Headquarters
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Where the agency was founded in 2007. Finance, client relations, creative, and the long-running John Deere and Performance Food Group accounts all run out of HQ.
~$~/about.tsorigin
the_nine — since 2007
An agency built in two acts.
Twenty years building digital for some of America’s most recognized brands — and one deliberate pivot, in 2026, to rebuild the practice around AI agents. Same senior people. New operating system.
act_one — 2007
One laptop, one conviction.
The Nine was founded in 2007 by Robby White in Tuscaloosa, Alabama — a single-laptop practice run out of a one-bedroom apartment.
Robby came at it sideways. An Auburn architecture grad, he carried the discipline of getting the foundation right before the elevation. That instinct — structure first, surface second — became the agency’s working DNA. The work compounded. One client became three. Three became a team. The team became a roster: John Deere (with us since 2020), Performance Food Group (since 2019), and a long line of credit unions, CPG brands, and regional institutions in between.
Two decades on, the team is 30 people across Tuscaloosa and Portland — and the work has been recognized at every level we’ve put it forward for: an Inc 5000 induction, Google’s top partner tiers, and an ADDY for the John Deere Warrior Tractor campaign.
act_two — 2026
We rebuilt the agency around agents.
The pivot wasn’t cosmetic. We tore up the org chart and rebuilt it around the assumption that AI agents do the work that junior staff used to.
Research. Drafting. Optimization. Monitoring. Reporting. The boring middle of every engagement — the part that used to absorb most of the budget and most of the timeline — is now run by an agent layer that a senior practitioner supervises.
Here’s the wager: a senior practitioner running an agent stack will outpace a traditional pyramid agency team 2-to-1 on the same budget. Same quality bar. Twice the throughput. Half the meetings. We bet the agency on it because the math is no longer close.
our_values
What we stand on.
Three things, in order.
01.
Love God
Our work has a why. Keeping that perspective at the front keeps the ego in check and the craft honest — for the team, and for every client who hires us.
02.
Love People
Internal and external, no distinction. The way we treat each other is the way we treat the people who hire us. If the experience of working with us doesn’t feel a little different, we’re doing it wrong.
03.
Love What We Do
Designers who care about a kerning detail. Engineers who notice a log line that shouldn’t be there. Strategists who keep thinking about the brief in the shower. Caring shows up in the product.
recognition
Earned, not asserted.
- 2020
ADDY — American Advertising Federation
Awarded by AAF Tuscaloosa for our work with John Deere on the Warrior Tractor campaign. February 2020.
- ongoing
Google Partner Agency
Recognized across Search, Display & Video, and Shopping — the partner tiers Google reserves for agencies actually moving spend, not just certified to talk about it.
- —
Inc 5000 list
Inducted onto the Inc 5000 list of fastest-growing private companies in America — a side effect of compounding client relationships, not a goal we chased.
locations
Two offices. One team.
West Coast
Portland, Oregon
Leadership, delivery, and the AI-native build. Where Robby, Brent, Andrew Marshall, and Brian sit — close to the kind of product and brand work that’s reshaping how digital gets made.
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brand smartsource
audience credit_unions
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Our sister practice: SmartSource.
SmartSource Solutions is the credit-union-focused practice inside The Nine — over 20 years of experience as a CUSO before joining The Nine, with nearly 300 credit union clients. Pixel-perfect websites, private-cloud hosting, and seriously strong security. Same senior people, same accountable system — tuned to the regulatory and member-experience realities of how credit unions actually operate.
Visit SmartSource→what’s_next
Where we’re going.
The bet is simple: AI-native agencies will define the next decade of marketing services — and we’d rather be the ones building that than the ones being disrupted by it.
That means investing in the agent stack, the tooling, and the senior bench that runs it — and being honest with prospective clients about which problems an AI-native team is actually better at solving and which ones it isn’t. Robby’s writing about the pivot publicly as it happens.
On the side, a portion of agency proceeds funds SproutWorks — Robby’s mission to employ men and women coming out of homelessness. Same conviction as Act One, scaled out: the work has a why, and the why is people.
Want to put us to work?
get_started
~$nine init --audit
Start with an Insight Genesis audit. Six weeks. Fixed scope. A written diagnosis of where your marketing actually stands — and what it would take to move it. If we don’t think you need us, we’ll say so.