Why you’re getting this: You’ve interacted with Haven or AdTribe before, and this is my weekly-ish update on my journey to building an AI-native agency. Zero pressure to stick around, just click unsubscribe if you don’t want to get it.
I went quiet for a few weeks. Good reason this time.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Two weeks in Portugal
I just got back from something I’d wanted to do for years: a real vacation. Two weeks, fully off, first time in my life.
My girlfriend and I spent them in Portugal. Some time in Lisbon first, then we rented a car and drove along the coast up north to Porto. The place that impressed me the most was Nazaré. A quiet little fishing town nobody had heard of that became world famous for exactly one thing: big waves. Every season surfers from around the world show up to try to ride the biggest wave on the planet.
Here’s probably the most famous photo of the phenomenon 👇
It was an amazing two weeks. And it convinced me that this is a mandatory test for every business owner. If the business runs without you, you have a business. If it falls apart, you have a job (probably the worst one). Because what’s the point of building a business if you can’t take two weeks to be with the most important people in your life?
And you know what, the agency was just fine.
Haven placed a candidate while I was gone. A new creative client went through onboarding start to finish. Client work got delivered, complaints got handled. All of that with me not opening Slack once.
Big credit goes to Tetiana, our new Head of Fulfillment. She took over my inbox, new contracts, invoices, and all the ongoing client requests that used to land on me by default.
Next step is to replace myself in sales, so the agency can grow while I’m gone.
Media buyers are becoming marketing engineers
Something else happened while I was gone that I keep thinking about.
The team ran an internal training without me. Two of our media buyers taught everyone else how they build landing pages with Claude. I found out from the recap in Slack after I got back.
Here’s an example of a page our media buyers built this way 👇
To be clear, it’s not a one-prompt magic trick. There’s a lot of tweaking before a page is actually good. The point is that a media buyer can now get it done at all, without a designer and a developer in the loop.
And it confirmed something I’ve been noticing for months. Media buyers are turning into something new. I call them marketing engineers.
The job used to be just media buying. Set up campaigns, manage budgets, send reports. For everything else you needed a specialist: a designer for the ads, a developer for the landing page, an analyst for the tracking. Four people, four salaries, and a lot of waiting between them.
Now with AI most of our media buyers can:
Build and integrate landing pages themselves, without waiting on a designer or a dev
Make static ads that look no different from what a professional designer would make
Put together a creative strategy by scraping the whole internet: the client’s reviews, competitors’ ads, the comments under them, the account’s own winning ads
And some go even deeper. Our Head of Performance just rebuilt a client’s whole tracking and connected every sale in their CRM back to the campaign it came from
One person doing the whole thing: the angle, the page, the creatives, the tracking. That’s not a media buyer anymore. That’s a full funnel marketer.
Two industries I’m bullish on long term
While we’re on the topic of where this is all going, two verticals I keep betting on because they’re AI proof: home services and longevity.
Home services, because AI can’t climb on your roof or unclog your drain. The demand is local, physical, and not going anywhere. The catch for agencies: these clients live or die by what happens after the lead. You need an advanced CRM setup and a proper sales team on the client’s side actually calling people back, and as marketers we control neither. You can fill the pipeline all month and still lose the account because nobody picked up the phone.
Longevity, because the demand is as human as it gets: people want to live longer and feel better. Peptides, telehealth, supplements. The vertical is extremely sensitive, so media buyers have to spend real time learning what compliant direct response looks like: what you can claim, what you can’t, how to write a hook that converts without promising medical outcomes. And both Meta and Google limit data collection on anything health related because of HIPAA compliance, so you’re optimizing half blind. Most buyers can’t do it. The ones who can are worth a lot.
And ecommerce? Ecom is here to stay. There’s no scenario where people buy less online. I stopped going to Costco entirely, I order everything to the house now (I hate looking for parking haha).
What’s unclear is the shape it takes. My bet: the whole concept of a website becomes obsolete and everything turns into an agentic experience. Your AI finds the product, compares it, orders it. The classic funnel of ad to landing page might simply not be needed anymore.
That’s it for today, hope you had a productive week.
Talk soon,
Dmitry