The Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast
Kevin Hourigan
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Conversations with Leaders and Founders of Marketing Agencies, sharing wisdom on how they built their company, lessons they wish they knew when they started, and marketing and agency strategies for the months and years ahead.
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Jun 23, 2022
On Generosity, Integrity, Raising the Goal, and Doing it NOW!
Joe Soltis, CEO, ChoiceLocal (Cleveland, OH)
Joe Soltis is CEO at ChoiceLocal, which Joe describes as “the top performing franchise growth engine” with a “money back guarantee.” The agency offers a wide scope of services for franchisors and franchisees of over 50 brands, enabling them to provide “Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI on the franchisee level” for a “small and medium size business price.”
Large clients might be parent companies of franchise systems, franchisors owning 20 or more franchise systems where each system may have from 20 to 200 franchisees – and up to as many as 6,000 internal franchise units. Small franchise systems may have 10 units. For these smaller clients, the agency facilitates franchise development, consumer, new customer, location, company, and digital talent recruitment marketing.
Joe says hiring is a challenge, especially in the franchise space. The agency needs to understand its client’s hiring needs, the kind of candidates it desires, and the historical hire rates to know the number of applicants to target . . . then reverse engineer the hire rate/cost per quality candidate by channel and implement the most effective marketing strategy to ensure future growth. Joe says they use the same channels as they do for consumer marketing (in a different order), plus some that are recruitment specific.
Joe notes that franchise operations need to beware . . . a lot of agencies will lock clients into proprietary technology solutions . . . that don’t fit. ChoiceLocal strives to find the right tools for each client to build a “win-win” ecosystem where franchisor, franchisee, and the agency all win. He says it’s important that the tool providers are companies sensitive to client needs, adaptable to a changing market, and willing to invest in “making sure that you can use their tool to provide the best in the world customer service to your end customers.”
Joe started his career working his way up for 10 years in a company that grew to serve Fortune 500 companies. At a time of great personal loss, he changed the direction of his life. In his words,
I always said I wanted to be successful so that I could help people, and that day it changed to “I don’t want to just build something; I want to help people and I want to do it now. I don’t want to be successful so that I can help people later. I want to do it now.”
Joe started ChoiceLocal with the mission “to help others” – the agency’s franchisor and franchisee partners, agency teammates (to make their dreams and aspirations reality), and people in the community.
Joe structured the agency with the goal of having employees work their 40-hours, then “unplug and leave work at work.” With a teammate Net Promoter Score in the 70s (far exceeding the “good” score, which is in the 30s), the agency has been a Top Workplace in Northeast Ohio for the past five years.
When Covid struck, the agency created a ChoiceLocal Economic Stimulus Package to help its customers “grow through the downturn,” an initiative that Joe estimates saved 30 franchisees from going out of business.
Giving back to the community is “baked into” the agency’s DNA, with 10% of profits dedicated to helping “kids in need.” Joe says the agency’s “big hairy audacious goal is to help 10,000 kids a year.” As of this interview, the agency had already helped 6,000 kids in 2022 through such things as meal programs, partnering with Habitat for Humanity to provide a home for an in-need family, and through team members’ personal volunteer work in the community. Joe says the next thing after achieving this goal would be to “raise the goal.”
Recently, the agency spun off a dental franchise, Broadview Dental Group, which Joe targets to be “the largest provider of dental care in the United States within 10 years.” Expectations are that dentists following this franchise system “can have 4.5 times the profit of a typical dental practice and only have to work three days a week to do it.” In this franchise system, a dentist maintains 100% of the business’s equity and, on retirement, can sell the franchise.
Joe can be reached on his agency’s website at choicelocal.com, by following ChoiceLocal on social media channels @ChoiceLocal, by following Joe on Twitter @helpothersjoe, or by connecting with him on LinkedIn.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Joe Soltis, CEO at ChoiceLocal based in Cleveland, Ohio. Welcome to the podcast, Joe.
JOE: Rob, great to be with you today.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about ChoiceLocal? What is the firm’s specialty? What is your superpower? What are you known for? Hit us with it.
JOE: We’re the top performing franchise growth engine. We work exclusively with franchisors and franchisees, and the reason we do that is we want to give Fortune 500 level customer service, results, strategy, and ROI, but we want to be able to do it when you look on the franchisee level at a small and medium size business price while delivering that.
When we do that, we offer a money back guarantee. We’re the first and only franchise marketing agency to offer that money back guarantee. We work with 50+ brands. We’re one of the fastest growing companies in the U.S., members of the IFA, the whole nine yards.
