Elevation Ten Thousand

Google Marketing Live 2026 was an ecommerce show. The biggest announcements work great for a $40 duvet and not at all for a $14,000 mini-split install. Our honest read on what actually changed for home service operators, and the one move that decides whether AI works for you or against you.

A paperclip. That's where they started. For our latest creative challenge, teams were given three hours, a brief, and one instruction: come up with your own idea. Team 3 came back with Clipé: a luxury paperclip brand built around the idea that the most overlooked object in the world just needed the right reinterpretation. Cartier collaboration. Justin Bieber and Steve Carell as campaign faces. A full brand world from scratch. This is what happens when you trust the idea enough to let it breathe. Three teams. Three campaigns built from nothing in just a few hours. Now it's your turn. 👇 Drop your vote for your favorite campaign in the comments: Crossgates Athletic Club, Curb Your Fear, or Clipé.

Three hours. A brief. And the instruction to "come up with your own idea." For our latest internal creative challenge, Team 2 came back with Curb Your Fear — the world's first emotional support system for parallel parkers. Trained specialists. A 24/7 hotline. A Certificate of Emotional Bravery for when you clip the curb and live to tell about it. The concept earns the laugh. The execution earned the respect. Full brand identity, campaign concept, short-form video, and a pitch built in 3 hours by people who do this for a living. One more team to go. Are you ready to see the final campaign?

If you grew up in the Capital Region, you already know Crossgates Mall was basically your first gym membership. After hearing Paige DeSorbo say Crossgates was her childhood cardio, one of our creative challenge teams immediately built an entire campaign around it: Crossgates Athletic Club 👊 Train Like an Albany Icon. Because those mall laps built character.

📣 We were recently featured in International Business Times for our approach to growth marketing for service-based businesses! It's a space we know well...home-services. Industries where the work is local, the competition is real, and generic marketing playbooks fall flat. We built E10K around the idea that these businesses deserve the same caliber of strategy that tech companies take for granted. 👏 Turns out, when you bring real strategy to local businesses, good things happen. Read the full piece 👉 https://lnkd.in/e3tQEWh6

Most firms don’t need more traffic. They need better conversion systems. Clicks don’t become cases without structure. It takes alignment across every step, from first touch to signed client. Look closer at the system. ⬇️ Then see what it looks like when it’s built right: https://bit.ly/4d5BTw4

As the internet revisits 2016, it’s worth asking which marketing trends actually deserve a comeback. Long-form content that shows real expertise. Tangible touchpoints like print and direct mail. Authentic, imperfect storytelling. Nostalgia used with intention. Not every trend should return, but the ones built on substance tend to stand the test of time. As for the over-the-knee boots… we’ll let the jury decide. 🥾😅 What should make a comeback and what can stay in 2016?

Keeping up with AI is demanding. Staying ahead of it is part of the job. So our team members Sable Trappenburg & Amelia Mahoney attended a webinar by Birdeye so you didn’t have to. We stay close to the conversations shaping how brands are summarized, surfaced, and trusted, focusing on real change, not hype. These insights are already influencing how we build clearer, more authoritative digital strategies in an AI-first world. 🗻

If there was a benchmark, we beat it. If there wasn’t, we made one up and beat that too.