MadAveGroup

05/29/2026

A great morning on the green for a worthy cause! Some of our MadAveGroup and TouchStone Digital team members joined the 29th Annual Tee It Up For Education Golf Outing at Ironwood Golf Club in Wauseon today — supporting Sauder Village's educational programs for youth in our region.

Joe Hochgreve, Kara Koepfer, Kara McGaharan and Nathan Steinmetz were proud to be part of it. Every swing today helps create incredible learning opportunities for kids throughout our community.

05/21/2026

Checking in with Jeremy Schroeder on Day 2 of Google I/O:

Google I/O can be likened to a festival for developers. Held at the Shoreline Amphitheatre—the very same venue that first hosted Grateful Dead concerts—it served as a home base for them throughout their career. It even resembles one of their iconic logos when viewed from an aerial perspective. What I saw at I/O Day 2 were rockstars of a different domain: several big names at Google taking the stage. And much like those fiercely loyal Deadhead crowds of the past, the energy here is fueled by a collective passion of developers completely tuned into the same frequency, eagerly waiting to see where the music takes the technology next. Thank you, Mark Techson—I was thrilled to snag a photo with you, as I've watched from afar over the years.

Shoreline has now hosted ten I/O events, and it feels fitting that I’m already thinking about I/O 2027 and beyond. I guess I’m officially a fan. Another fun fact about the venue: it was built on a former garbage dump. There’s a beautiful analogy there. It makes me think about the web back in 1999 when I first started playing around with websites. While not necessarily a landfill, the early web was certainly a fragmented hodgepodge of technology where things were quickly thrown away and technologies died in real time.

Lately, it feels like that old digital scrapyard has taken a new form with the endless sea of so-called AI slop and static, unresponsive data cluttering the internet. But just like Shoreline repurposed its foundation, our industry is finding a way to build something incredible on top of it.

What that looks like in practice was scattered all over the venue today through some incredible, hands-on tech demos. I got to experience this new era firsthand, seeing how it's becoming about more than just using an app or visiting a website. Stepping into an AI-powered photo booth, trying out an agentic phone booth, ordering customized coffee, and even testing bleeding-edge Android XR glasses all offered a mind-blowing glimpse into how we might interact and compute in the VERY near future.

Lately, AI has already been supercharging our developers back home, making it easier and faster than ever for us to build beautiful, cutting-edge code behind the scenes. But the next step—the one on full display today—is enabling our clients and their end-users to benefit from these technologies directly. The future of the web is moving far beyond just a great-looking website with static information at your fingertips. Instead, we are looking at truly intelligent, interactive platforms that will bring an entirely new level of engagement to our projects moving forward.

Walking out of the amphitheater today, it’s clear that while the Bay Area might host the festival, the real work happens when we take these tools back to our own sandboxes. You don't need to be headquartered in Silicon Valley to build for the future. The takeaway from Day 2 isn't just that the technology is shifting—it’s that we have everything we need right back in Toledo to build these high-interactivity platforms ourselves. The toolkit just got a massive upgrade, and I'm ready to see what we can create with it.

05/21/2026

Strategic. Organized. Proactive. Collaborative. Adaptive.

If those five words describe you, we want to meet you. We're hiring a Marketing Manager and we're looking for someone who will genuinely love this role. Sound like a fit?

Apply today: https://jobs.madavegroup.com/

05/20/2026

Checking in with Jeremy Schroeder at Google I/O. See his thoughts on Day 1 below:

Here's the latest from Senior Web Developer, Jeremy Schroeder, at Google I/O:

I’m surrounded by Nvidia, Intel, Apple, and Cisco. Oh, and Google, of course. It’s quite a departure from life back in Toledo, but if you squint, it’s not that different. We’re building incredible things back home, too. Today, though, I took in what the Bay Area has to offer, knocked on a few palm trees, and fully immersed myself in the innovation and community at Google I/O—Day 1.

I’m accompanied by my fellow GDG Toledo organizer, Justin. Thanks to our commitment to building the developer community back home, Google gave us the opportunity to visit. We’re both avid web developers, hungry for the latest tech and tools. But we're also surrounded by a couple thousand other developers from around the world, all bringing just as many perspectives on our current landscape and where the future will take us.

