I'm bringing you a weekday newsletter to share some exciting news: We just launched a new AI training platform called AdVenture Plus.
You're invited to join as a founding member, and it's free for all of October.
Most of you know AdVenture Media as a marketing agency, but for more than a year a big part of our work has been AI training. In that time we've trained more than 2,000 professionals in our public AI workshops, where people learn to do real work with tools like Claude. We also run private workshops and AI consulting for more than a dozen companies. Attendees have come from Salesforce, T-Mobile, JPMorgan, JetBlue and EA Sports, as well as small and mid-sized businesses around the world.
AI is going to change how every company works, whether anyone likes it or not. Some people will sit back and let it happen to them. Others will take control of their own future with it: they'll learn it, stay curious about it, and want to collaborate with people who spend all their waking hours pushing these models to their limits.
AdVenture Plus is for those people. It's the ongoing version of our training, and twice a month we go live on Zoom for an hour. Some sessions we build from a blank folder while you watch; others we break down a new AI model the week it drops and show you what to do with it. Every session ends with your questions, and every one is recorded and filed in the Vault so you can watch the ones you miss.
Between sessions, members get our AI Fundamentals course, the Agent Context Kit (our tool for teaching your AI assistant how you work and write), and 50% off every public workshop we run.
Our first live session is this Friday, October 9 at noon Eastern: Build an agent in an hour. Spiros Maragkoudakis, who runs our one-on-one AI builds with clients, will interview me about a job I want off my plate, then build an agent that does it, live, starting from a blank folder. You'll see every prompt we write and what we change when something doesn't work.
October is free. Join before December 1 and you lock in the founding rate of $19 a month for as long as you're a member; after that it's $29. Sign up any time before noon on Friday and you're in.
Wait. Are you a marketing company or an AI company?
Both, and we have been for a long time.
AdVenture Media started in 2012 as an education company. Isaac Rudansky, our founder, was teaching people how to run Google Ads, and the agency grew out of the students who eventually called and asked us to just do it for them.
By 2018, Google and Meta were rebuilding their ad platforms on machine learning, handing bidding, targeting and eventually the ads themselves over to algorithms. Most of the industry fought it. Agencies told clients that automation was just Google's way of getting them to spend more money, and they kept doing everything by hand. We went the other way, and in 2020 I wrote Join or Die: Digital Advertising in the Age of Automation to make the case for it.
That book has full chapters on how machine learning actually works: the five classes of machine learning, how a Bayesian algorithm updates its beliefs as new data comes in, and how that differs from a deep learning neural network. Very little of that tells you how to set a budget or write an ad. I put it in anyway, because I've long argued that if you're responsible for getting results out of AI, you need to understand how it learns.
Never Always, Never Never came out this year, and the last nine of its 33 chapters are about AI, including how AI works and how the AI inside the ad platforms learns.
That's why I've never seen marketing and AI as two separate businesses. Performance marketers have worked alongside AI every day for close to a decade, because every Google and Meta campaign is a machine learning system you train with your own data.
As I wrote in the book, AI didn't arrive when ChatGPT launched in November 2022. The technology had been around for years; what arrived was the awareness, and with it the pressure on every company to have an answer. Now finance, operations, sales and leadership teams have the same kind of technology in front of them, and the skills carry over directly: knowing what data to give the machine, how to judge what it gives back, and when not to trust it.
So that's what we teach, to marketers and non-marketers alike, in our public workshops, in private training for companies, and now in AdVenture Plus. Marketers will get a lot out of it. So will the operators, finance leads and founders on this list who have never run an ad in their life.
If you want to see what that looks like, join us Friday at noon.
Patrick