The OTHERSIDE Manifesto
A vision for a new era of digital advertising, where channels connect, creativity thrives, and brands finally have a system built to help them grow.
For years, digital advertising has been in a quiet state of stagnation.
Commerce, culture, and technology have all evolved at breakneck speed, yet the systems brands rely on to grow haven’t kept pace. A decade later, we’re still using the same logic, the same structures, and the same processes to deliver results.
Why? Because competition disappeared. When only a handful of ad platforms control nearly all global inventory, the incentive to innovate evaporates.
Instead of progress, we have watched the industry regress toward closed, walled-garden ecosystems where advertisers have less control, less visibility, and fewer meaningful levers to pull.
Brands have adapted, but they have not advanced. Instagram CPMs have climbed more than 130% in five years, which means your ROI is effectively cut in half even if everything else stayed the same. And Meta is not alone. With Google’s new AI Overviews, more than half of all searches now end without a click, leading to a drop in website traffic across the board. Ads cost more, yet deliver less.
With rising costs and ongoing market uncertainty, it is no surprise that performance has stalled on the major platforms. Worse, these platforms continue to move toward heavier automation and black-box systems, giving brands even fewer ways to steer their own results.
For most brands, “performance” now means survival, slowly redefining their goals down to a break-even state. Creative freedom has been traded for predictable, feed-friendly formats. The result is a culture of micro-optimization, where creativity is measured in click-through rates and every ounce of originality is A/B-tested into sameness.
These channels have each grown in their own direction, but not together. What is currently called “digital advertising” is really a collection of isolated systems, each reaching customers in single, uncoordinated moments that break the way people naturally make decisions.
Individually, these channels are not broken, but taken together, they are fractured.
And as they race further down the track of isolated automation, the cracks are getting deeper.
While the world races forward, our industry stays still, repeating the same patterns, relying on the same logic, and mistaking stagnation for stability.
Because at the center of this stagnation is a deeper issue: We’ve lost the connection that makes advertising work.
One channel cannot carry the weight of the entire customer journey.
The modern customer does not make decisions in a single moment or in a single medium. They move through a world of screens, sounds, and surfaces, and every one of those touchpoints shapes how they see a brand. The research has been consistent for years. What is missing is the industry’s willingness to build around it.
Studies show that real impact happens through repeated exposure. Further, multiple touchpoints have been shown to drive the most substantial gains in awareness, intent, and brand resonance. Even a single point of added awareness has been proven to map to future sales and, often, lowers acquisition costs. When brands stop showing up, they lose ground, and the decline begins almost immediately.
Cross-channel studies show that when campaigns add digital surfaces, performance rises faster than the spend behind them. And neurological research confirms that repetition on a single channel quickly fatigues people, while multi-channel exposure increases attention, persuasion, and memorability. Emerging channels follow the same pattern, often driving strong recall and meaningful incremental sales.
If advertising were designed around this reality, the industry would look very different. Instead of growing, it narrowed. Fewer channels, higher costs, less reach, lower frequency: the world changed, but digital advertising stayed the same.
The conclusion is simple:
Performance comes from coordinated systems, not isolated placements. People respond when a brand meets them where they already spend time, and when brands do this, they remember more. They trust more. They act more.
This is the gap we are closing.
We are rebuilding the connective tissue that digital advertising so desperately needs. Not by adding more channels for the sake of scale, but by creating a system where every placement reinforces the next.
A system built on a simple truth: that connection drives outcomes.
The problem was never the channels. It was the distance between them.
For years, the advertising industry has known what drives real performance. People respond when brands reach them across many touchpoints. The research is clear. What has been missing is the system to support it.
To date, brands have been forced to assemble their strategies across disconnected tools. Meta runs one strategy, Google runs another. This structure of isolated ad platforms does not reflect how people move through the world or how they make decisions.
And buying behaviour matters. It is the foundation of how brands grow. The industry knows this, but the systems we rely on have never been built to support it.
This is the gap we are closing.
We are building the infrastructure that should have existed all along. A connected environment where every channel informs the next, where CTV strengthens display, where mobile enhances audio, and where every placement grows smarter because of the ones around it.
We call this Connected Performance Ads™.
A model designed for digitally native brands. A system that aligns with real human behaviour. A network where every impression carries the weight of those before it and increases the value of those still to come.
For too long, brands have been told to make the best of a fractured landscape. Stitch together disconnected tools and hope it behaves like a unified strategy. It never does. Because no matter how strong a channel is on its own, it is just not built to solve for the dynamic nature of buying behaviours.
So we built a way forward.
Our approach is simple: Every placement should make the subsequent placement stronger. Every impression should add to the story. Every channel should learn from the others.
To make this possible, we developed The Performance Grid™, our own tailor-made algorithm that automates buying decisions across every digital surface. It reads signals from each channel, learns from performance patterns, and distributes spend where it will have the most impact. CTV, mobile, display, native, audio, and in-app placements all operate under one intelligent framework, each benefiting from the data of the others.
The result is a connected ecosystem that mirrors how people actually behave. Frequency becomes meaningful instead of wasteful. Creative fatigue eases. Performance becomes more predictable. Momentum becomes possible.
This is what we are building. A connected system designed for the realities of modern advertising.
This is how digital advertising should function, and it’s going to change the future of growth.
Building a better way for brands to grow.
Growth has meant the same thing for too long. Spend more. Chase more. Push harder inside systems that give less with every passing year.
Brands have been conditioned to believe this is the only way forward. That scale must come at the cost of control. That success has to be rented from platforms that were never built to protect their interests.
We refuse to accept that.
The future of advertising is not about squeezing more out of fewer channels or forcing brands into cycles of creative fatigue and rising costs. It is about rebuilding advertising into something sustainable, fair, and genuinely supportive of the people who rely on it.
Advertising should reward creativity rather than suppress it. It should give businesses the freedom to reach people where they naturally spend time, without being boxed into a single feed or a single platform by algorithms that decide your targeting for you.
We believe advertising becomes stronger when it works together. We believe brands deserve access to the full digital landscape. We believe in systems that elevate good products, good storytelling, and good businesses.
This is the philosophy behind OTHERSIDE.
The next era of advertising is connected. Not because it feels new, but because it reflects how people actually live. They watch, listen, scroll, search, explore, and revisit across countless surfaces. Real effectiveness comes from honouring that journey and building a structure that supports it, rather than fighting against it.
Our goal is simple:
Give brands the system they should have had all along. A system designed to compound impact, that makes every impression more valuable than the last, and that helps great products find their audience and stay with them.
This new system is called Connected Performance Ads™.
With it, we will help brands grow in a way that feels honest.
This is the new shape of growth.
Welcome to the OTHERSIDE.
Sincerely,
Cory Dobbin
Founder & CEO
OTHERSIDE
