On Stage at Whalies 2026: What It Felt Like to Share the True Classic Story
I've been in performance marketing for a long time. I've sat across from CMOs, stood in front of media teams, and walked clients through campaign post-mortems more times than I can count. But sharing the stage at Whalies 2026 — in front of a room full of some of the sharpest ecommerce operators in the industry — and talking about what we actually built with True Classic was something different.
I'm grateful. Genuinely.
The session was moderated by Yaakov Komaiko, VP of Design at Triple Whale, and I was joined by Bryan Cano, former Head of Marketing at True Classic and founder of Tempo. Together, the three of us walked through how we leaned into AI — not as a buzzword, not as a future-state roadmap item, but as a live, functioning part of how we run media today.
The framing Yaakov set was perfect: this wasn't a product demo. It was a real-world conversation about what it takes to decide to automate, what you build the automation on top of, and what you learn when you actually do it.
How This Partnership Came Together
The relationship between RealEyes, True Classic, and Triple Whale didn't come from a pitch deck or a partner program. It came from doing the work together, every day.
We were all three using Triple Whale's platform — leveraging it as our measurement and attribution backbone — and we naturally formed a daily team alignment on development and direction. What started as a shared operating cadence became a shared product vision: could we take the signals Triple Whale was surfacing and build automation that acted on them in real time?
The answer turned out to be yes. And the results are in the case study.
The Question the Room Kept Coming Back To
The session generated a lot of good discussion, but one question kept surfacing in different forms: "How did you get comfortable enough to fully automate — and what exactly did you hand over to the system?"
It's the right question. And it gets at something important that I think a lot of operators miss when they talk about AI in media buying: automation isn't a binary switch. It's a confidence curve.
Here's what we actually did:
We started by building clarity on the decisioning criteria — the specific rules, thresholds, and signals that a skilled human media buyer would use to make a budget or creative decision. Then we codified those into logic that could run on top of Triple Whale's data layer. The automation didn't replace judgment. It operationalized it.
What We Handed to the System
What we handed to the system: budget pacing, bid adjustments, creative rotation, and spend reallocation across campaigns based on real-time performance signals.
What we kept in human hands: strategy, persona development, creative direction, and the interpretation of results that required business context beyond the numbers.
The insight that resonated most in that room: you can only automate what you've first made explicit. If you can't articulate why a human would make a given decision, you can't automate it well. The discipline of building toward automation forced us to be clearer about our own process — and that clarity made us better even before the automation ran.
What Whalies Announced — And What We're Thinking About It
The day after the panel, Triple Whale made three product announcements that I think deserve serious attention from every ecommerce operator.
Moby 2 Is Live
Moby 2 is Triple Whale's proactive agentic AI — now available and purpose-built for ecommerce. The upgrade is meaningful: it doesn't just surface insights, it makes decisions and acts inside your accounts. Every conversation it has becomes an automation that runs the following week.
For our clients, this is directly relevant. The work we demonstrated on stage with True Classic is exactly the kind of use case Moby 2 was built to scale. We're actively evaluating how it becomes part of our standard operating workflow.
Our recommendation:
If you're a Triple Whale user, prioritize getting Moby 2 into your workflow now. The advantage goes to operators who build fluency with it early.
Moby Specialists — Starting With Moby Media Buyer
Triple Whale unveiled a new family of AI teammates built for specific jobs. First up: Moby Media Buyer, which runs Meta and Google campaigns with every decision grounded in Triple Whale's measurement layer.
We'll be direct about this: tools like Moby Media Buyer will handle more of the executional layer of media buying over time. The agencies and in-house teams that thrive will be the ones whose value lives in the strategy, creative, and insight layer — not the button-pushing layer. At RealEyes, that's where we've always focused. If anything, this accelerates the shift toward the kind of work we do best.
Our recommendation:
Be honest about where your agency or in-house team creates value that AI genuinely can't replicate. Strategy, persona development, creative intelligence, and business judgment — those compound. Execution is getting commoditized.
Compass: One Measurement System to Rule Them All
This may be the most important announcement for growth-minded operators. Compass unifies multi-touch attribution, incrementality testing, and Media Mix Modeling into one calibrated system — what Triple Whale called "the single source of truth you've been waiting for."
For years, these three approaches to measurement have lived in separate tools, separate reports, and separate conversations. Compass is a meaningful step toward resolving that fragmentation.
Our recommendation:
If you're still making budget decisions based on platform-reported ROAS alone, Compass should be on your shortlist. The brands that invest in measurement infrastructure now will make faster, better decisions than those that don't — and in a high-CPM environment, that edge matters.
A Note of Gratitude
I want to close the way I opened: with thanks.
To Yaakov and the Triple Whale team — thank you for building a platform worth believing in, and for giving us the stage to share what we built on top of it. Partnerships like this one are rare. The kind where the technology vendor and the agency and the client are genuinely building together, not just co-existing in the same stack.
To Bryan Cano — watching you articulate what RealEyes helped True Classic build, from the operator side, meant more than I can express. You and the team at True Classic took a bet on a vision for AI-driven media, and you ran with it.
And to everyone in that room at Whalies who asked hard questions and pushed us to go deeper — you made it a better conversation.
If you're thinking about what it would look like to bring this kind of approach to your own media program, we'd love to talk. Not to pitch you — to think through it with you.
RealEyes Digital is a performance marketing agency founded by alumni of Facebook and Overture/Yahoo. We specialize in paid media, creative strategy, and AI-integrated media buying for DTC and ecommerce brands.