ROB: Wow, congratulations. There’s a certain clarity to that that is certainly appreciated. Let’s peel it back just a layer. When we think about franchise, I think some of us think about restaurants, but there are franchises of all stripes. There is plumbing. There are franchise marketing agencies, for that matter. So what does a typical customer look like? Is there a particular range of franchises, of locations? Because you could have two or two thousand. What’s a typical engagement look like?
JOE: We work with some franchise systems that are owned by what we would call a platform, like a parent company that owns franchise systems. There are some franchisors that we work with that actually own 20+ franchise systems, and within each of those franchise systems there can range anywhere between 20 franchisees on the small side and 200 on the large side. So, we’re talking within these companies 2,000-unit franchise operations, and some franchise systems that we work with even have 6,000+ franchise units within them.
Also, on the other end of the spectrum, there are franchise systems that we work with that are 10-unit franchise systems. We power them on franchise development, we power them on consumer marketing and new customer marketing for their franchisees as well as their company and locations, and we also power their talent recruitment through digital marketing to drive highly qualified applicants. Staffing is obviously a huge challenge in today’s world, and particularly within the franchising space.
ROB: That’s a little bit of a wider scope of services than I think we often hear in local marketing, especially once you get into the recruitment side. So that’s interesting. Is it the same channels for getting customers in and getting employees in? Is it different? What’s the mix of touchpoints there?
JOE: It is the same channels, used in a different order, plus there are additional channels that are recruiting specific. Obviously, there’s different job boards that are highly important in the recruiting space, and then there’s also a whole host of digital channels that can be activated, from geotargeted Google Ads to Facebook advertising. Each of them has their strengths and their weaknesses.
Our job within these franchise systems is to understand what their hiring needs are, who they’re looking to hire, what their historical hire rates are so we know how many applicants we need to drive, and then we can also reverse engineer the hire rate by channel,…
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Jun 16, 2022
How to Bring the “Little Guy” to the TOP
Rafi Arbel, President, Market JD (Chicago, IL)
Rafi Arbel is President at Market JD, an internet-based advertising that focuses its work on “increasing visibility” for small law firms specializing in personal injury and workers’ compensation cases. With the kind of clientele the agency serves, the written content has to be extremely precise and accurate. That’s why the firm currently employs 3 attorneys. Rafi is one of them.
The agency provides websites, search engine optimization, pay-per-click, reputation management, and content production. The work split is about 65% to 70% personal injury and 55% (overlapping) worker’s compensation legal firms.
Rafi says, “Everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well.” Because this work is so labor-intensive and the details are numerous and critical, Rafi believes that those “who do it well” are not only those with knowledge, but those who have built a process to ensure consistent, high-quality outcomes. People have to know what they are doing, set an end objective, figure out the tasks to get it done, assess and respond to feedback, and do it “consistently over and over again.
Because Rafi practiced law for 6 years, he has represented people. Following a passion for selling and “engaging people,” he worked for Thompson Reuters and spent a number of years selling for Findlaw and Westlaw. Then, he went back for his MBA and again, and decided to change course, this time to become an entrepreneur. With this varied background and because he has been promoting small law firms for over 20 years, he understands what lawyers do, “how they do it, and how to position them.”
In this interview, Rafi notes how SEO has changed over the years, that searching for broadhead terms, “Chicago injury lawyer” or “Nevada workers’ compensation lawyer” renders a lot of paid ads at the top of the page so that even if a firm organically appears below that in the map section or even below that, the likelihood that SEO will produce much traffic is negligible. Or the firm’s won’t show well because Google’s Local Service ads take up the top of the page, followed by Google Ads below that. A big portion of the top of the screen gets taken up by all those paid ads . . . especially on mobile. So, broadhead SEO is not of great benefit to lawyers.
What does work are longtail searches. Rafi says the great race now is to “capture the longtail searches’ to find “the corners that the big guys don’t see.”
As an example, Rafi talks about a Nevada client . . . a personal injury lawyer who, unlike his big competitors, does not have$40,000 or $50,000 a month to spend on SEO. What the attorney does have is a lot of experience representing people who have suffered sepsis and whose doctors failed to treat it correctly. Medical malpractice? Not many Nevada lawyers work in that area. By building comprehensive content to cover sepsis and medical malpractice, Market JD is carving out a unique niche for the lawyer’s business and building a moat around the lawyer’s business as well. Few competitors in that specific area will be willing to invest the resources to match this project.