That future is more unclear than ever—but exciting and promising. Unclear because the leaps we’ve taken in our industry over the past year were unexpected to most. It has brought refinement to how we use AI, something we’ve been trying to wrangle since OpenAI gave us ChatGPT a few years back. It has brought power to our industry, and the industries we serve, by enabling us to write tools for AI to comb through our data and let us visualize it in a more bespoke way.

Today, we’re able to do even more. With Google being a central player in AI and web tech in general, we take their lead and build upon it, superimposing their vision onto our own. There’s not only innovation in AI, but also in accessibility, security, and viability. Developing for the web is more powerful than ever, which is a clear win for our customers at Touchstone and MadAveGroup.

I’ll be sharing some of the nitty-gritty details with our team back in Toledo, ensuring that we’re building for the future and taking full advantage of the drops that Sundar Pichai gave us himself. Stay tuned—Google I/O Day 2 has in-depth talks and demos in store, creating a breeding ground for ideas and innovation that we’ll bring back to serve on a platter to the Midwest and beyond.

05/20/2026

This piece just won a Silver Telly Award! We made it for our friends at Fisher-Titus Medical Center.

05/20/2026

We had a blast creating an inspirational video to welcome 5th Year by Junior Achievement's newest class, celebrate this year's graduates and reconnect with alumni to see how far they've come. So proud to support this incredible event and the young people it champions. Here's to the next chapter!

05/19/2026

Our Senior Web Developer Jeremy Schroeder is heading to Mountain View, California for Google I/O, Google's flagship annual developer conference. As a co-organizer of the Toledo chapter of Google Developer Group (GDG), Jeremy was invited to attend the event AND a worldwide GDG summit on Google's campus later in the week.

Hear from Jeremy below:
I’m not usually one for travel—much to my wife’s disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good vacation, and I’d never pass up the chance to see the world’s natural wonders. But dealing with flights, summoning Ubers, navigating rental cars, and sleeping away from the comforts of home? No, thanks.

For Google I/O, though, it all becomes bearable. I’ve been an avid fan of Google since I first laid eyes on Gmail. Back then, it was a massive departure from the clunky Hotmails of the world, fundamentally changing how we interact with the web. I still have emails and life context preserved from clear back in 2006, when I first snagged an early invite to join. It was a piece of web tech that was lightyears ahead of its time, even if we take its foundational ideas for granted today.

Back in 2006, I was already building websites, and opening up the source code was how you learned the craft. Today’s web is heavily obfuscated and a thousand times more complex, but back then, there was always something to learn just by peeking behind the curtain.

Now, as I sit here on an exhausting six-hour trek from Detroit to San Jose (complete with a quick sprint through LAX), I'm reminded of why I always pick a seat right over the wing. Sure, the view of the scenery is great—looking down at the vast patchwork of Midwestern cities and villages is deeply humbling. But the wing seats offer a different kind of view. I like to see how things work. Watching the ailerons, the flaps, and feeling the roar of the engine is an opportunity to appreciate the sheer engineering that powers our world.

So here’s to Day 0 (standard array indexing joke, IYKYK). I'm incredibly excited to experience Google I/O live this year. As a Senior Web Developer at TouchStone Digital, it’s more vital than ever to absorb the innovations and developer tools Google is driving forward. We are squarely in the age of AI, technology is moving faster than ever, and I can't wait to bring a piece of that momentum back home to Toledo.

05/19/2026

Is your marketing team thriving or surviving?

You're meeting deadlines, but your strategy feels more reactive than proactive. Content is going out, but the results aren't consistent.

That's not a skill issue. It's a capacity problem.

Finding the right team to identify bottlenecks and provide workarounds can make all the difference.

05/16/2026

Ten years, countless projects and one common thread: April keeps everything moving. She has a rare talent for organizing people, schedules and strategies without ever losing sight of the details. Our staff and our clients know she can bring order to complexity. Thank you, April, for a decade of focus and leadership.

05/14/2026

AI is everywhere, and it has its advantages, but it can’t fully replace the human element of content creation. TouchStone Digital Content Developer Jessica Speweike explains why.

AI is fast, and it can learn to generate branded content. But can it truly mimic the human experience?

When it comes to adding cultural context, providing personal insight and incorporating expertise, people still dominate. Learn why a human touch still matters for content creation.

https://tinyurl.com/bdvdxezw