpromote is testing the market. Rather than betting on one platform, it's piloting multiple agentic partners, McGill said, including Kargo and PubMatic on the SSP side, while watching DSP-led efforts from companies like Yahoo and Amazon. So far, much of Wpromote's experimentation has leaned toward SSP-provided solutions.Those platforms have moved faster to bundle inventory, creative formats and activation into unified environments, said McGill, making them a more practical entry point for agentic workflows. DSPs are catching up, he added, but for now, SSPs offer a clearer testing ground. Long term, McGill expects a more interoperable model. "It really comes down to where you can drive the best outcomes and reach the right audiences," he said. "You'll have a lot of optionality, and the systems will need to connect." From beta to buy-in. Still, speed and automation aren't enough to secure a place in the stack. Wpromote is also evaluating Project Kera against familiar agency criteria: performance, efficiency and control. On the performance side, the agency is looking for measurable lift across both brand and performance metrics, McGill said, whether in the form of improved reach and attention or increases in conversions and return on investment. Operational gains matter, too, he said. Faster campaign setup, reduced manual work and better real-time insights could all justify deeper adoption. But ensuring strong testing guardrails is just as critical as tracking performance gains, McGill said. As agentic systems take on more responsibility, agencies are wary of too much automation and black-box decision-making. Data quality and transparency remain top concerns, especially when campaigns are being shaped through prompts rather than traditional workflows. "We're being really mindful of overreliance on automation," McGill said. "You still need the right data inputs, governance and QA processes in place to understand what's actually happening." That caution reflects a broader industry reality. Agentic platforms promise to unify planning and execution, but agencies aren't ready to hand over control. Instead, they're building systems that let them decide when and how to plug those tools in. Tagged in:

Wpromote's acquisition of Giant Spoon promises to bring bold creativity and proven performance into one frictionless client experience.