The list only counts one thing: verified revenue, 2022 through 2025. No pitch deck. No narratives to weave. Either the number moved or it didn't.
The pattern I see, looking back at what actually produced that number, is that almost none of it happened in a single year. It happened in the fifth year of a relationship, when a client handed us a bigger piece of the roadmap than they had the year before, because the first four years worked.
We have clients who have been with us for more than twenty years, back when “digital marketing” was little more than a banner ad and a prayer. Growth like this isn't something a company manufactures on its own. It's something that clients decide, year after year, is worth deepening.
Last month it was our Great Place To Work Certification. This month it's Inc. 5000. Different lists with the same underpinning: when relationships last, so do the things you build together.
Don’t get me wrong, the ranking is nice. But the years of relationships behind it are the part I'm the most proud of.
Patrick Patterson
CEO at Level Agency
What's interesting this week
Level ranked No. 87 in advertising, marketing, and PR on the 2026 Inc. 5000 That makes two straight years on the list. The growth came in a hard market. Budgets are flat, growth targets are up, AI reshaped the buying journey, and platforms now demand data infrastructure most brands have never built. Level's answer is one connected growth system spanning intelligence, creative, experience, activation, and measurement.
Key takeaway: The system is the mechanism behind the rank. The announcement covers how the Becker Media, WebMechanix, and BAM Strategy acquisitions and the Level Intelligence Suite fit into it.
Meta built a custom audience that can only exclude people Exclusion-only custom audiences remove people from an ad set and cannot be used to include anyone. Meta names two use cases: people who opted out of a product, and people a business has a legal or regulatory obligation not to target. Meta ads educator Jon Loomer adds a third, screening out your own employees.
Key takeaway: Treat this as a standing guardrail on the account, not a campaign setting. The list cannot be converted back once created, so build it with legal in the room if you operate in a regulated vertical.
Google Analytics will benchmark your campaigns against similar businesses Josh Moser, Senior Director of Product Management at Google, announced that Ask Advisor will compare campaign performance against anonymized averages from peer businesses. Existing Analytics benchmarking reports the median plus the 25th and 75th percentiles for your industry category. Google did not say when the Ask Advisor version arrives or whether it uses that same peer group.
Key takeaway: A benchmark is only worth reading if the peer group looks like your business. Audit the industry category on your property now, before the comparison starts landing in front of stakeholders.
The 59-Point Gap Featuring Brad Stephenson, SVP of Marketing at Level, Stacy Heubeck, AVP of SEO at Level, and Stephanie Gallo, Corporate Director of Marketing at Pima Medical Institute
Ahead of our team’s trip to the Career Schools Private Education Network (CSPEN) 12th Annual Conference in Austin, Brad Stephenson, our SVP of Marketing, and Stacy Heubeck, our AVP of SEO, sat down with Stephanie Gallo, Corporate Director of Marketing at Pima Medical Institute. Stephanie has spent her career building brands in healthcare and higher ed, including the launch of Chamberlain University.
The number that stands out in the discussion is the gap between branded and non-branded AI search results. Schools show up fine when a student searches their name directly. Then they disappear the moment the question gets specific: a comparison, a financial aid inquiry, how long a program actually takes. Level's own research puts that gap at 59 points between branded and non-branded visibility in AI tools.
Stephanie recommends getting compliance, academics, and marketing to agree on one thing: publish the specific, unglamorous details nobody wanted on the site before. This includes tuition, program length, and certification eligibility. Pima went from roughly 250 pages cited in AI overviews to 1,500 in a year due in large part to a willingness to answer prospective student questions as transparently as possible on their website.
A key takeaway from the discussion: get an account on ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude and query your own brand. Many marketing leaders running these programs have never done it. If you can't find your own program in the answer, neither can the student asking about it.
Social strategy and social media are two different things
WARC's new report, The Pace Principle 2.0: From Social Sprint to Sustained Growth, finds that social and creator marketing hit structural ceilings on long-term brand growth. Rica Facundo, Managing Editor at WARC APAC, calls the trap a social sprint loop: more content chasing virality, optimized for the algorithm ahead of enduring memory and customer resonance.
The report draws a line between social strategy and social media. Marketers treat social as a channel of platforms, creators, and formats. WARC defines it as a creative strategy built for conversation, sharing, and participation around a brand. The most effective campaigns lean on social platforms less than the industry average, extending through creators, PR, search, and cultural conversation.
The effectiveness numbers land on pairing. Broad emotional campaigns deliver 2.1 times the brand and business impact of broad social campaigns. Targeted social campaigns run 2.4 times more effective than targeted emotional ones. Neither narrow approach builds strong long-term brand effects. Matching creative approach to target market lifts effectiveness by as much as 70%.
Key takeaway: Broad brand building and targeted activation need to run at the same time, with creative matched to the audience it aims at. WARC's evidence base is Asia, but it argues the mechanics travel.
The Interactive Advertising Bureau reports 83% of ad executives say their company has used AI in the creative process, up from 60% in 2024. Results have not tracked adoption. Ipsos and Syracuse University's Newhouse School tested 20 ads, half human-created and half AI-generated, with 3,000 US consumers. The human-made ads won on emotional engagement and short-term sales impact.
Level's creative team spent the past year testing where the stage matters on live client campaigns. Their finding: AI earns its keep in research, concepting, exploration, and production prep. Quality drops when it takes over the finish.
The workflow is specific. Structure the prompt around what cannot change before you describe the change itself. Generate dozens of near-identical frames and let a person pick the one worth building on. Run the same brief through several models, since gaps between tools widen the moment a job asks for motion or scene extension. Finish every image by hand in Illustrator or Photoshop.
Category matters too. New York now requires conspicuous disclosure when ads include AI-generated synthetic performers, with penalties starting at $1,000 per violation.
Key takeaway: The biggest returns land before production starts. Level used Claude to review and label raw shoot footage, cutting 10 to 20 hours of an editor scrubbing files for keyframes, and that time moves into color, pacing, and sound design.
Palette is an AI video studio built by MIT computer science graduates and multimodal AI researchers, backed by Y Combinator and OpenAI. It keeps generation, editing, and storyboarding on one canvas, so a brief, its variations, and the final cut stay in a single conversation. A model router picks between ByteDance Seedance 2.0, Google Veo 3.1, Kling 3.0 Pro, and others per task, and failed jobs refund credits automatically.
The routing is the reason to look. Level's creative team found the widest quality gaps between models on jobs asking for motion or scene extension, and Palette turns that side-by-side comparison into a setting on one bill.
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