Our approach
Over more than a decade of studying how communities actually form — how people gather, participate, and influence each other — we developed a set of principles. Your audience has an audience. Enable fans to be better fans. Audiences are networks of participation.
These ideas shape every piece of work we put out. So we started building them directly into the instruments we use every day. The instruments hold the underlying structure — the rhythm section — so the team can focus on the higher-level thinking: interpretation, judgment, improvisation.
Each tool here exists because the work required it. Listening tuned to how communities actually behave. Analysis that preserves the diversity of motivations within an audience. Systems that pressure-test whether our thinking aligns with our principles.
We build them iteratively, in conversation with AI, shaped by editorial judgment. The team leaves feedback, we think it through together, and changes ship the same day. The tools stay close to the work because they grow directly out of it.
Tools
Murmur
Built so the team could run a quick scan of social conversation any time they needed one — tuned to how we actually use social listening in a LASO way. Each project gets its own point of view: some are oriented toward engagement patterns, others toward strategic insights, others toward watchouts. The team leaves feedback in Slack about what's working and what needs adjustment. We think it through together and ship changes the same day.
Reprise
Reprise reads the audience around intellectual property — a film, a show, a franchise — and asks whether the network around it is active: after release windows, between seasons, even when it's out of production. Are audiences gathering around the content and bringing in people who weren't there the first time? It reads social activity in an EA1 way that helps you understand what content actually means to people, not just the metrics that matter to platforms.
Team Radar
The team shares stories in Slack all day — articles, references, things that caught their attention. A bot reads what's been shared, levels up the framing, and presents it back for the team to verify and build on. It's the same move we pioneered with fans: find the signal in what people are already talking about, elevate it, give credit, create new connections — turned inward.
LASO Alignment
A thinking partner for the work in progress. Paste a draft or a brief, and explore how it aligns with our principles — are we designing for participation? Considering the full network? Listening before we act? Less an editor, more a way of having the framework in the room while decisions are being made.
Trend Distance
How far does a trend travel from where it starts? This tool measures the distance between a signal first appearing on social platforms and how quickly it shows up across news media — a way of seeing how ideas move from communities into the broader conversation, and how fast that cascade happens.
What's next
We think a new kind of agency is emerging.
An agency has always been a collection of people who think well together. The question is where that intelligence lives. In the senior team's intuition? In the methodology deck? What if it was embodied in the tools everyone actually uses?
With the help of custom AI, we're exploring what happens when you write your own software — encoded specifically for how our team sees. Algorithms embed culture, so why not use that as a tool to help them judge what matters and decide what to do next.
The tools above are just what we're building right now. There are more ideas behind them. Each one is a small experiment in the same larger question: what does it look like when our agency's way of seeing can be embedded not just in the work but in the very tools we use?
Interested? Let's talk.