Rafi says the best way to contact him is to call him at: 312.970.9353 or email him at rafi@marketjd.com. (Market JD like Juris Doctor)
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Rafi Arbel, President at Market JD based in Chicago, Illinois. Welcome to the podcast, Rafi.
RAFI: Thank you, Rob. Nice to be here.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us a little bit about Market JD, and what is the company’s superpower? What is your specialty?
RAFI: Market JD is an internet-based advertising firm. We only work for small law firms. People think that we work for lawyers; it’s much narrower than that. We really don’t work for the big firms. They have their own marketing needs that are very different. We really focus on small law firms. We do everything that they need online to increase their visibility, which means we do websites, we do search engine optimization, pay-per-click, some reputation management, and of course, the content production.
Your question was what is our superpower. What I have learned over the years is that everybody can build a website and everybody can claim they do SEO or pay-per-click well. What differentiates those who do it well from those who don’t is not just knowledge, but process. Because each of these things is so labor-intensive, and because there are so many details that have to get done right, you have to build a process behind every one of them. The process should really dictate the outcome.
If you are making sure all of your t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, then you should get a consistent, high-quality product every time, assuming you know what you’re doing. Over the years we’ve gotten feedback, like everybody else, of what works and what doesn’t work, and where Google has rewarded us and where Google hasn’t rewarded us. We’ve taken those lessons, and those have affected what we want in the sites and what we don’t want, and how our sites need to be built and the content that we need to create. Then we convert those objectives into tangible tasks that can be assigned to every person in the process.
So, our superpower is our ability to take an end objective, figure out how to get it done, and then do it consistently over and over again.
ROB: Got it. You mentioned smaller law firms. Are there any particular practice areas or geographies that you focus on? Are there any that you do not do from a practice area or geographic area?
RAFI: Historically, we’ve focused primarily on workers’ compensation and personal injury law firms. I’d say 65% to 70% is personal injury, and probably overlapping, I’d say 55% workers’ comp, because some firms do both. But we have criminal law firms, divorce law firms, business law firms. Really, generally speaking, it’s a business-to-consumer law firm – those people who don’t just have a few big business clients that they get all their recurring work from. These are people that help the individual consumer, that constantly need a new flow of cases coming in. Those are the people that need us most.
It’s not that we can’t help those that just need a law firm brochure, but what we’re really good at is improving somebody’s visibility, not just creating a brochure. We might be overkill if all you want is something that validates your existence.
ROB: As a consumer, when you mention some of those practice areas, it certainly rings to me – my perception would be that that’s largely a reflection of the marketing budget of the different types of law firms. In other words, I certainly see a lot more personal injury and workers’ comp advertising than I see let’s say business law. Is that some of the alignment between your focus and the market?
RAFI: Absolutely. Although I do find it a little – I don’t understand why some of the other practice areas don’t spend more. Yes, it is true that the potential payout for a personal injury lawyer is much greater. But what I will say is that I think the estate planners and a lot of the transactional attorneys that have the potential – or even maybe especially the civil litigation lawyers, they have potential to make a huge amount of money from a civil litigation case. If they’re representing the manufacturer that bet the business on litigation, the attorney’s fees can easily be in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
So why those attorneys don’t want to spend a few grand a month to promote themselves is beyond me. But that’s beyond probably the scope of this conversation. At the end of the day, it’s really the personal injury lawyers who are spending and who are programmed and understand the need to spend to brin…
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Jun 9, 2022
Why Citizen Branding?
Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director, Citizen Group (San Francisco, CA)
Inspired by Marc Gobé’s book, Citizen Brand: 10 Commandments for Transforming Brand Culture in a Consumer Democracy, Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group, started his agency in 2006 to work with entities committed to meaningful and measurable pro-social impact. His agency’s proposition is that organizations build brand value when they “walk their talk” and operate in ways that enhance society for their employees, shareholders, and consumers.
Robin notes that the rise of social media has created a window on organizational operations . . . companies have a harder time projecting a “corporate mirage” that “everything is okay” when people can now see what is going on, assess practices, and ask the tougher questions. Clients today include for-profit companies, nonprofit organizations, municipalities, cities, and trade associations.
Working with Amnesty International and other NGOs while he was at Chiat/Day early in his career, Robin became aware of two operational economies: “the Moneyball ad world, where money is thrown around (half a million for a 30-second spot)” and the $15k budget for creating a nonprofit PSA environment. Gobé’s book identifies the trend toward citizen branding as a convergence between these two economies.
