EST. 2001 – San Francisco, CA.
The expertise of an agency.
The alignment of an in-house team.
The agility of a freelancer.
Engineered to work as one.
Today’s marketing organizations are expected to launch more campaigns, support more channels, produce more content, and respond faster than ever before, all while operating with leaner teams and tighter budgets. Traditional creative support models were never designed for this pace, often forcing marketing leaders to choose between adding staff, hiring agencies, or managing multiple outside resources.
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Why CMOs Choose Engine:
The challenge :
Today’s marketing organizations are expected to launch more campaigns, support more channels, produce more content, and respond faster than ever before, all while operating with leaner teams and tighter budgets. Traditional creative support models were never designed for this pace, often forcing marketing leaders to choose between adding staff, hiring agencies, or managing outside resources.
The approach :
Engine was built to solve a different problem. Rather than asking organizations to choose among agencies, in-house teams, freelancers, or fractional leadership, Engine combines the strengths of all four into a single integrated creative solution. By pairing executive-level creative leadership with AI-native workflows, Engine helps marketing organizations expand capacity, accelerate execution, and stay aligned with changing business priorities without increasing organizational complexity.
How wework:
Engine is a new expression of a creative partner built for today’s marketing departments. We combine the expertise of an agency, the alignment of an in-house team, the strategic leadership of a fractional creative executive, and the agility of a freelancer into one integrated creative solution. Every engagement is designed to adapt to changing priorities, providing experienced leadership, hands-on execution, and AI-native workflows exactly where they create the greatest business impact.
Rather than assigning work according to creative roles or billing rates, Engine organizes expertise around your organization’s priorities. As your marketing needs evolve, so does our focus, without reorganizing teams, renegotiating scopes, coordinating vendors, or deciding which specialist should handle the next project. We’re one-stop shopping.
Built for today:
Our business model is built for today, not yesterday. AI is revolutionizing how creative work is developed and produced, but access to technology alone does not create competitive advantage. Engine combines AI-native workflows with experienced creative leadership, unconventional thinking, and human-centered judgment to focus technology on the right business challenges and develop messaging that is original, strategically sound, and genuinely meaningful to the people it is intended to reach.
The following are some of the questions and considerations we hear most often from marketing leaders evaluating whether Engine is the right fit for their organization :
We already have an Ad/Design agency.
Creative agencies excel at broad projects, ideation, strategy, and project execution, but work outside their defined scope can become cumbersome, costly, or slow to execute. Engine fortifies your existing agency by providing ongoing creative leadership and hands-on execution across the initiatives that fall between traditional scopes, helping your team move faster while making better use of the creatives already in place.
Why not simply hire another employee?
Hiring creative leadership requires recruiting, onboarding, salaries, benefits, and long-term commitments before meaningful value or action is realized. Engine provides immediate access to executive-level creative leadership and executional expertise, giving your organization experienced executional capacity without adding permanent staff or more personnel overhead.
What if our current team and partners are already working well?
Keep them. Engine isn’t designed to replace the people, partners, or processes already delivering results; (though it could); it’s designed to strengthen them when growing marketing demands begin to exceed available capacity. We add executive-level creative leadership, hands-on execution, and rapid AI-native workflows exactly where they’re needed, helping your organization accomplish more without restructuring your team, replacing trusted partners, or adding permanent staff.
Why Engine instead of a fractional CCO or CD?
Fractional Creative Directors provide valuable strategic leadership and executive oversight. Engine delivers that same level of leadership while also providing hands-on creative execution, agency coordination, ideation, content development, messaging, and AI-native workflows that transform strategy into measurable results, becoming an active extension of your marketing team rather than simply an outside advisor.
Today, everyone has AI. Why do I need Engine?
AI is transforming business at an unprecedented pace, but tech alone doesn’t create competitive advantage. Experienced creative leadership is still required to establish strategy and steer AI in the right direction. Critically, they uncover unconventional ideas, focus AI on the right business problems, and develop messaging that genuinely resonates with people. Engine combines executive leadership with AI-native workflows to deliver faster execution, greater creative capacity, and more effective human-centered marketing.
Can Engine integrate with our existing team?
Absolutely. Engine was built to operate as a seamless extension of in-house groups, marketing departments, working easily alongside design and ad agencies, executive leadership, and sales teams. Our objective is to strengthen the people and partners you already trust by providing additional creative leadership, strategic thinking, and executional expertise wherever and whenever it’s needed the most.
Generating creative without strategy is like playing darts blindfolded.
Meet The Founder :
Engine was founded by Robert Solis, a strategy-driven, award-winning Creative Director with over 32 years of experience helping organizations solve complex marketing challenges through strategic thinking, compelling creative, and thoughtful execution. Having built his career professionally as both a writer and an art director, Robert brings a rare combination of verbal and visual thinking that connects business strategy with messaging, brand development, and creative execution.
Over the past three decades, Robert has partnered with a wide variety of brands ranging from emerging startups to Fortune 500 companies, providing executive-level creative leadership and executional support across branding, advertising, product launches, digital experiences, sales enablement, and integrated marketing initiatives. His work has earned Advertising Awards and has been featured by CNN, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Adweek, and Advertising Age. More importantly, those experiences have provided a practical understanding of how successful marketing organizations operate, where they become constrained, and how experienced creative leadership helps teams accomplish more.
In 2001, Robert founded Engine to give organizations a more efficient alternative to the traditional agency model. Built around a carefully selected network of independent creative specialists, Engine delivered senior-level thinking and exceptional execution without passing the cost of a large agency infrastructure on to its clients. More than two decades later, Engine has entered its next evolution. By combining decades of executive creative experience with AI-native workflows, Engine has fundamentally expanded what a lean creative organization can accomplish, delivering the strategic thinking, creative breadth, and executional capacity of a much larger agency while remaining agile, highly responsive, and deeply integrated with every client it serves.
Creative. Reengineered.™
Learn how Engine’s engagement model differs from traditional creative support models, and why it was built for today’s marketing departments.