CEO. Thought Leader. Bonsai pruner.
Born and raised in New York, Adam bought a one way ticket to California after graduating from Cornell. From an early age, he was attracted to art and technology— programming video games on a PET computer in 6th grade — so the exploding digital scene in 1996 San Francisco felt like home.
In the entrepreneurial spirit, he bought a book on Photoshop and declared himself a web designer. After a few years at a handful of agencies, he had officially earned the title. In 1997, he was blogging before the word “blog” was coined. In 1998, he was the resident Flash guy at Think New Ideas, a hot integrated agency. In 2000, he was recruited to help start the SF office of Tribal DDB.
Adam and his partners founded Traction in 2001 (in the spare bedroom of his apartment) on the principle that doing great work is easier with talented people you like and admire. Twenty great years of collaboration with some of the world's greatest brands have borne out that philosophy.
In 2019, he led the transformation of Traction into a marketing accelerator to better serve the needs of brands in today's fast-paced, data-driven environment. He plays a hands-on strategic role with Traction's clients to help ensure that their business objectives are aligned with the needs, desires and behaviors of their customers.
A prolific writer, Adam has spoken at dozens of industry conferences around the world and published over one hundred articles in industry publications such as Adweek, Ad Age, Forbes, Entrepreneur, Mashable, and others. In 2013, he was a MediaPost All-Star, an award given to the three most influential digital creatives in the US each year. He is an amateur bonsai artist and can occasionally be found at Lake Merritt in Oakland practicing tai chi.
Earlier this week, Lauren Evans and I stood in front of a room full of in-house agency leaders at the ANA In-House Agency Conference in Huntington Beach (where the sunsets are so pretty they make it into blog posts) and made a promise right in the title of our talk: AI is a friend, not a foe. You could feel the room wanting it to be true.
Every marketer has access to the same AI tools. And here's what that's quietly doing: it's making everyone faster at producing the exact same average. It’s diluting brands — just as brand has become more important than ever. The winners of the next few years aren’t going to be the marketers who adopted AI fastest. It'll be the ones who figured out what to do with it that no one else can copy.
Yesterday, LinkedIn sent me a notice. I've been the CEO of Traction for 25 years. It feels trite to talk about how much has changed since then. In 2001, there was no Facebook, no iPhones, no Uber, no Zoom. But as I sat and reflected last night about spending the last quarter century leading this business, what came to mind wasn't the things that had changed — it was the things that stayed the same.