At his agency’s inception, Robin worked with Walmart’s sustainability effort and explored how big-box retail stores needed to change their operational practices to support sustainability, creating “a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, (and produce) less waste” and a model for future initiatives with other organizations. Brands get a lift from doing the right thing, he says, both for society and for the environment.
In his early adulthood, Robin says he didn’t know that people had human rights. He says the 30 articulated in the United Nation’s post World War II Universal Declaration of Human Rights made a big impact on him.
Citizen Group is involved in a diverse range of projects. It is working with:
* Sports apparel retailer Lids on a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Initiative (They Gave Us Game) to recognize and honor early Black sports leagues.
* A group called Leading Age on the Keep Leading Life campaign to showcase the variety of caregiving and expert services available to people who are aging.
With close friend Jordan Harris, Robin shares a concern about the need to promote electric vehicles. Citizen Group commissioned a study to investigate the feasibility of shading California’s 4,000 mile aqueduct system with solar canopies to reduce evaporation, conserve water, reduce algal growth, and generate power. Annual water savings for a complete end-to-end system were estimated at 63 billion with the solar array along the aqueduct system’s existing utility corridors rather than taking up working land. A spinoff company, Solar AquaGrid, will be working Audubon Society to study environmental impacts and with the state and irrigation districts to plan the first demonstration project, and break ground on the pilot (proof-of-concept) project this fall.
Robin can be found on his agency’s website at citizengroup.com.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Robin Raj, Founder and Executive Creative Director at Citizen Group based in San Francisco, California, with some other fascinating interests as well. Welcome to the podcast, Robin.
ROBIN: Good to be here, Rob. Thank you.
ROB: Excellent to have you. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Citizen Group, and what is the firm’s superpower? What are you all known for? What do you do well?
ROBIN: Well, I started Citizen Group in 2006, and it was really inspired by a book of the same name called Citizen Brand. This is where I can give a shout-out to an author by the name of Marc Gobé. I was really moved by the book, written in about 2003. The thesis of the book is: sooner or later, all brands will have to behave as citizen brands.
That really caught me because it was like the spear in the chest moment in terms of the societal challenges we face and the responsibility brands and corporations and civil society have. It also predated, presaged, the rise of social media that has made the rise of citizen brands possible. We expect more from the brands we purchase and are loyal to. If they’re not walking their talk, it can be a liability versus when they can really take the initiative and operate in a way that enhances society for their employees, for their shareholders, for their consumers. Then that builds brand value. That was the proposition.
So I started Citizen Brand, and we’ve been working since that time with a variety of entities, for-profit companies, nonprofit orgs, municipalities, cities, sometimes, trade associations. But what they all have in common is some commitment to have pro-social impact that is meaningful and measurable.
ROB: Let’s pull into that a little bit. Give us maybe an example, if you can, of a client, of the sort of work you’ve done together, of what this looks like in action.
ROBIN: Well, in the early going, roundabout 2005-2006, I had the opportunity to work with Walmart’s sustainability effort. Those were two words that didn’t necessarily go together at the time. It raised a lot of legitimate skepticism. But in fact, under the tenure of their CEO at the time, Lee Scott, they really saw the future as it pertains to big box retail and how they would have to change their practices, be it in terms of packaging, creating a packaging scorecard – they created more of a race to the top for brands to reutilize, recycle, less waste. And many other initiatives. In fact, they formed 13 sustainability committees in their transportation, their energy, their seafood.
That’s been the model. I’ve also done a lot of work with what is now called the Great Sports Alliance, but it started with the nonprofit NRDC and the interest on the part of professional sports – the venues, the arenas, the teams – adopting sustainable practices, again, throughout their supply chain. Energy, waste, water, transportation, how they procure goods. That story needs to radiate through their internal supply chain to their external stakeholders to their consumers.
So having meaningful initiatives that then you can start to develop stories that really show the impact and the lift that brands can get from doing the right thing – that’s the common denominator. And those were two stories, ongoing, that started around the time we started Citizen.
ROB: That’s early, and I feel like some of that has not even arrived yet. Something I feel like we’re starting to hear a little bit about is measuring the environmental impact of a business and the different layers of measurement. You’re probably the expert on this and not me, but some people will say, “All of our power consumption is green energy.” It’s like, okay, but – you mentioned the supply chain, you mentioned suppliers, you mentioned up and down the organization.
