If you work across Coegi, RADaR, Saltwater, VSA or any team in the MTP network, you already know the drill with Creative Brand Identity: point it at a client or prospect, wait for the deep dive, get back a comprehensive report you can build a strategy on. It’s thorough. It’s also not built for the moment when someone on a call asks “what’s this brand actually doing now?” and you need an answer in minutes, not days.
That’s the gap Resident Advisor closes. Version 1.0 is live today, and it’s worth understanding what it is, who it’s for, and why we built it as its own product instead of bolting it onto CBI.
What it actually is
Resident Advisor is a standalone tool for fast, grounded analysis of one or more websites. You give it URLs and a structured ask (what kind of read you want, who it’s for, how deep to go) and it pulls live content from those pages, optionally enriches with performance data, and hands back a decision-oriented answer. Then you keep going: follow-up questions stay in the thread, grounded in what came before, instead of starting over.
It is explicitly not a chatbot with a search bar bolted on. The structure is the point. The same discipline that makes CBI reports useful is baked into a tool built for iteration speed.
Who this is for
This is an internal tool first. If your day involves any of the following, it’s built for you:
- Strategy and account teams prepping for a pitch or QBR who need a quick, evidence-based read on a prospect’s or client’s digital presence, not a full CBI pull, just enough to walk into the room prepared.
- Creative teams pressure-testing a brand read before committing real production time to a direction.
- Client Strategy / DAs who want a fast competitive scan across a handful of sites without spinning up a full engagement.
- Anyone who’s found themselves manually digging through a competitor’s site, screenshotting things, and trying to synthesize it under a deadline.
Why it’s structured the way it is
A few things worth knowing about how it works, because they’re not incidental — they’re the actual value:
- Saved clients and personas. You can save a client once (shared across the team, or private to you) and reuse it. Personas let you shape the answer for the actual decision-maker you’re serving — a CMO read is not a performance-marketer read, and Resident Advisor treats that as a real input, not an afterthought.
- Your own documents count. Upload a client’s brief, notes, or existing research, and it gets pulled into the advisory alongside live site content — so the answer isn’t just what’s public, it’s grounded in what you already know.
- Social presence, discovered automatically. Point it at a site and it’ll find the brand’s LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube, and sample what’s there as background.
- It remembers across threads. Prior advisories you’ve run get surfaced as context on new ones, so insight compounds instead of resetting every time.
Why standalone, and why now
We started building this as a CBI feature. It became clear fast that the workflow is genuinely different, CBI is for when a decision needs certainty and can wait a day; Resident Advisor is for when you need to move now and can graduate into a full CBI pull later if the stakes warrant it. Same underlying philosophy ::: structured inputs, evidence over vibes ::: different tempo.
This is v1.0, not the finished product. Retrieval, memory, and the CBI hand-off will keep getting sharper. For now: if you’ve been doing manual competitive digging by hand, or waiting on a full CBI turnaround for a question that didn’t need one, give Resident Advisor a try.