I’ve been in tech long enough to know the difference between a trend and a turn. And this, my friends, is a Turn.
But not the one most people are selling. I keep reading that AI is going to run your ads for you, and it isn’t. I’ve watched enough campaigns to know where a machine is brilliant and where it’s confidently, expensively wrong, and the line between those two is the most valuable thing I know right now.
So let me put it plainly, because this is what we rebuilt Alkemia Growth around.
What actually changed in paid media
Three things, and they’re all real.
Targeting moved into the creative. The platforms got better at finding your buyer than we ever were at describing her. Audience-building as a craft has largely collapsed into the algorithm. What’s left for us to control is the asset itself. Creative is the new targeting — Julien wrote about exactly this when Meta’s December algorithm update landed.
Prediction moved upstream. Platforms increasingly optimize toward predicted purchase intent rather than observed behavior. That rewards accounts with clean signal and real creative variance. It punishes accounts running four ads and hoping.
The bottleneck became review, not production. Making fifty variants stopped being hard. Knowing which twelve deserve spend, and why, still is. Karen put it better than I would: most campaigns that get blamed on the algorithm were under-tested, not unlucky.
Notice what all three have in common. Every one of them increases the volume of reading required, and leaves the judgment exactly where it was.
Where AI genuinely earns its place
We build our own intelligence from everything we’ve learned, and we point it at four things:
- Creative testing at real volume — running and reading enough variants to actually know what a hook is doing, instead of guessing from three.
- Signal reading across accounts — patterns in spend, pacing, and performance that would take a person days to surface.
- Cutting decisions, earlier — finding what to kill before the budget scales in behind it.
- List and audience work — the assembly and segmentation that is genuinely mechanical.
That’s the labor of growth marketing, not the craft of it. Handing it to a machine isn’t a shortcut. It’s the correct allocation, and refusing to do it is just expensive nostalgia.
Where it doesn’t, and won’t
A model can’t tell you what a number means for your brand. Rising cost-per-acquisition is a failing campaign or a widening audience, and the data looks identical either way. The context isn’t in the data. It’s in the room.
A model has no stake in what you built. Point one at conversion and it will happily flatten everything distinctive about you to get there, and it will show you a beautiful chart while it does it. That’s the whole reason I started this company. You shouldn’t have to dull what makes a brand yours to make it bigger.
A model can’t make the call that has no precedent. New product, new market, a quarter that looks nothing like the last one. That’s a strategist’s read. There’s no training data for your first time.
Intuition without intelligence is slow. Intelligence without intuition is noise. Fused, it’s growth that’s fast and unmistakably yours.
The part nobody wants to say out loud
Every agency uses AI now. So “we use AI” tells you nothing. It’s table stakes dressed up as a differentiator.
Two questions actually separate people:
Did you build it, or are you renting it? We build ours. My team’s judgment, a strategist’s read on a brand, a media buyer’s feel for what’s working, gets encoded into intelligence that tests, learns, and compounds. That intelligence then sharpens the judgment that built it. Every cycle makes the system better. Every client makes it better. It’s multiplication, not addition, and it’s the reason this compounds instead of plateauing.
Are you still in the room? Nobody gets handed a tool and left with it. Not on the agency side, not in the Labs, not on any product we ship. If you’ve ever been sold software and called it a service, you know exactly why I’m making a point of this.
So here’s what we’re launching
Alkemia Growth is now an AI-driven growth-marketing agency, and there are two ways in.
Alkemia Labs is where we build the intelligence and make it something you can hold. Its first product, sKale, is live — Meta ads intelligence in your hands. You make the calls, it does the reading, and we stay close by. Two more are in development: one pointed at Google, one at creative. Their names are still in the works, and I’d rather tell you they’re coming than make something up.
Managed services is the done-for-you side. Meta and Google ads, creative auditing and testing, customer list building, optimizing and scaling. The whole growth system, built and run, led by people.
The offerings are what gets done. The two ways are how much we do and how much you do. Start light on a product and graduate up, or hand us the whole thing. Same intelligence underneath either way, same people watching it.
Who I built this for
Founders with a vision worth protecting.
I’ve been a growth marketer since before it had the name, one of the first people marketing apps on Facebook, back when you wrote the playbook as you went. As Director of Marketing at Zoosk I helped build it into one of the top grossing dating apps in both stores. Across the brands I’ve worked with since, that work has driven over $500M in revenue, and taken companies from launch to $25M a year.
In all of it, the constraint never changed: hit the goals without giving up what makes it yours.
Growth isn’t a task we check off. It’s a system we build with you, designed to learn, sharpen, and become yours to keep. That’s the approachable alkemy, and it’s only the beginning. We can’t wait to build what’s next with you.
Part human intuition. Part artificial intelligence. All alkemy.