So outside of the stick that may be coming on that, whether it’s in public markets or whether it’s regulatory, how do you get businesses to think about the carrot when in their own initial reaction they might say, “We do the right things here,” and it’s true in maybe the first or second order effects, but when you get to the third order effects, there’s a lot more to work on?
ROBIN: No doubt there is. And it can be challenging. But creating an initiative that you can build the sociopolitical will for, and then building on that, creates the momentum. Creating a coalition of the willing that this is the trajectory that the company or the organization wants to take is fundamental. And it’s not just environmental, by the way; it’s social impact, fundamentally.
ROB: Yeah…
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Jun 2, 2022
A Colorful Review of the Possibilities of Paint
Susan Britton, Owner/ Principal Creative Director, Britton Marketing & Design Group (Fort Wayne, IN) Susan Britton is Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group, a branding boutique agency that focuses on strategy, design, and helping its color-trended consumer goods clients better brand and market themselves.
Sue started her career at Vera Bradley and rode a 9-year growth boom where things changed so rapidly the company had to reinvent itself every six months. (Revenues increased from $10 million to $400 million.) She left Vera Bradley on such good terms that they provided her with furniture for her new company and stayed on as clients with Britton doing catalogs and marketing for them for the next 10 years until Vera Bradley went public.
Sixteen years after she left her position at Vera Bradley, Sue says the experience “gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion” – Britton’s niche market. She believes that brands “really take off” when a brand is distinctly “nuanced” in a way that shows the brand is special and the agency builds a “very highly descriptive visual expression” reinforcing the brand identity and couples that with a “strong strategy.” Done right, the created assets can be amortized over time, broadly used, and will promote a “more devoted following.”
As an example of a typical client, Sue talks about working with a number of paint companies, the importance of tracking color trends and building brand uniqueness, and the challenge of reaching out to “the do-it-yourselfers and the do-it-for-mes and then the pros.”
Some changes Sue has seen over the years are “a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly,” the need for lots of online (and often transitory) creative assets, and the flux of brands vacillating between bringing their creative work inhouse . . . and seeking an external agency. Sue’s agency has deleted some staff positions over the years and today outsources to partner vendors such less-frequently used services as building website backends or videography.
Sue is a strong believer in work-life balance. Before Covid, her agency interviewed people to discover what they valued . . . and came back with these results: “Their family, whatever that looked like. Their community. Their spirituality, whatever that looked like, or wellness. And then their environment.” She says, “They’ve circled the wagons around their family in a really, really big way.” She describes this as “the new American middle.”
Sue can be reached on her agency’s website at: bmdg.com (for Britton Marketing & Design Group), send an email off the site, or email Sue directly at: sue@bmdg.com
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Susan Britton, Owner and Principal Creative Director at Britton Marketing & Design Group based in my hometown of Fort Wayne, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Susan.
SUE: Thank you, Rob. You can just call me Sue, that’s fine.
ROB: We’ll go with Sue. Yeah, it’s excellent to have you here. I want all the Fort Wayne stories that the audience might not want to hear. But why don’t we start off first with a little bit of introduction to Britton Marketing & Design Group, and what is the firm’s superpower?
SUE: Well, we’re in Fort Wayne, Indiana because my education happened when I went to work for Vera Bradley, which is located – their headquarters are here in Fort Wayne. I joined Vera Bradley when they were about $10 million, and nine years later they were about $400 million. We tried everything, we experienced everything, and growing at that fast rate, we were reinventing every six months what we were doing. So that was a real privilege, and like I said, a great education.
Then I jumped off after about 10 years, and owner/founder Barbara Bradley Baekgaard and her partner, Pat, were really supportive when I left. They gave me furniture from the merchandising department and helped me get set up because they appreciated that they were female entrepreneurs and I wanted to be one again as well.
Then we continued to work with Vera Bradley, doing their catalogs and some marketing for the next 10 years until they went public. It really gave us a wonderful foundation to work with companies that are focused on home and colors, or fashion. We worked with Peter Millar as well for a few years, getting them on the map.
So really, our superpower, I would say, is design. It sounds very typical, but I think it’s sometimes underappreciated. I guess it’s hard to define sometimes, but when you have a brand that is really nuanced, when you have a very highly descriptive visual expression of what that brand is coupled with a really strong strategy, that’s when it operates on all cylinders and when we’ve seen brands really take off. I think people talk about it a lot in this industry – the form and function, the art and science – but it has always been true and will continue to be true.
