How Known blends data science and creativity to reinvent marketing

Executive overview

Most marketing agencies separate media, research, and creative into disconnected silos — and clients pay the price in lost signal and misaligned incentives. Known was built to reunite those capabilities under one roof, with fees tied directly to client business outcomes.

The result is an agency that competes on intelligence, not scale — deploying proprietary AI tools while sharing them openly with clients.

The core insight: being smarter than your competition beats being bigger.

Why Known was built

• Three agencies — Blackbird (creative), Shearson Associates (data), and Stun Creative — merged in 2020 using private equity to remove structural barriers
• The fragmentation of marketing over 30 years meant clients lost fidelity as media, research, and creative drifted apart
• Known's founders believe reunification was inevitable; they just moved first
• Fees include a component at risk, tied to client bottom-line results — aligning incentives across every business unit

Building culture across a remote-first company

• Launched and scaled entirely during COVID, with hundreds of employees who never shared an office
• Two defining traits surfaced when surveying the team: holding themselves to a higher standard than anyone else would, and genuine kindness toward colleagues
• Known is employee-owned — making culture preservation a direct financial interest
• Kern owns the operating system; Ross owns the belief system — complementary, not duplicated

Skeptic: Known's proprietary marketing OS

• Skeptic covers the full marketing supply chain: audience insights, asset creation, and optimised delivery at scale
• Named because it is never satisfied with its own answers
• ~65 apps inside the platform, growing by roughly two per week
• Uniquely, clients get direct access — their internal planners work in the same backend as Known's buyers, with full transparency into decisions and rationale
• No other agency has opened its operating system to clients this way

Surviving a $30 million crisis

• A major client went into administration in London hours before bankruptcy; Known was left with a $10M already-spent hole and a $30M total exposure
• A Super Bowl spot had to be stopped mid-production; staff who had relocated to London had to return
• The crisis forced a re-examination of the business model — Known had been chasing scale and ignored risk signals
• Response: developed a new suite of faster-impact products that could move client revenue quickly without relying on slow, large-scale RFPs
• That pivot set up what is tracking as Known's best year

Working with scaled vs. challenger clients

• For Disney: Known acts as media AOR, buys media inside the Disney ecosystem, and is co-producing a Hulu show for another client — three distinct relationship layers with one partner
• For Slate Auto (a $20K customisable EV): Known helped execute an unconventional launch — cars wrapped as fake businesses, a fake commercial placed directly after the Saturday Night Live monologue
• Skeptic was deployed across both Known's and Slate's internal teams simultaneously, giving both sides real-time visibility into media planning and buying decisions

Navigating the AI shift in marketing

• Search share is moving to LLMs; GPT optimisation is the new SEO — early but active investment area
• Over-allocation to search has been a widespread mistake; the question typed into search was created somewhere else (in culture, in conversation)
• The right response for brands: build a place in culture and organic conversation so the question may not get asked at all
• Social algorithms (Instagram, TikTok) are already decade-old AI agents — Known's model is to field a data science team that can decode and outsmart them
• AI may democratise the means of production to the level of a free public utility, as DeepSeek suggests — or it may concentrate power in megascale players; the outcome is genuinely unknown

Advice for founders with limited marketing budgets

• Start with self-knowledge: who you are, what you offer, and what clients actually want to buy
• Value proposition clarity costs nothing and is the foundation everything else is built on
• Resist the polished success narratives — nobody has figured it out; the field has reset
• Give yourself permission to feel your way through it and keep refining based on what the market tells you it needs