20 Year Anniversary

Twenty years ago, Julie Warnecke walked away from one of the most-watched companies on the planet to start something of her own back in Indiana. She had been on the early team at Google AdWords, the product that would go on to reshape how the internet makes money. In 2006, she came home, set up at her condo, and started Found Search Marketing with one client and a contrarian idea about what an agency should actually be.

Two decades later, Found manages more than $210 million in annual media spend, generates millions of leads for clients and ranks year over year on the IBJ's Top 25 Largest Advertising Agencies list. To mark the milestone, we sat down with Julie to talk about how it started and what she is paying attention to next.

You were on the early AdWords team at Google. What did paid search actually look like back then?

AdWords was divided between AdWords Select and AdWords Premium. The team I was on built the first advertiser support function for self-service advertisers. People came to Google, signed up, put in their credit card, their keywords, their website, and launched ads. Our job was everything from approving the ads to teaching advertisers how to write better copy. We were inventing the playbook in real time.

What did Google teach you that ended up shaping how you built Found differently?

To focus on bottom-line outcomes instead of the decorative agency experience. The deck, the titles, the lunch theater, none of that moves a campaign. We went the opposite direction. We were going to roll up our sleeves, focus on performance, and skip the agency-as-spectacle part. That has remained true. It attracts a specific kind of client, and it filters out the rest.

Walk us through the early days. Day one of Found.

Day one was a referral. The first client was a documentary film company in New York. I had to figure out what to charge them with no other agency experience to compare against. I had to figure out how to build the reports, how to communicate with clients, how to run strategy sessions. I was on the outside of Google for the first time in years, and I was teaching myself how to be an agency.

The first hire was Nicholas. He cold called me while I was in the middle of building a report I was struggling with. I told him I would send him something to try as a test run. Before I got off my next client call, he had sent it back. Done. I hired him on the spot.

The first major client was ITT Tech. I saw an article about them in the IBJ and cold called the front desk. I told them I had just moved back to Indiana, I knew their space, and we should talk. They gave me one project, we knocked it out of the park, and eventually Found became their paid media AOR.

You have talked about Found being an “anti-agency.” What did you mean by that?

I never wanted to compete on the polish. I wanted to compete on the work; the outcomes. Early on, I would walk into pitch meetings without a deck. I would dress down on purpose. I wanted prospective clients to see that the people doing the work were also the people in the meeting. No handoff to a junior account manager later. No translation layer between the strategist and the client. Found was built differently, and I had every intention to be clear about that.

It is not for everyone. It was never supposed to be. For the clients who valued direct access to practitioners over front-of-the-room performance, it worked. It still does.

Nine current Found team members have been with you for 10-plus years. The leadership team averages 9.3 years of tenure. How do you keep people?

By keeping them in the work. The fastest way to lose your best practitioners is to promote them out of practice and into internal politics. Our senior team is still actively involved in client accounts. They are still the best resource for the latest, hardest questions. That is how they keep learning, and that is why they stay.

What has not changed in 20 years?

There are sand traps everywhere in paid media. There is no set-it-and-forget-it. You have to stay vigilant. That part of the job has not changed at all, and I do not think it ever will.

You have been clear about where you think paid media is going next. What are you actually paying attention to and what’s next for Found?

With AI, the cost of intelligence is collapsing to zero. That is the shift. Running great paid media has never been about the intelligence itself. It has been about the application of it, the curation, the decision about which direction to take. If AI can produce the calculation, the report, the first pass on a strategy, then the value moves to orchestration. We have to get used to saying we are valuable because we know how to orchestrate outcomes, not because we know how to build a spreadsheet.

These advancements are coming either way, and knowing how to leverage them on behalf of clients has always been our job. That job is just going to take different forms.

This does not mean our strategies can be recreated by AI on its own. The context still matters. But human-curated strategies can now be deployed and stress-tested in much faster cycles than ever before, which means the same-size team can handle more complex strategies and more rapid iterations. It is imperative that the team understands how to use these tools.

That is what we have been working on internally this year. We split the team into cohorts and pushed every one of them to experiment with Claude and Gemini inside live work. The point is not the tools. The point is the muscle. The teams that build it now will be in a completely different position 18 months from now than the teams that wait.

Found Search Marketing celebrates 20 years on June 9, 2026. Julie Warnecke can be reached for interviews and speaking engagements through Kelsey Connor, Director of Agency Marketing & Brand Strategy.