ROB: I assume on Day 1, you were the one designer. Is that the case?
SUE: Yes. [laughs] I was sitting there looking out the window on a rainy day, at my desk. I had two other family members involved with me, and we were like, “Oh my gosh, what did we just do?” But the work followed, and we worked really hard. It all worked out. We’re here 16 years later and still figuring out marketing in the world today, which has gotten very complicated as well.
ROB: I was going to ask, because design in and of itself can be a little bit tricky to define, but then the definition has even probably changed on you. How has the nature of the work you do, the services, the deliverables – what has shifted in those 16 years?
SUE: I think it’s how fast everything – the kind of creative assets that people need constantly, day in and day out online – in the past, when we started out, it was print. Catalog work, and you would do two-week photoshoots. Well, that has really changed because of the tentative nature of the imagery that people need and the quantity of it. But I think what happens today is it’s easier to rely more on the science, which is more memorable – how many click-throughs – as we look at the success of an email campaign or whatever, a social media campaign.
I’ve seen a transition for a couple of things. One, a reluctance to invest in creative because it’s changing so quickly. But when they don’t do that, then you could put anybody’s logo on a picture on Instagram, like fashion or even home goods. It really needs to be nuanced in a way that you know when you look at it that that is a special brand. And it takes a little investment to do that, but there is a way that it can be done where you’re really creating assets that are amortized over a certain period of time and used in every area. I see when companies do that, they really have a more devoted following. People respond so well to the uniqueness that that brand represents.
Secondly, I think I’ve seen a change where in order to save costs many brands will bring their creative in-house, and that can be very successful, too, if they find the right people. It can also be easily unsuccessful just because of the complacency or the repetitive nature of the work. Focusing on one brand, day in and day out, I think sometimes people lose a little bit of edge. But not necessarily.
ROB: There’s definitely a lot to consider there. The pendulum of in-house versus – not outsourced, but out of house, working with a creative services firm. That pendulum seems to swing both industry-wide and then some clients really swing that pendulum back and forth as well.
You certainly mentioned Vera Bradley as a foundational client; what does your mix of clients look like? Are there typical industries, other key clients you’re able…
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May 19, 2022
Making Small Business Personal and Successful
Amanda Parker, President and Owner, Collective Alternative (Indianapolis, IN)
Amanda Parker is President and Owner at Collective Alternative, a full-service agency that focuses on growing small, mostly local businesses. She started her agency 14 years ago to bring together her background in strategy and development, experience as the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and passion for Mom-and-Pops, new home construction, and small, home-service businesses. Typical agency clients might include a local plumber trying to compete with bigger plumbing competition.
In this interview, Amanda explains there are a number of differences for successfully working with small businesses as opposed to mega-brand clients. Marketers typically work fast. With small businesses, she has found that it is important to slow down, communicate with the client, and let them know what the agency is trying to accomplish, the end goal/objective, and the benefit of the end goal. They require a lot more “hand-holding” through the process, she explains, and they can’t “afford to waste a single dollar.”
Amanda feels it is also critical to “protect” these smaller clients, to watch both the market and the economy. She also believes an “it’s just business” approach does not work. Larger companies have the resources and resilience to “experiment” with marketing strategies. With smaller companies, errors bleed through to the bottom line and can affect an organization’s survival. With smaller companies,
It is so personal. It doesn’t get any more personal for a small business owner. They have sunk everything into it. They’re working 12-16 hour days. All they want to do is provide for their family, send their daughter to dance class, send their kid to college, whatever it is. It’s personal.
Amanda says she is quite cognizant of her personal weaknesses. In building her agency, she focuses on hiring people who can bring complementary strengths, identifies potential areas of growth, supports continuing education efforts, and brings in experts to help her team “accelerate” their careers.
Some of the agency’s local clients go national. One client they are currently working with provides rehabilitative and mental health care for first responders (fire and police). The client will soon launch a national first responder mental health platform called Shield, which excites Amanda because it facilitates open discussions of mental health.
Amanda can be reached on her agency’s website at: collectivealternative.com or thecaway.com, or by email at: amanda@thecaway.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today by Amanda Parker, President and Owner at Collective Alternative based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Amanda.
AMANDA: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Very excited to be here.
ROB: Absolutely. Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Collective Alternative, and what distinguishes the firm? What is your superpower?
