LAB / FEATURE / NOV 2, 2026
Hoydich Advertising,
the back catalog.
Fourteen campaigns and ad ideas, 2009 to 2026. None of them is scored here as a hit or a miss. Each one is read for what it was exploring at the time: the question behind it, what it tried, and where that thread runs now.
Written Monday, Nov 2, 2026, about 8:30 PM PT. Sources read the same evening.
Concept work. Almost none of these ran as paid media, and the pages they live on say so. Not an official City of El Segundo page.
The campaigns
What each one was exploring
1. theDigitalNews.TV
June 2009 · a WordPress.com blog at adsales.wordpress.com
- The question
- What is digital advertising turning into, and can you learn it by reading the trade out loud?
- What it tried
- A small group blog of ad-industry news with the tagline “Stats. Metrics. Articles. Resources. Trends. For Digital Media.” One June 8, 2009 post on Microsoft’s Bing launch reads “Posted by michael hoydich.” The post covers Bing showing up inside TV shows and on Hulu, including a telethon-style spot it calls a “Bing-a-thon.”
- What it carries forward
- Another post on the same blog argued that “Online advertising will work even better if there is an interactive creative revolution.” Seventeen years later, the creative on this page was mostly drafted by AI models working from his briefs. That is one kind of interactive creative revolution.
listingSource: “Microsoft readies Bing-a-thon,” June 8, 2009 and the blog’s front page. Read Nov 2, 2026. The post is a repost; its original article is credited to another writer.
2. PointCast launch week
April 19 to 25, 2026 · pointcast.xyz
- The question
- Can a crew of AI agents run a go-to-market overnight while the founder sleeps?
- What it tried
- A seven-day release sprint planned a launch “across five channels,” named in the plan as “Product Hunt + Farcaster + X + Nouns + HN.” Overnight sprints then added share cards, a five-chip share row and a drafted Show HN post, under a standing rule that “cc never posts on Mike's behalf.”
- What it carries forward
- The honest count. The site’s Friday visitor race closed at “0 entries,” and the write-up said so on the wire: “The town didn't go viral overnight. It got more itself again, in a different way.” Publishing the zero, not hiding it, is the habit every later page on this list keeps.
listingSources: PointCast block 0321, Apr 19 and block 0361, Apr 25. Read Nov 2, 2026. Whether the Show HN post ever went up is unconfirmed.
3. Nouns Cola
April 22 to July 12, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/nouns-cola
- The question
- What if you made the campaign before the can, and let the ads tell you what the product should be?
- What it tried
- An operating board, a match-3 game, a Spotify listening room with a “sponsored by Nouns Cola” line, a launch sprint aimed at taste-panel and preorder signal, then posters. Set 02 was four single ads, Hero, Night, Pop and Mural, made with ChatGPT image generation. Dated posters followed into July, each from a one-line scene such as “beach parking lot after pickleball, cooler open, golden hour.”
- What it carries forward
- The case study names the idea in one line: “Nouns Cola started as language before it started as liquid.” Its rule of thumb: “Use AI to make the project visible early. Then use human judgment to decide which parts deserve to become real.” That order of operations shows up in nearly every concept after it.
listingSources: PointCast block 0338, Apr 22, 0339, Apr 26, 0394, May 5, 0395, May 5, 0459, poster dated Jul 11; poster set 02. Read Nov 2, 2026. Nouns Cola is a concept; no can has been produced.
4. Saturday, Rebranded
July 27, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/25/2029
- The question
- If you play famous creative director for a day, what do you change first: the logo, or the place?
- What it tried
- PointCast took its college-football Top 25 and gave every school an original abstract mark, an imagined 2029 stadium move and repairable student gear, as an unofficial design exercise.
- What it carries forward
- The answer was in the subtitle: “the sport already has brands; what it needs are better places.” Brand work as a way to talk about places is the same move the El Segundo concepts make three months later.
listingSource: PointCast block 0524, Jul 27. Read Nov 2, 2026. Unofficial and not endorsed by any school or conference.
6. Nouns Money
October 2, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/nouns-money
- The question
- Can money itself be the campaign: something you collect, carry and trade for the story?
