But Novus is also attracting C-suite talent from major holding company agencies. Novus’ latest hire came in September when Paul DeJarnatt’s joined as vp, managing director of digital, following an 18-year tenure across various Publicis agencies including Starcom, Performics and most recently Digitas, where he had been senior vp of media.

Ironically it was Novus’ attention to metrics detail in the oldest of all media — print — that first got it noticed in the early 2000s as a newspaper planning and buying shop, said Melony Rios, Novus’ CEO, whose own tenure at the agency spans more than 20 years. Rios said the application of data and rigor created, in essence, an early form of programmatic buying of newspapers that led the agency to be the largest print media buyer by gross billings at that time.

“We had gathered newspaper data down to the sub zip code level and, and built software that allowed us to aggregate millions and millions of circulation data — subscriber data, sales data from our clients, first-party and third-party syndicated data — and organize it in a way with a level of speed that allowed us to create plans anywhere from a few hundred stores to 14,000 stores in a matter of minutes,” explained Rios.

She said that approach generated improved results for clients ranging from 30-300 percent. “It was one of the reasons that we’ve kept 95% of all the clients we’ve ever had for more than seven years — one client for over over 20 years,” said Rios.

That discipline pivoted to a digital-first shop, to the point where print (though still a discipline) is no longer emphasized even if it remains about 40 percent of the media spend (of the remaining 60 percent, two out of three dollars is spent on digital properties).