AMANDA: Oh, our superpower. Our firm is unique in we focus on small business. My background with agencies and things like that, I was on the larger accounts, but I really fell in love with the mom n’ pops, the small businesses of the country, and wanted to give them an opportunity to compete and gain some market share. So, we really focus on those mom n’ pop businesses.
I love home services. When I did work on the client-side, I was the Vice President of Marketing for a homebuilder, and I fell in love with it. It got in my blood. So, we love home services and new home construction and all of that. But I just love my small business clients and to see their growth. It’s just amazing.
ROB: That’s excellent. Those businesses, you say small; are they largely local? Are some of them national in scope? Is it heavy into services? Are you helping the local plumber go up against the big guys, or what are the industry specialties?
AMANDA: The majority of our clients are local. We are definitely helping that local plumber go up against the big guys. Even the bigger guy in the area, right? Which I just love. But we do have some clients that are national, or they’ve started local and they’ve grown nationally. We have one client that started here in Indiana, and they provide rehabilitative care, mental health care, all of that kind of thing for first responders – for fire and police. And they are growing on a national scale, especially with a new product they’re taking to market this month. So, it’s really cool to see that growth and be a part of it.
ROB: That’s really exciting to be able to help with that. What is it that you think changed as the firm grows that makes it maybe a different firm specialty? How do you define small as in small business, and what is it that really makes the scope of what they need a great fit for you?
AMANDA: My background is strategy and development, so I really focused on when you’re a small business, you cannot afford to waste a single dollar. I really focus on the strategy behind everything that we do. We don’t throw things at the wall to see what sticks. We are very focused, hone in on – we may do some A/B testing, but for the most part it’s planned out. We know what the payoff is going to be. We know we’re going to deliver the right ROI for our clients, and we really focus in on that strategy to make sure that every dollar they give to us is working for them and paying off.
ROB: There’s definitely a certain pressure. They don’t have a lot of extra dollars for experimental budgets when you’re talking about a small business. And I can imagine there’s probably a range of services you can engage in. How far across the range are you going? You can do anything from SEO, you can do SEM, you can do paid organic social, you can do media, TV, billboards, out-of-home. How far does the rabbit hole go with these clients?
AMANDA: We’re actually a full-service firm, so we do everything that they need. One issue that I always heard from my small business clients was they felt like they had to repeat their initiatives over and over again to a number of different marketing partners. At one point they’re talking to a PR person; then they’re talking to a digital firm; then they’re talking to an SEO firm. It was just all over the place, and they never felt like they had the unity, so they couldn’t tell if their dollars were really working for them or not.
I brought all of those different expertises in-house with different people leading those different areas, and now everything is under one roof and we all collaborate and talk together. So, they don’t have to repeat and they can really see the benefit of it.
ROB: Some services, it’s pretty straightforward; you can show somebody “You’re a plumber, we ran this ad, we tracked the phone numbers, here’s your calls.” Maybe if they’re really detailed, they can see what they got from that. How do you look at something that can be a little bit of a longer term investment?
Let’s say you’re looking at – whether it’s an awareness campaign on a digital billboard, whether it’s maybe something where the outcome – sometimes it’s not 100% certain how well you can do in SEO and what keywords you can optimize for. How do you think about helping them through that process of investing over time? The outcome is a little bit unknown, but directionally, you know because it rhymes with plenty of other clients that you’ve seen.
AMANDA: I think it’s more a matter of educating them and almost holding their hand through the process so they understand what it is that we’re trying to accomplish, they know what the end goal or objective is, and they know what the benefit of that end goal is. A lot of times as marketers, I feel like we go so fast – and we know it, and we know the…
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May 5, 2022
Page One or You Don’t Pay
Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts
Kevin Roy is the Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO, a full-stack digital ad agency, best known for search engine optimization but also providing paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, and programmatic display services. Over the years the team has developed a number of internal systems to keep up with the work, including 24x7 online ordering system that funnels agency orders to his team and creates a workflow. Kevin says the agency always has more web development work than it can “keep up with” but over the past 15 years, it has always been a “loss leader.”
The agency’s motto is “Page 1 or you don’t pay.” Kevin explains that the agency does not guarantee the agency’s services will get a client on Page 1. It’s about whether the client pays.
Unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don’t pay us. If we don’t get them ranked, they don’t pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don’t pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked
Part of the “secret sauce” of the agency’s success is a comprehensive understanding of Google’s webmaster tools and its ever-changing rules. Websites are optimized “based on a few very important factors.” The agency has an 80-step process, which is frequently updated to adapt to Google’s policy changes. As a recent example of a new Google requirement, Kevin cites desktop viewability. The agency has integrated this requirement into the websites it manages and tested the sites to ensure they meet “all those metrics.”
