About
Safemode was founded by Adam Kobi. The bio below covers the career that led here. The sections after it cover how the business works and the principles it runs on.
How Safemode started
Our first kid was born in 2020. By 2021 we needed a nanny, and even with two incomes the cost was putting us in the negative most months. I started consulting on the side to close that gap. By the time our second arrived and daycare costs stacked on top, what started as a stopgap had become a real business.
How We Work
Built by an operator, not a salesperson.
Most agencies are run by people who haven't logged into an ad platform in years. The work gets handed down, strategy by senior buyers, execution by juniors, oversight by someone who only sees the dashboards. Safemode is the opposite. The person designing your strategy is the person in the account. I started as an SEM analyst and the day-to-day account work has never left my job description.
Reporting that survives scrutiny.
Every Safemode engagement comes with reporting infrastructure built or audited to your spend level. We validate every conversion event, reconcile what the platforms claim against what your CRM and analytics actually show, and document the deltas so the numbers in the deck match the numbers in the business.
Performance over contracts.
Engagements are month-to-month. We've kept clients for years because they wanted to stay, not because they were locked in. If we're not earning the retainer in measurable lift, you should be free to leave.
What I keep finding
When I come into a paid media program, it usually falls into one of two shapes. The first is a Frankenstein inherited from years of agency hands or piecemeal in-house ownership: pieces built at different times by different people, never reorganized as the brand grew. Campaigns overlap, conversion actions double-count, and naming conventions disagree across platforms.
The second is the opposite. A clean in-house build from a smart but small team that's now hit a ceiling. Well-organized, well-intentioned, but missing the strategic pressure-test that a senior outside operator brings, and usually missing the measurement layer that turns optimization from a platform conversation into a business one.
Most of the time neither shape is anyone's fault. Accounts grow with the brand. The people who built them were learning the business at the same time they were learning the platforms. The result either way: structure that worked when the brand was smaller doesn't fit anymore, and no one has had the time, or the experience at scale, to rebuild it.
My background comes from places where organization isn't optional. Disney's product catalog was deep enough that I still know every Disney princess in alphabetical order. Each had her own search campaign rather than living under a generic "princesses" category, because the product depth and brand treatment varied widely from one to the next, and pooling them would have averaged away the structure that mattered. Yahoo gave me a window into how brands like Nike, Adidas, Macy's, and Nordstrom organize their paid search at scale. Scaling ecoATM's budgets from seven figures to eight required proving out digital attribution in an age of reduced click-level visibility, which we did with carefully designed geo incrementality tests. At those spend levels, an account that isn't organized produces decisions you can't defend, reports your CFO can't trust, and a team that can't pick up where you left off. Organization is what I lead with on every engagement. It's what makes tracking, reporting, and ultimately performance possible.
Safemode rebuilds the foundation. Account structure that matches your spend level. Conversion and attribution wired so the data flows cleanly into reporting you can defend in front of a CFO. Optimization decisions made on real business outcomes, not platform-attributed ROAS.
Adam Kobi, Founder
I've been running search and paid media since 2009, most of it inside companies you've heard of: Disney, Yahoo, CBS, ecoATM, and currently Farmers.
The pattern across every role: I keep getting hired to fix paid media that's either underbuilt or actively bleeding money.
The career
Started at Disney Store in 2011 as SEM Analyst, then Online Marketing Associate, managing a multi-million-dollar SEM budget. Increased ROI 28% year over year, restructured the product feed, and made friends with the engineering team. The work tends to move faster when a small data fix can happen in a hallway conversation instead of a ticket. (A habit that's served me well ever since.)
Moved to Yahoo in 2014 as Senior Creative Strategist, then Senior Account Manager. Ran paid search for 30+ retail advertisers including Macy's, Nike, Adidas, and Levi's. Quarterly business reviews, multi-variant testing, the discipline of being responsible for someone else's spend.
Joined CBS Interactive as Marketing Manager in 2016, during the streaming wars. Grew daily active users 120% year over year for CBS All Access (now Paramount+) through a mix of paid social, paid search, and a lot of late nights running real-time bid management during election night coverage.
Spent seven years at ecoATM and Gazelle (2018 to 2025), promoted from Digital Marketing Manager to Sr. Marketing Manager to Marketing Director, scaling budgets from seven figures to eight. Pitched a $1 minimum payout promo that grew the lowest-tier device collections from 12% to 27% of total volume. It started as a one-month test and became part of the business model.
Currently a senior paid media lead at Farmers Insurance, where I led the rebuild of their Google Ads program from a negative 20-to-40-percent ROI into a positive 20-to-40-percent ROI. Google Impact Award submission pending. Farmers is also the regulated- industry case study on this site, and the work keeps me in current operator chops at a $400M+ ad-spend scale, the kind of depth that's hard to maintain from outside a brand of that size.
Team
Adam Kobi
Founder
Running paid media since 2009 across Disney, Yahoo, CBS, ecoATM, and Farmers Insurance. Founded Safemode in 2021. Every engagement runs through me, by design.
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