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Adam Kleinberg
Company
Traction
Location
San Francisco, California, USA
Bio
In 1996, I bought a one-way ticket from New York to San Francisco, bought a book on Photoshop, and declared myself a designer. I was blogging before the word "blog" existed and became the resident Flash guy at a time when that actually meant something. A few years and a handful of agencies later, I'd officially earned the title. In 2001, I founded Traction in the spare bedroom of my apartment on a simple principle: great work is easier with talented people you like and admire. I've spent 24 years building Traction into something different. Clients need outcomes, accountability, and access to top-tier talent. They want to work with people who actually give a damn. We redesigned the agency model to deliver both—a marketing accelerator built on a fractional, zero-waste model with 350+ specialists we scale based on what the work requires. We sell innovation. That's our specialty—helping brands turn innovative products and services into business outcomes. AI-driven ultrasounds for GE Healthcare. A natural cat litter that penetrated 10,000 retail locations in a year. The lowest CAC ever for HelloFresh. An 84% performance lift for Meta Pay. A 300% engagement lift for Lenovo. Apple has trusted us for 20 years. The work spans brand experience, organizational design, and AI implementation. Sometimes the problem is the campaign. Sometimes it's the organization itself—we recently identified $10M+ in efficiencies for a $20B retailer by redesigning their marketing operations. I also run The Futureproof Project—a community of 300+ CMOs moving past AI hype into real implementation. For the past year, I have been fractional CMO of Patiofyre (they make gorgeous wood pellet heaters) helping them achieve 6X ROAS. I've written over 100 articles for Adweek, Ad Age, Forbes, and others. Recent recognition: Campaign US Agency of the Year for Talent Management (Gold 2024, Bronze 2025), Campaign's "40 Over 40," and three 2025 ANA B2 Awards for Best Branding Program, Best Integrated Campaign, and Best Use of AI. When I'm not working, I'm practicing bonsai, doing tai chi at Lake Merritt, or walking with my doberman, Moose, and golden retriever, Dipper, in the Oakland Hills. www.tractionco.com www.thefutureproofproject.com
In 1996, I bought a one-way...
description
Traction is a marketing accelerator for in-house teams—a new breed of consultancy designed to enhance and improve your marketing. We’ve extracted the overhead, bloat and inflexibility from the agency model. Instead, we are aligning the experience clients need with the experience talent wants. We do it with a liquid workforce that fluidly adapts to help marketers solve problems with their in-house marketing.
Traction is a marketing accelerator for...
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Actionable Takeaways
The Liquid Workforce Is the New Competitive Advantage:
Maintaining a traditional agency staff model means averaging out talent — you get generalists when you need world-class specialists. Traction's liquid workforce model solves this by building bespoke teams of fractional experts around each engagement. The result: more senior talent, more specialization, and significantly less overhead. This model is also why Traction has team members from Lululemon, Nike, Hilton, and Nordstrom — brand-side experience that creates faster trust with clients.
Context Is the Moat in the AI Economy:
Adam's observation that 'the tools are leapfrogging one another in capability, but the context is the moat' is the most important AI insight any agency can internalize right now. Building Claude skill stacks — where brand guidelines, tone, templates, and messaging are baked in — means every piece of content output is consistent, on-brand, and scalable. The competitive advantage isn't which AI tool you use. It's how well you've trained it on your context.
AI TCO Is a Real, Complex, and Underserved Problem:
Choosing between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini is not obvious — each has a fundamentally different licensing and token pricing model, and the right choice depends heavily on expected usage patterns. Traction built a vibe-coded TCO calculator that helps clients make that decision objectively. This is a new category of consulting that didn't exist two years ago and represents a significant opportunity for any agency positioned to own it.
The Marketing Org Design Practice Is the Highest-Leverage Service:
When Traction helped a large retailer evaluate their agency contracts, they identified double-spend, misaligned specializations, and structural inefficiencies that added up to $5 million in savings. That's not a creative service — it's a strategic consulting service. As brands continue moving more function in-house, demand for this kind of org design expertise will only grow.
The Future Proof Project Is a Moat Disguised as a Community:
What started as a small CMO dinner is now a 350-person community of senior brand leaders convening monthly around AI. Speakers have included the chief design officer at Figma and the head of Gen AI at Nike. The learning that comes out of that community flows directly back into Traction's AI operating system. It's both a lead generation vehicle and a proprietary intelligence-gathering mechanism — a genuinely rare competitive asset.
From Efficiency to Empowerment: The Mighty Humans Mission:
Adam's observation that 300 million jobs could be displaced by AI in the next two years frames a fundamental tension: the same technology being used to make agencies more efficient is simultaneously threatening workers everywhere. Mighty Humans — a movement he's co-building with enterprise sponsors — aims to convert that threat into an opportunity by providing free AI training, municipal project experience, and business-building support to displaced workers. For any agency leader thinking about their brand and purpose, this is the right direction.
Conversation Highlights
Adam Kleinberg has been building Traction, his San Francisco-based marketing accelerator, for 25 years — and the agency looks almost nothing like it did when it started. In this episode, Adam unpacks the three things that make Traction different from every other agency: a liquid workforce of world-class fractional talent, a marketing organization design practice that once saved a client $5 million, and the Future Proof Project — a community of 350 CMOs sharing the frontlines of AI adoption. He also walks through how his team built an AI operating system using Claude skill stacks, vibe-coded a TCO calculator to help clients choose between Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini, and why his biggest 2026 initiative — Mighty Humans — is aimed not at brands, but at the people AI is about to displace.
Topics Discussed
- Traction’s 25-year evolution from traditional creative agency to marketing accelerator for in-house teams
- The liquid workforce model: small core team + bespoke fractional talent networks for senior expertise with less overhead
- Marketing organization design: how Traction helped one retailer restructure their agency contracts and save $5 million
- The Future Proof Project: a community of ~350 CMOs and brand leaders convening monthly around AI education
- Building an AI operating system using Claude skill stacks — brand guidelines, templates, and messaging stacked for consistent on-brand output
- The AI TCO calculator: a vibe-coded tool that evaluates whether a company should invest in Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini based on usage patterns and pricing structure
- The chameleon client model: how Traction adapts to each client’s in-house capability level (AOR, creative direction, or specific problem-solving)
- Mighty Humans: a movement partnering with enterprise companies to provide free AI training to workers displaced by automation
