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.
AI search tends to reward consensus, and originality is how consensus begins. If you want ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude to describe and recommend your brand, you need four things: a clear identity, information you keep current, credibility that other people give you, and an original idea worth repeating. Those are four principles I've learned in more than twenty years of practicing tai chi.
What AI changes about branding, what it doesn't, and what marketers should expect from their branding partners. In the mind of a customer, you get to be one thing. That's been the foundation for how we design a brand narrative at Traction for decades. Today, brand narratives have a new audience: the language models powering Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT and Grok. They are playing a bigger and bigger role in brand discovery, but what matters in a great story is still the same — understanding your customer and identifying the problem you solve for them.
In many respects, business-to-business marketers are among the world’s most savvy. They use technology to gain a single view of the customer, methodically move targets through the funnel ,and pass off leads to sales. They are frequently data-driven in every decision they make. But, the limitations of tools and data can also prevent B2B marketers from seeing the forest from the trees.
