Some news: I've joined MagnifAI Media as Co-Founder and board member. MagnifAI is an AI-powered, flat-fee advertising platform built for car dealerships, and I'm building it with Founder and CEO Yalda Ghorashy.

I want to explain why, because this is the most natural step I've ever taken.

I've spent two decades in ad tech, starting at Veoh Networks and then at Verve, the Encinitas company that created the location-based mobile advertising category back in 2005.

At Verve the problem was deceptively simple: get a phone in someone's pocket to walk them into a store, then prove it happened. Not with a survey or a model, but with real latitude and longitude tied to real store visits. Foot-traffic attribution at the time was mostly hand-waving. We made it measurable, for retailers, restaurants, CPG brands and, yes, auto dealers.

The other thing Verve taught me was distribution. Building a good ad product for local businesses is one problem; reaching thousands of them is a different one. I worked directly with Verve's founder, Tom Kenney, on the SMB product, launching one of the first self-serve, location-targeted mobile ad platforms so that partners who already had SMB relationships, companies like Yahoo Small Business, ReachLocal and hibu, could sell our mobile channel into their base. The technology only matters if it fits how the customer already buys.

After Verve, Tom and I teamed up again at Loyal, where as CTO I built out a contextual ad exchange for mobile apps and connected TV, with audience targeting and attribution across systems reaching hundreds of millions of monthly users. Exchanges, attribution, audience building, creative, and the plumbing between them. Different products, one recurring lesson: the advertiser almost never gets to see the whole loop from dollar spent to customer walking in, and the people selling them media rarely have an incentive to show it.

I've written about how that plays out on the sell side in Curation Is Just Sell-Side Targeting and What Publishers Need to Know About Curation.

The honest answer to "why did you join" is Yalda.

She spent twenty years inside the automotive industry, much of it on the OEM side at FCA and Stellantis working with dealers, agencies and vendors across the country. Everyone she has worked with still picks up the phone when she calls. In an industry that runs on relationships and trust, that position of respect is not a nice-to-have; it is the whole go-to-market. And she has the right vision for what dealers need, not what vendors want to sell them. I knew this would work because she would be the one leading it.

The problem she's pointed at is the clearest broken loop I've seen in my career.

A typical dealership hands its advertising to an agency that takes a percentage of ad spend. When the agency's revenue grows with the budget, the agency is rewarded for spending more, not for selling more cars. Often the dealer doesn't even own the Google Ads account their money runs through; if they leave, the history, audiences and data leave with the agency.

Meanwhile, dealers have something almost no other local advertiser has: they know exactly who bought, when, and for how much. That closed loop is sitting right there in the DMS, and almost nobody is wiring it back into the media.

MagnifAI Media is a flat fee, never a percentage of spend. Dealers keep their own Google Ads account and pay Google directly, 100% passthrough. When someone we advertised to buys a car in the showroom, we close the loop back to the exact campaign and keyword that brought them in, so a general manager sees matched sales, not clicks. Our Known Shopper Graph recognizes the majority of site visitors who never raise their hand. Our AI creative library builds ads from the actual inventory on the lot, right model, trim and color. And Otto, our AI agent, does the daily optimization work an agency used to bill for, and narrates what it did.

For me it's the Verve thesis again with far better data: drive the visit, prove the visit, get paid for the outcome instead of the spend.

We're early. We have dealerships live, pilots underway and a long list to build. If you run a store or a group and nobody has ever asked you whose name is on your Google Ads account, I'd like to talk. And if you're a Rails engineer who wants to work on real attribution problems, same. It's the same small-team, Rails-first way I build companies.

You can find us at magnifaimedia.com. More soon.