Working Planet, Then & Now: What’s Changed (and What Hasn’t)
Having worked at Working Planet for more than a decade now, I’ve had the chance to meet and work with a lot of smart, creative, and genuinely interesting people in the industry, many of whom I’m still lucky enough to keep in touch with.
The other day, I was catching up with a former colleague when they asked how we’re navigating AI and all the changes happening across the digital marketing landscape. As I started writing out my answer, I realized just how much has changed at Working Planet over the past five or so years, and how much of that probably isn’t obvious to people who aren’t directly involved with us today.
So, I took some time to reflect on what’s changed, what hasn’t, and how Working Planet has evolved since we transitioned to remote work from our days on the East Side of Providence, RI.
There’s a lot to cover.
In this article:
A more experienced, more connected team
One of the biggest changes is the team itself.
Today, Working Planet has the highest concentration of experience and specialization in our history. As people have grown in their roles and new expertise has joined the team, we’ve built a deeper bench of knowledge across paid media, analytics, creative, technology, strategy, and more.
Our leadership structure has evolved, too. Courtney Lenhardt and I now lead the company, while founders Soren and Vida have transitioned to the board.
Along with that leadership transition has come a continued shift toward greater team autonomy. We’ve put more emphasis on making sure knowledge isn’t concentrated with just one person or team. Cross-training is now embedded into how we work, helping us build continuity, share different perspectives, and give people more ownership over their work.
That same thinking has influenced how we train new employees. Our onboarding program now combines sprint-based and micro-learning formats to get new hires embedded with their teams more quickly while continuing to build their knowledge over time. Learn more about our updated training approach and company culture.
From the East Side of Providence to a team across the country
If you remember Working Planet from pre-2020, you probably remember our office on the East Side of Providence.
Today, we’re fully remote, and our team is made up of people located across the country.
That has changed more than where we work. Going remote has allowed us to broaden our talent pool beyond the geographic area around Providence, giving us access to people with different experiences, perspectives, and areas of expertise that we may not have encountered otherwise.
It has also required us to be more intentional about how we communicate, document information, and share knowledge. We’ve had to move away from relying on being in the same room or having a quick conversation at someone’s desk and toward systems that make information accessible across the company.
Our project management approach has evolved along with that. We’ve moved from Sprints to Kanban, giving teams more flexibility and visibility while still providing the structure needed to keep work moving and maintain focus on the most impactful work to support our clients’ growth.
We’ve changed how we show up in the world
You may also notice a different Working Planet online.
Within the past two years, we’ve updated our website and broader online presence to better reflect who we are today and support where we’re headed as a company. Our marketing has become more intentional about explaining not just what we do, but how we think about growth, profitability, data, and our role as a partner to our clients.
We’ve also ventured into a medium that didn’t exist at Working Planet a few years ago: podcasting.
Our podcast, Data Planet, features marketing leaders from across the industry and explores the ideas, challenges, and changes influencing marketing and business growth today.
It’s another way for us to share what we’re learning while learning from people outside of Working Planet, too.
The spreadsheets are not what they used to be
If you are reading this as a former employee of Working Planet prior to 2020, you may remember living your entire work life in Excel.
There’s considerably less of that today.
We’ve moved from heavily manual, Excel-based reporting and tooling toward custom-coded automation and real-time, client-facing dashboards. Instead of spending as much time gathering, cleaning, and formatting information, we can spend more time interpreting it and figuring out what it means for the business.
We’ve also expanded how we think about measurement.
Attribution is still useful, but it doesn’t always tell us whether advertising actually caused an outcome. We’ve developed our own lift-testing methodology to help measure incremental impact and answer a different question: what happened because of the marketing?
That distinction matters when the goal isn’t simply to report on performance, but to understand how marketing can best contribute to bottom line growth.
More AI, more automation, more time for thinking & collaboration
It would be difficult to talk about the past five years without talking about AI.
We’ve adopted machine learning to help optimize toward business outcomes, while using newer AI tools for things like idea generation and automating repetitive tasks.
The point isn’t to replace the thinking. It’s to reduce the amount of time spent on work that doesn’t require as much thinking in the first place.
We’re also building more of our own technology.
Today, we create custom-coded tools that pull information from different sources, automate processes, process and report on data, and help us identify opportunities to optimize and grow client accounts.
In other words, technology has become much more deeply integrated into how we work, not just something we use to execute campaigns.
Our capabilities have expanded beyond media management
Paid digital is still at the center of what we do, but our capabilities around it have grown significantly.
We now have deeper expertise in predictive modeling and have expanded our network of industry partners across areas including SEO, AEO, GEO, content development, RevOps, and agency growth.
We’ve also added creative services to our internal capabilities, including a more formalized approach to creative testing using conjoint analysis, a more modern option than A/B testing creatives in machine learning-driven ad networks. Learn more about our creative testing methodology.
When something falls outside what our internal team is set up to provide directly, we can also bring in trusted partners rather than trying to force a solution that isn’t the right fit.
The result is a broader set of resources we can bring to the table while keeping our core expertise at the center.
We’re more embedded with our clients
We’ve always operated as embedded partners to our clients, but how we realize that has changed over the years.
We collaborate more closely with client teams, bring in expertise from across Working Planet, and provide resources beyond the day-to-day management of paid media when it makes sense.
Our onboarding process has also become more formalized. Rather than relying primarily on a handful of people to get a new client up and running, we bring expertise from across the team into the process. That helps accelerate setup while making sure the right people have what they need to help our clients succeed from the beginning.
And communication is more integrated into clients’ existing workflows. We regularly work directly within client Slack channels and project management platforms, making it easier to collaborate as part of the team rather than operating alongside it.
So, what hasn’t changed at Working Planet?
For all of that change, the foundation is surprisingly familiar.
We still manage full paid digital programs using a scientific approach. We use data, testing, analysis, and continuous learning to understand what is working, what isn’t, and where there may be opportunities to improve.
We still believe our success is tied to our clients’ success. That shared-fate philosophy remains central to how we work. We only succeed when our clients do.
We still don’t believe long-term contracts are necessary to build long-term relationships. Our goal has always been to earn the next month, the next year, and the next stage of growth.
And we still keep our client-to-staff ratios low. As our capabilities have expanded, maintaining a high level of service and access to experienced people has remained a priority.
A lot has changed. The reason we’re here hasn’t.
Working Planet today is more experienced, more specialized, more technical, more connected, and capable of supporting clients in more ways than we were five years ago.
But the evolution hasn’t been about changing who we are for the sake of changing.
It has been about building on what worked, recognizing where we could do better, and investing in the people, technology, systems, and partnerships that help us do better work.
So if you knew Working Planet five years ago, welcome back.
You might not recognize everything.
But you’ll probably recognize us.
