Every generation got better at reach. None of them got better at remembering. That is the half we built.
It comes from a small group who each own one layer and sit close enough to argue about it. I have been in those rooms. They are loud. They move fast. What comes out is better than anyone in it.
Marketing had that. Then it scaled, and scale broke it. The specialists got spread across agencies, platforms, vendors and contractors. Expertise stopped being something a company had and became something it rented. Talent was the product. So the quality walked out when the account team did, and nothing anyone learned survived the contract.
Every few years the industry rebuilt the same expertise from scratch and called it a new era. I did it three times.
The missing thing was never talent. It was a place to keep what the talent decided.
So that is what we built. A team where each person owns a layer they have already run at scale. Rik is what connects them. It holds every decision they make, weighted by what it cost and what it returned, and hands it to the next decision instead of losing it.
Rik does the remembering. Our team still does the deciding.
Rik is not a replacement for the people on this page.
Rik is what happens when none of us ever forget.
Tom Walsh
FOUNDER & CEOEvery year the systems got better at reach and no better at judgment. We could find anyone. What we could never answer was the only question a CMO actually has: is this making a difference to the business? Nothing remembered what worked. Nothing measured against what would have happened anyway.
So I went and built the half nobody was building.
I didn't hire a team. I called one.
People I had already been in the trenches with. Every layer of this company is run by someone who has shipped that layer somewhere else, at scale, and sold it.
The hardest part was never the technology. It was getting people who had already lived through the last era to come and build the next one. Each owns the layer they have already run at scale.
Matt Martella
Thirty years in advertising technology, most of it running the businesses other people write case studies about. He has built the commercial engine at every scale this company will pass through.
Ben Harvey
A career spent opening markets that didn't have a category yet. He ran the international side of a public marketing-technology business and now builds ventures out of the Gulf.
Pat Flynn
Industrial-grade finance. He has closed the books at Fortune 100 scale and carried a private-equity-backed manufacturer through a multi-billion-dollar sale.
Kris Persons
She has built client development teams at three of the largest performance and CRM marketing firms in the industry. She owns Rik Works: who we take on, and whether the work holds.
Dennis Dayman
He took a marketing-automation pioneer through its IPO, then served as chief privacy officer at an enterprise cloud and chief information security officer at a public communications platform. He is why your legal team says yes.
Atif Kazmi
Chief content officer of a design and culture publication, and a brand advisor to the consumer hardware companies whose taste everyone else copies. He owns how this company looks and sounds.
Danny Giardullo
He owns the email product and the advertiser supply behind it. Brand-direct only, curated one partner at a time, no aggregators. When a decision needs somewhere real to land, he has already built the route.
Michael Bloom
Data and audience strategy for the largest publishing houses in America. He owns the identity and knowledge layer. It is the ground truth underneath every decision Rik makes.
Prash Brooks
Media and social activation at two of the largest platforms in commerce and social. He runs the Media Desk, where a decision becomes an impression in front of a real person.