About First Position Digital
Our Story
Based in Chicago, First Position Digital was founded in 2020 to help middle-market brands win business through paid digital advertising. That was a good place to start. It isn't where the work ended up.
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Search changed. Your customers stopped typing keywords and started asking questions from ChatGPT, to Gemini, to Perplexity, to Google's own AI Overviews. They form opinions about who's worth their time before they ever reach a homepage. The top of the funnel moved into channels no brand owns.
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Most agencies responded by adding "AI" to their capabilities deck and carrying on. We rebuilt how we work instead. Today FPD runs paid media, organic search, and AI discovery as one connected system — The Discovery Orchestra — because treating them as three separate workstreams is what's breaking for most marketing teams right now.
Built for the middle market
We work with brands big enough to have real budgets and real complexity, but not big enough to absorb a holding-company agency's overhead. That's a specific place to sit, and it shapes everything: senior practitioners on every account, no junior handoff after the pitch, and recommendations sized to what you can actually execute.
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We also work as a white-label partner to other agencies who need AI-search and paid-media depth they don't have in-house.
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Humans embracing technology as a tool
A lot of advertising agencies are still nervous about AI. Worried it'll replace them. Worried clients will figure out which parts of the work it's doing that they were overcharging the client for.
We're not.
The team at First Position Digital uses AI every day, when applicable, because it makes the work sharper, faster, and more accountable. We use it to spot patterns in campaign data that would take a human a week to surface.
We use it to keep your brand visible inside the AI tools your customers are now searching with. The technology keeps changing. Our job is to know what to do with it, on your behalf.​