AI-Powered Growth

May 6, 2026

Captain's log

“If we were starting Level Agency today, with all the tools and AI that exist right now, how would it be different?”

I ask myself that question almost every day.

It's also the most important question marketers can be asking themselves right now.

A few weeks ago, Reed Hastings told a story about factories in 1905. When the electric motor was invented, factories took their existing setup and just retrofitted it. Replaced the steam engine, kept everything else the same. 

Productivity went nowhere. It took until 1925, twenty years, before companies redesigned the factory floor around what electricity could actually do. That's when productivity jumped 30 to 50 percent.

We are in that exact moment right now. You can't keep forcing the new engine into the horse. You have to build the car.

What that looks like in practice is a shift from being subject matter experts to being subject matter editors. The operational work goes to AI. The human role becomes setting the goals, the guardrails, and the approvals. Human leads. AI executes.

That conversation is happening everywhere right now, and for good reason. I'm all in on where this is going. I'm also a little terrified. Those are both good things.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program.

Patrick Patterson

CEO at Level Agency

Upcoming Virtual Insider Session: Level x Google

What's interesting this week

Level wins a Silver Stevie at the 2026 American Business Awards
Level took home a Silver Stevie in the Achievement in AI-Powered Marketing Strategy category. The win is for a propensity model we built for Aviation Institute of Maintenance using Level.Signal, feeding predicted application likelihood into Google's Value-Based Bidding. The results? Application rate climbed, total applications grew, and cost per application dropped.

Key takeaway: Awards are not the work, but they are an honest read on whether the work holds up against everyone else's. Proud of this team.
Read more

TikTok plugs Out of Phone into 1.1 million digital out-of-home screens
TikTok announced a partnership with Vistar Media that extends Out of Phone campaigns to more than a million digital out-of-home placements, including ad space in Times Square. Social content keeps escaping the app, and the line between social, OOH, and CTV is harder to see every quarter. 

Key takeaway: If you are still treating social and OOH as separate line items on separate plans, the brands cross-pollinating between them are eating your reach.
Read more

Why generalist DSPs are leaking budget in audio
The Drum on a problem most performance teams are not measuring. Audio has no visual fallback and no scroll-back, so context, listening environment, and mood matter more than impression cost. Most DSPs were built for display and bid optimization, and that legacy shows up as wasted spend in screenless channels. 

Key takeaway: If Spotify, podcast, or programmatic audio is in your media mix, the ROI question is probably an adtech question, not a creative one.
Read more

The intent data playbook is breaking down
MarTech with a clear-eyed take on why "buy the in-market 5%" is leaving B2B teams stranded. By the time a buyer signals intent, they already have a shortlist of about five vendors. If you are not in that consideration set before the signal fires, the data is useless to you. 

Key takeaway: Intent data is a sales activation tool, not a marketing strategy. The other 95% is where the brand work earns the right to be on the shortlist later.
Read more

Adweek's 2026 Creative 100 lands ahead of Cannes Lions
Adweek's twelfth annual Creative 100 dropped this week. The framing in the intro caught me: "the process of creativity has never been faster, its tools never more impressive, and improving seemingly every week. And while it's all been dazzling, more than anything else it has brought into sharp relief the value of human ingenuity." 

Key takeaway: Same argument I am making in the log above. Said better. Worth a read before Cannes Lions in June.
Read more

Deep dive: AI

Unifying the search experience for real growth in 2026

Brad Stephenson published a piece on Search Engine Land this morning that I want everyone on a marketing team to read. The headline number: in February 2024, Gartner predicted traditional search volume would drop 25% by 2026. It didn't.

Google search revenue accelerated to 17% year-over-year growth and crossed $63 billion in Q4 2025 alone. The pie got bigger. Clicks per search fell. The slices got redistributed. And most search teams are still optimizing for the old pie.

Here's the part of the piece that should change how you staff your search team. A Search Engine Land analysis of 25 million organic impressions across 42 clients found organic CTR drops 61% when an AI Overview appears. Paid CTR drops 68%. Cue the panic.

Except brands cited inside AI Overviews see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Being inside the AI Overview does not cannibalize your traffic. It amplifies it. The AI Overview is functioning like a trust signal, a stamp of "this brand is worth clicking."

Brad's argument is that organic, paid, and AI search cannot keep living in three separate spreadsheets. The piece walks through a three-lens diagnostic for finding the gaps, and includes a Level case study where unifying paid and organic for a B2B SaaS client cut acquisition costs 18% and lifted SEO leads 22%. 

Read more

Deep dive: Growth

What LeadsCon 2026 got us thinking about

Our team was on the floor at LeadsCon last month and put together a recap that is worth your time, even if you weren't in Vegas. 

Three things to sit with.

One. Lead fraud is harder to spot because the tools used to generate fake leads got better. AI can now produce behavioral patterns that look like real user activity. The FCC's one-to-one consent rules changed the volume math for a lot of publishers, and the downstream effect is that lead quality is being renegotiated industry-wide. 

Two. Volume as a north star is a metric from a different era. It made sense when generating leads was hard. AI made it easy. Sales capacity didn't scale to match. Qualification didn't scale to match. So a lot of teams are now reporting up on numbers the sales team privately does not trust. The fix is feeding a quality signal back into your bidding so the platform stops optimizing for cheap and starts optimizing for valuable. 

Three. The line that stuck with me from one of the panels: "We're optimizing faster than we understand what we're optimizing for." That is the question to bring back to your team this week. Personalizing first contact based on a journey someone hasn't admitted they're on is technically possible right now. Whether it reads as useful or reads as surveillance is a question nobody has data on yet. The honest answer is that conversion rate and buyer experience may quietly start diverging, and the divergence will not show up in the dashboards until later.

Read more

AI tool of the week

NanoGPT

NanoGPT is a pay-per-prompt aggregator that gives you access to more than 200 AI models, including GPT, Claude, Gemini, Midjourney, Flux, and Sora, through a single interface. No subscription. No registration to start. You buy credits and spend them on whatever model fits the job.

Where it earns its place in a creative workflow is the testing phase. When you are prompting for a campaign concept and you do not yet know whether GPT, Claude, or Gemini will give you the sharpest version, you can run the same prompt through all three for the price of three prompts. Same for image and short-form video. The cost of model comparison drops from another monthly subscription to a few cents per test.

The bigger point: the right model for a given creative task changes every few weeks. NanoGPT is a hedge against locking your team into one provider's strengths and weaknesses.

What does ChatGPT actually say about you?

When a potential buyer asks an AI agent for a Top 5 list in your category, do you make the cut? More importantly: Why or why not?

Don't leave your brand’s reputation to an algorithm you haven't audited. Our scorecard pulls back the curtain on how AI platforms frame your brand sentiment and which sources they use to vet your authority.

Inside your custom report:

• Sentiment analysis: Is the AI's summary of your brand accurate or outdated?
• Citation audit: Discover which third-party sites are feeding the AI your info.
• AEO roadmap: Immediate steps to improve your "AI discoverability."

If this email was forwarded to you, sign up here to get future issues.