People Buy From People They Know: Reflections on Our First Client Summit
This week, we hosted our first-ever Client Summit.
The idea started simply: bring our clients into a room with the people actually shaping how audiences discover brands today and spend a day learning together. Six months of planning later, on Tuesday, September 15th, that room came together at The National Arts Club in New York City for a full day of conversation on AI, the media landscape, and the creator economy.
It was, by any measure, a success. Not because of scale or spectacle, but because of how much our clients showed up, committing a full day to their own learning and because the people we brought together to lead that conversation were genuinely exceptional.
Why We Did This
Conferences are a notoriously hard business. Scale it up and you lose the real connection; keep it intimate and the economics get difficult fast, in both fees and time. Nearly everyone who’s organized one before told us the same thing: this is a hard way to make money.
That was never the goal. We built this Summit to reinvest in the people who choose to work with us, to give our clients direct access to the operators, founders, and advisors on the front lines of the changes reshaping their industries.
What the Day Looked Like
The program moved through four panels, each built around a different piece of the discoverability puzzle:
AI in Practice brought together three operators putting AI to work in very different businesses, Marco Credendino of Artemest, John B.R. Long III of Profitmind, and Dalia Soles of Design Assisted, to compare notes on what’s actually working, what isn’t, and where to start.
The New Media looked at trust and attention across three completely different models: Jason Orme of Future plc’s Homes Portfolio, Dennis Scully of The Business of Home Podcast, and Anna and Garrett Albury of CoolStuffNYC.
The Creator Economy examined how creators, agencies, and heritage brands are structuring deals and building trust in the influencer era, with Becca Batkin of G&B Digital Management, Heather Van der Mije of Lilly Pulitzer, and Micaela Verrelien of Design Assisted.
AI and Search closed the day with a look at how search itself is being rewritten by AI answers, featuring Julia Noran Johnston of Business of Home and Ziff Davis Lifestyle Group, and Jennifer Smiga of Ultraviolet Agency.
What Stuck With Me
Of everything said over the course of the day, one line has stayed with me since: people buy from people they know.
It’s simple, maybe even obvious. But it’s also a reminder of why days like this are worth the effort it takes to produce them. There’s no substitute for the trust that builds when people spend real time together, in a room, learning from one another.
Over the coming weeks, we’ll be sharing more takeaways from the Summit, the conversations, the debates, and the moments that gave us the most to think about. For now: thank you to everyone who joined us, and to the speakers who made the day what it was.
