In the competitive environment of today’s marketing industry, many agencies tend to differentiate themselves based on minor improvements and fragmented offers. Joe Yakuel has found that this approach misses the most important structural issue that most marketing agencies fail to recognize. Prior to founding WITHIN in 2015, he worked as a marketing manager in major organizations like Quidsi and The Vitamin Shoppe. The main issue he noticed while working there was that departments responsible for branding, performance, creative, and media lacked coordination and optimization for common purposes. As a result, this led to poor results, inefficient processes, and lost revenue opportunities.
To solve this problem, Yakuel founded WITHIN with a clear vision: marketing should not be divided into separate brand and performance functions, but connected through measurable business goals. His approach brought together data-driven strategy, creative development, and business accountability in a model now commonly referred to as “performance branding.” At a time when many marketers treated brand building and performance marketing as separate disciplines, Yakuel saw their combination as a competitive advantage for growth-focused businesses. This philosophy later gained broader recognition in the market under the term “brandformance.”
Since founding WITHIN, Yakuel has helped advance the performance branding approach across the industry. Today, many companies, from DTC startups to enterprise brands, apply similar principles to connect marketing investment more directly to revenue and business outcomes. By developing a model that was both timely and scalable, Yakuel positioned himself as an early leader in performance branding and built WITHIN into a partner for brands looking to align creative, media, and measurement around growth.
It may be said that Yakuel’s main achievement is his skill at creating systems that can operate effectively for a long period. For instance, after founding WITHIN, he decided to implement some processes to enable scalability and efficiency. Previously, his agency followed a traditional startup approach, which included team-based work and shared knowledge between its members. However, when the number of employees exceeded 50, he decided to formalize operations in order to optimize the agency’s services.
Namely, Yakuel introduced standardization, documented processes to provide consistency, assigned specific responsibilities to people in order to promote accountability, and developed a reporting mechanism to track important business metrics. By developing this approach, Yakuel managed to transform a creative agency into a powerful growth engine capable of delivering results consistently. It means that all its activities are integrated, including strategy, operations, and analysis of business metrics.
As for this skill, it can be traced back to other aspects of Yakuel’s entrepreneurial path. Having graduated from Tulane University with a bachelor’s degree in Finance and obtained a Master’s degree from the NYU Stern School of Business, he started trying different business opportunities. He was not always successful, as his ideas related to a contact lens store and investment research had no prospects. However, he did not give up and went on.
Eventually, one of his ventures proved itself very successful. It was a business involving a custom fireplace eCommerce website that became profitable during its first week of operation and reached $5 million in sales. This venture convinced him of the importance of direct alignment between marketing activities and revenue generation, which is now incorporated into WITHIN’s strategy.
Moreover, in 2020, Yakuel co-founded another business called brkfst.io – a proprietary platform aimed at allowing brands to create and test high-performance user-generated content in large volumes. This idea originated from the necessity of coping with the shortage of such material that exists in a traditional agency environment. Therefore, Yakuel expanded his system approach to the creative production domain.
Currently, Yakuel focuses on the development of the company’s existing business model and its scaling. For instance, he seeks to increase WITHIN’s capabilities in consideration-stage media to offer an end-to-end solution. Also, he plans for WITHIN to explore different vertical markets, like health care, and to develop AI-enabled solutions to improve both creation and optimization processes. Additionally, the company intends to expand internationally to accommodate the increasing number of global clients.
Written in partnership with Tom White