- What it tried
- A catalog of 100 notes built on CC0 Nouns art, fourteen currency studies, “three campaign posters and two US Letter print-proof PDFs,” plus a City Atlas and community campaign under the line “Every city starts somewhere.” The rule on every page: “Art trades only, never cash.”
- What it carries forward
- The best note came from the build itself: “One good afternoon is a better founding promise than a giant network.” Two weeks later the same idea grew into a plan for paper notes signed under the house brand line “Enjoy.”
listingSources: PointCast block 0655, block 0656 and block 0711, Oct 19. Read Nov 2, 2026. Nothing is minted or for sale.
7. El Segundo Motors
October 17, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/el-segundo-motors/
- The question
- What would an ad for a car the town builds together sound like, before there is a car?
- What it tried
- A speculative beach-friendly electric car brand, with five campaign concepts: “The Luxury of Twenty-Five,” “Built where satellites are born,” “Plug in the party,” “Link Six” and “Your time is the currency.”
- What it carries forward
- The house philosophy got written down here for the first time: “Hoydich Advertising treats every ad as an invitation.” The page’s own section header says it shorter: “Every ad is an invitation.”
listingSources: PointCast block 0702 and the case study. Read Nov 2, 2026. Vehicles unbuilt; illustrations are AI-generated.
8. Hoydich Play / SIGNALSAURS
October 18, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/hoydich-play/
- The question
- Can one character carry two campaigns at once, one for families and one for grown-up collectors?
- What it tried
- A toy-company concept around a robot dinosaur, with a brand book, research and two ads. For families: “Small robot. Big afternoon.” For collectors: “Grow up. Keep playing.” The hero line over both: “Make room for play.”
- What it carries forward
- Splitting one product into two honest audiences, each with its own four words. The page is clear that it is “a creative and research archive, not an offer for sale.”
listingSources: PointCast block 0704 and the archive. Read Nov 2, 2026.
9. Staycamp
October 18, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/staycamp/
- The question
- Can a brand make staying home, or riding out a power outage, feel like a trip?
- What it tried
- “A home camping brand concept” with a water planner, a 52-card activity deck, printable neighbor cards, and a launch kit of “poster concepts, pouch labels, welcome-email drafts and an FAQ.”
- What it carries forward
- An ad kit that is also a useful tool. The planner and the porch cards work whether or not the brand ever exists, and “nothing is for sale.”
listingSource: PointCast block 0707. Read Nov 2, 2026.
10. PointCast Guides, the print run
October 20, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/guides/ads
- The question
- Can an ad recruit people instead of selling something?
- What it tried
- Thirteen magazine pages credited to “Hoydich Advertising, El Segundo, California, 2026,” built from squares, for a guide network that needed one human per topic. A few of the lines: “About time.” “Every block needs a Guide.” “Orange slices are a logistics problem.” “WANTED: one human per topic.”
- What it carries forward
- The house ad as a help-wanted sign. The page calls them “house ads for PointCast only,” with “No placements bought.” Concept, copy and layout are credited to Claude Opus 5.5; the ocean art is Michael Hoydich’s Midjourney work.
listingSources: PointCast block 0716 and the print campaign. Read Nov 2, 2026.
11. Radio El Segundo print kit
October 22, 2026 · pointcast.xyz/radio-network/print
- The question
- How do you promote an audio project with paper, before it makes a sound?
- What it tried
- Eight printable sheets for a planned community station: a Main Street poster, a pocket schedule card, a neighbor-voice flyer with tear-off tabs, an underwriting one-pager, a network map, a tuning guide, bumper stickers and door hangers. The kit’s own headline: “Paper for a station that isn’t on yet.”
- What it carries forward
- Rules for the ads themselves. Underwriting gets a name, what it is and where, with “No prices, discounts” or “call now.” Every sheet says the station is not on air, and the kit says “Ask before you post anything.”
listingSources: PointCast block 0741 and the print kit. Read Nov 2, 2026. Nothing is on air.
12. Industry Next
Reviewed Oct 24, 2026 · industrynext.xyz, with a local page at elsegundo.xyz/industry-next/
- The question
- Can the agency turn into a studio that teaches the work, so a client leaves with the workflow and not just the ad?
- What it tried
- A studio described as “Michael Hoydich’s independent AI and creative studio, based in El Segundo and open to work beyond it,” with the positioning “Useful tools, playable worlds and considered objects; strategy, design, code and culture.” Its published formats are a Working Session, a Build Day and a five-week Starter Kit. The local page adds three proposed offers, one of them “Marketing AI: one campaign, made repeatable.”
