The person behind the page.

I'm Ryan Davidson. I build the systems for how marketing, media and measurement fit into the rest of a business, and the numbers a leadership team can stand behind when they don't.

I built that from the ground up in media planning and buying, doing just about everything: frameworks and strategy, brand and direct response, television, digital, social, audio, out-of-home, owned and earned, and everything in between. What I always wanted was to see the media work as part of the larger system it was feeding. "We ran media and the business grew" is not the whole story, but partners and publishers run with it because it's an easy one to tell. So much happens between the spend and the result, much of it having nothing to do with media, and I rarely got to see the connective tissue. When I did, it usually came as a KPI that felt bolted on, related to nothing else, so the system still didn't feel connected. Most of my career since has been about changing that.

I started at holding company agencies, Zenith and then Carat, on accounts like Verizon, JPMorgan Chase and General Motors. That's where I learned what it takes to move a plan through a large, matrixed organization: the finance review, the legal review, the six people who each own one piece of the answer, and the difference between a media plan and a business case.

At Barkley, an independent full-service shop, media stopped being the whole conversation and became one part of it. Creative, communications, retail and media were planned in the same room, and I got to see the thread that runs through all of them, and what happens when media is built to work in concert with the rest instead of alongside it.

Then I went in-house, to the tea business that includes Lipton and TAZO, as it was separated from Unilever. I helped stand up the media and digital function for the new company across a dozen markets, with a budget that ran into nine figures, which meant building the way media gets planned, bought, measured and reported to a board in a company that had never done it on its own.

Now I work independently, mostly with growth-stage and mid-market brands, founder-led or private-equity backed, and with the people who sell to them. Attribution that ties spend to real customers rather than the platform's version. Geo tests. A plan for the year with ranges on it. Test, ship, read the number, adjust.