About

An independent auditor for advertising spend.

We earn nothing from your media plan. That independence is the point: the only thing we sell is an accurate answer about which advertising worked.

The name

"Fractal" is the honest part: the math underneath Insights is non-linear, the kind of curve that repeats its own logic at every scale, which is what a fractal actually is. "Rock" started as a photograph — a real rock formation the founder had kept for years, stacked and structural in a way that looked like it belonged to the same idea. It's the mark on every page of this site.

There's a lighter reason too. The name is a nod to Fraggle Rock — a small, deliberate wink at the culture we wanted the company to have, even while the math stays serious.

How it started

In 2012, Mark Travis was introduced to Michael Wolfe as someone with a genius process for measuring advertising effectiveness across every channel — TV, radio, out-of-home, digital. It ran on a handful of extremely complex spreadsheets and software packages that larger companies have since absorbed or abandoned.

That began a partnership that still runs the company today. Mark committed to building it full-time in 2020, formalizing Michael's process into what is now Insights.

Mark Travis, Founder & CEO

Mark began his career at IBM, on the original data-dictionary project inside what was then called Marketing Systems. He went on to write the real-time statistical systems for Indoor and Beach Volleyball at the Atlanta Olympics — the stats seen on television, in print, and on the scoreboards were his. He later co-founded IBM's Lawson ERP practice and closed out his time there with the WebSphere Studio and Eclipse teams.

After IBM, he worked as a product management and technology consultant for companies including IHG Hotels, North Highland, Resilience Alliance, User Insight, and Raytheon.

He is also an IFR-rated pilot with around 1,800 hours, which is not incidental to how this product thinks. We describe traditional marketing mix modelling as a post-mortem and this as a flight controller, and that is not a borrowed metaphor. A paper map shows you where people went. An instrument panel tells you what is happening now, and lets you deviate around the weather rather than flying into it because the flight plan said so. A budget locked in last autumn is a flight plan. A hurricane is a Level 5 cell on the radar. You deviate.

"Every system I've built — Olympic scoreboards, ERP rollouts, now this — comes down to the same question: is the number actually true, or does it just look true?"

Michael Wolfe, Premier Partner

Michael is President of Clarity i2 (formerly Bottomline Analytics), Fractal Rock's implementation partner. With more than thirty years in advanced marketing analytics and effectiveness modeling, he has published papers and holds patents in the field, and has spent his career helping established brands get a straight answer on what their marketing actually earned.