- What it carries forward
- The house style, sold as a service. The marketing offer promises “a reusable research → draft → review → publish workflow with named owners” and rules out “guaranteed leads, sales, ROAS, viral reach or autonomous publishing.” Its Nouns Money production desk asks “what happens after an image exists,” the same question entry 6 left open.
listingSources: Industry Next on this site its services file, reviewed Oct 24, 2026, and the Nouns Money production desk entry on Projects. industrynext.xyz itself turns away automated readers, so its wording here comes from those pages. The offers are proposals; no client results are claimed or checked.
13. The Hoydich Advertising Division
October 25, 2026 · elsegundo.xyz/lab/
- The question
- What happens when the ad agency is a set of bots, each trained on a different school of advertising?
- What it tried
- Grok Bot creative agents he calls the Hoydich Advertising Division (HAD), each writing in a famous agency style: Think Small, Big Idea, Attitude, Provocateur, Viral Stunt and Culture Hack. The Think Small desk drafted four concepts for this site, rendered by ChatGPT and Grok, as “a branding campaign, not a sale.”
- What it carries forward
- A working agency with a name, a roster and a lab notebook. Both image tools drew the 25-mile ring far too small, which is now a known bug to fix on the next run.
listingSource: We asked AI bots for a Vanity Fair ad, this site, Oct 25, 2026. No media was bought.
14. Hype Kills
Date unconfirmed · hypekillsnyc.com
- The question
- Unconfirmed. The name reads like an answer to the hype cycle, but no public source says what it set out to do.
- What it tried
- A New York project in the Hoydich orbit, at its own domain. Its site turns away automated readers, and web searches for the name and the domain turned up nothing about it. So this page can’t say what it made, when, or who it was for.
- What it carries forward
- A placeholder in the catalog. A PointCast block from April 2026 makes a similar argument in its headline, “hype is dead, craft is the trade,” but it doesn’t mention Hype Kills, so the two are not linked here.
listingSources: none that describe it. Checked Nov 3, 2026: the domain, two web searches, PointCast blocks, and this site’s own files. Related only by theme: PointCast block 0169.
The through line
Our read, not a source’s
- Ads as invitations. From the guide pages to the radio flyers, most of these ads ask a person to show up, help or play, more than they ask anyone to buy.
- The campaign comes first. Nouns Cola set the order: make the thing visible, then decide what deserves to be real. The car, the toy and the camp kit all follow it.
- House ads, on purpose. Nearly all of this ran on his own sites, for his own projects. That keeps the cost near zero and the experiments fast.
- The labels are part of the style. “No placements bought.” “Not on air.” “Not an offer for sale.” Saying what a thing isn’t has become a recognizable part of the voice.
- The agency got smaller and more numerous. In 2009 it was a person reading the trade. In 2026 it is a roster of models with named desks, and a person who says yes or no.
Not in here yet
What we looked for and couldn’t check
hypekillsnyc.com and industrynext.xyz turn away automated readers, so nothing on this page is quoted from them. Industry Next is covered through this site’s own page about it. Hype Kills is listed above with no description, because no public source gives one. We found no public record of his street-sticker designs or of ad work from his New York years, so they are left out rather than guessed at. If you have a dated, public link to an earlier Hoydich campaign, send it through tips & corrections and it can join the catalog.
About this page
Labels, provenance, corrections
listingmeans the claim comes from the project’s own published page. Most of these pages are Michael Hoydich’s own, so they describe his work in his projects’ words. Quotes are copied from the sources linked under each entry. “The question” and “What it carries forward” are this page’s reading of each project, not claims made by the sources.
Drafted by Claude (Opus 5.5) from 20 cited pages, read Nov 2, 2026, and checked by Claude against each source. Entries 12 and 14 were added Nov 3, 2026 from this site’s Industry Next page and services file, PointCast blocks and web searches. No second model has checked it yet. Michael Hoydich asked for this feature on Nov 2, 2026. No images from the campaigns are reproduced here; follow the links to see them.
Corrections. Send the URL, the claim and a supporting source through tips & corrections. Corrections are dated on the page.