Two creative directors, building the taste layer.
Taste is a standard someone has to hold. Two founders who spent two decades as creative directors for the largest Fortune 100 clients, advised by a PhD scientist, and backed by $2.9M in funding.
Raised to build the taste layer
Top Meta advertisers spoken with personally, at $50k to $1M a month in ad spend
In ad revenue tracked and attributed by Admark
Creative direction for the largest Fortune 100 clients
Justin Evergreen
Builds the models, agents, and API behind the taste layer, and brings it to the platforms that make ads.
Creative director across Crispin Porter + Bogusky, The Martin Agency, where he was VP, Digital Creative Director, and McKinney, making work for Walmart, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Audi, Nike, Disney, Sony, Converse, Motorola and Nasdaq.
The machine-learning work started well before the current wave. Facial Profiler put facial recognition inside a Facebook app for Coca-Cola Zero and matched more than a million people to their real-world double across 189 countries, at a 91% conversion rate and no media budget. Audi's The Art of the Heist ran half a million people through a four-month alternate reality game and presold 500 cars before the A3 reached a showroom.
Through Adaya's Meta ads training programs, including YouAI, and the Admark attribution software, he has personally spoken with hundreds of top Meta advertisers who routinely run $50k to $1M a month in ad spend. He knows, from the inside, what separates an ad that scales from one that never should have run.
At Adaya he builds Dessert end to end, the taste layer API, drawn from an analysis of 180,000 ads across skincare, supplements, apparel, home and food. It stands on what he built before it: Admark's attribution across $200M in tracked ad revenue, and YouAI's 500+ deep-trained custom models.
Cannes Lion and Campaign of the Year, Audi. Cannes Silver Lion, Brammo.
Alicia Evergreen
Leads design, product, and creative direction, and defines the creative-director judgment the taste layer is built on.
Art director and creative director across Pentagram, Ogilvy, 180 Amsterdam and Kastner, for Hellmann's, Toyota, Nokia, Shell, Burger King, Qualcomm, adidas, Red Bull, Nike, LG, Sony and Beyoncé and JAY-Z's 22 Days Nutrition.
Generative, data-driven creative has been the through-line since long before the term existed. Recipe Receipt, conceived at Ogilvy, turned a supermarket till roll into recipes written from whatever was in the cart, personalized per shopper at the checkout. That was 2012. It lifted Hellmann's sales 44% in a single month and took Cannes Gold, Clio Gold and a One Show Silver Pencil.
Alongside Justin, she has personally spoken with hundreds of top Meta advertisers running $50k to $1M a month in ad spend, through Adaya's Meta ads training programs and the Admark attribution software. That is where the taste layer's sense of what actually works comes from.
At Adaya she leads design, product and creative direction, and sets the standard every Dessert ad is held to: the persona, the angle, each ad’s job in the funnel, and the layout and type. Her performance work has halved cost per acquisition across $7M in Meta spend, and her broadcast work has reached 111.9M viewers in a single Super Bowl spot.
Cannes Gold, Clio Gold and One Show Silver Pencil, Hellmann's.
Each one solved
a piece of taste.
It started with attribution: brands signed up for Admark to see which ads actually earned their revenue. Through Admark and our Meta ads training programs, including YouAI, we have personally spoken with hundreds of top Meta advertisers who routinely run $50k to $1M a month in ad spend. We know what makes a Meta campaign succeed, and what makes one fail.
What actually performs. An autonomous media buyer with real store revenue attributed to the campaigns that earned it: $200M tracked across 10,000+ ad sets.
Judgment can be modeled. 500+ custom models trained to write in one person’s voice across Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, LinkedIn and X.
Where human taste still matters. An invite-only marketplace matching the top 1% of vetted AI experts to briefs, inside Slack.
The taste layer. Creative-director judgment as an API: ten finished ads from one call, with the full decision trail as structured data.
Pat Benz, PhD
A PhD organic chemist and scientist-founder who advises Adaya on the scientific rigor behind its AI research and experimentation.
Patrick H. Benz founded Benz Research and Development in 1983 as Optical Monomer Corporation. By 1989, a third of the world's soft contact lenses were made from raw materials BRD produced, using a proprietary monomer process he developed.
He built Automated Lens Manufacturing, which uses two- to six-axis robots and an automated video blocker to make custom precision lenses, and still runs today. In the late '90s he moved into intraocular lens materials for cataract surgery. By the time he sold the company to a private equity group in September 2021, BRD's materials had gone into more than 80 million cataract lenses, mostly across Europe, India and Korea.
Over 40 years as president, he developed many of the polymers and processes used in lens manufacturing. At Adaya he brings the same discipline to how we study AI: controlled experiments, measured results, and a method that compounds. It is how four experiments became the taste layer.
25+ US patents and 100+ foreign patents. Company acquired by private equity, 2021.