About
Twenty years on one account. That is the agency.
Pine Knob Solutions is a Michigan marketing company. We plan the work, build the sites and tools the work needs, and we stay on the account. The founder still does the work.
Most shops sell a roster. Strategy in one seat. Design in another. A developer on a contract. A media buyer who has never stood in the field they are advertising. Then the account gets handed down.
We sell a stack.
The talent stack
Scott Adams’ point is simple: you do not have to be world-class at one skill. You become rare by getting very good at several skills that almost never show up in the same person.
That is the firm.
Marketing
Twenty years on a live Michigan account. Ads, listings, calendar, story, site, map. The unglamorous work, repeated until people know when to come.
Design
Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Formal training on the visual side, then years of putting that training on pages that have to convert a weekend crowd.
Systems
It started in high school: custom machines so a FIRST robotics team could finish a frame. It became sites, maps, dashboards, and software that matches how a business already runs.
Discipline
Navy. The detail work from those years is not on this page. The standard is.
Place
Michigan, on purpose. The name is local. The work is built for the way this market actually moves.
One founder. Those five skills. That combination is the product.
A marketing company that can also ship the site, the map, and the dashboard does not have to wait on a vendor to make the promise real. That is why the stack beats a roster.
Twenty years is authority
Agencies put “20 years” on the About page because the LLC is old. The people doing the work are often not.
Our twenty years is the work.
Michigan Antique Festival came with no website and no social. The job was to market a show people used to find by habit and paper. We ran the marketing for more than two decades. Then we rebuilt miantiquefestival.com. Then we built map.miantiquefestival.com, the Treasure Map: a statewide map of shops, malls, and festival weekends.
The public record this year: 252,000 active users.
That is not a campaign. That is a practice. Authority is what you get when the same shop is still accountable after two decades, and the numbers sit on the server, not in a brochure.
How the stack was built
1. Mid-nineties
Hardware
David Edens built high-end systems so his FIRST robotics team could render animations. Hardware first, because the software needed something fast enough to finish a frame. That was the start.
2. Pittsburgh
Design
Art Institute of Pittsburgh. Formal training on the visual side. The work after that never split cleanly into art or engineering. The festival sites and the dashboards still sit in that overlap.
3. Service
Navy
Then the Navy. He came home to Michigan and put the same discipline into civilian systems.
4. Home
The account
Michigan Antique Festival. Over twenty years of marketing for a show that started with nothing online. The redesign of the public site, then the Treasure Map, is what you can go verify. 252,000 active users this year.
What a marketing company with this stack actually does
We do not restart the brand every spring.
We run the marketing that has to keep working when the season turns. We design the site that has to hold the traffic when the marketing works. We build the map and the tools the operation actually runs on. The public piece you can verify is the Treasure Map at map.miantiquefestival.com: statewide shops, malls, and festival weekends.
Unique software and web are not a second business. They are how the marketing stays.
If you want the same kind of stay
Tell us what is broken or missing. A site, a map, a dashboard, or the long marketing job. We will tell you if it is a fit.
David reads the notes.