Kevin warns against using “tricks” to “game the system” to get a site ranked. He says, “Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources” and will eventually figure out the “game.” “That’s not a position you want to put your client in,” he says. He believes it is more important to “just try to provide quality and relevance” and then adds, “It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do.”
When Kevin decided to start his agency, he offered to build websites and run SEO for three successful businesspeople on two conditions: that they not tell anyone that he “did it for free” and that, if they were happy with his work, they would recommend him. The strategy worked. Today, the agency is 100% referral and “business just keeps coming in.”
At the beginning of client engagement, GreenBananaSEO provides a free website audit and recommendations based on what it perceives to be a client’s problem. Kevin says the agency is a “digital executioner” with an SEO division and a paid media division (focused on key performance indexes/conversions). He says the agency does “almost everything on a screen that’s paid” including OTT (over-the-top) television, programmatic, geofencing, geotargeting, and addressable media. No billboards. No direct mail. “It’s all paid media,” he explains, and the agency is “hired by people to make their messaging and their branding work.”
Kevin can be reached on his personal page at: ijustmetkevin.com.or on his agency website at: greenbananaseo.com.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and my guest today is Kevin Roy, Co-founder of GreenBananaSEO based in Beverly, Massachusetts. Welcome to the podcast, Kevin.
KEVIN: Hey, thanks for having me.
ROB: Great to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about GreenBanana and what you specialize in?
KEVIN: We don’t sell bananas. GreenBananaSEO is a full-stack digital ad agency, and we’re primarily known for our search engine optimization, but we also have a significant portion of our clients run paid media, Google AdWords, Facebook, programmatic display.
One of the reasons that a lot of people know us for search engine optimization is our mottol, which is “Page 1 or you don’t pay.” So unless we get our clients on Page 1 for the keywords that they pick, they don’t pay us. If we don’t get them ranked, they don’t pay us. If we get them ranked and lose their rankings, they don’t pay us. We have to get them ranked and keep them ranked.
And the big secret is there’s no secret. You just do what you’re supposed to do. Google publishes their webmaster tools. They’re not fun to read. [laughs] We read them and we optimize people’s sites based on a few very important factors that I could always touch on later. But you don’t try to game the system. You just try to provide quality and relevance, and you magically rank.
ROB: How do you think about socializing that knowledge across your team? Some people who are there might have an intrinsic knowledge of what it takes, they’ve digested the notes on what Google likes, what Google doesn’t like. But somebody new comes in or somebody’s new to the industry – how do you think about putting them on the path of not looking for tricks and of doing the right thing?
KEVIN: That’s a great question. We have a process. We have an 80-step process and we teach our members to follow that process. But we also have a hierarchy of SEO director-level knowledge that are always going and looking for the latest changes that Google has published that they made and how we have to adapt our process to that.
Something that just came out recently was desktop viewability. It’s something that Google is amping people for if they don’t have the right desktop viewability, so we have to make that part of it, go in and test that, make sure their site is hitting all those metrics and adapting the site to that.
ROB: That makes sense. SEO has a long history, and it’s been through – you’re making reference to tips and tricks, and there were all these conversations about “secrets.” There were tools people would provide that would tell you these secrets. Did you always come at it from the non-secrets angle, or was that an evolution and there were some tricks that once were kind of helpful, but have really attenuated as Google has evolved its algorithm?
KEVIN: The thing that’s always stuck in the back of my mind is how massive Google is. There are tricks and things that you can do to game the system and try to get the site ranked, but Google is always going to be bigger and have more resources, and they are ultimately going to figure that out, and that’s not a position you want to put your client in. I always say, it’s not if you get caught, it’s when you get caught. So if you decide that’s the game you want to play, then buckle up. Maybe that’s something you want to do, but that’s not what we do.
It does take people a little longer to get ranked when you follow the rules, but it also is harder to lose your ranking when you do. It’s a lot more beneficial. And our clients are real businesses that are really trying to promote their work, and they can’t afford to get caught for something we did.
ROB: Page 1, that’s a great target. Are there ever keywords I would want to target where you would look at me as a client and say, “You know, I get it, but that’s a no. We can’t guarantee that”? Is there a target that’s too high?
KEVIN: There are two parts to that answer. Number one, we don’t guarantee ranking. We guarantee that if we can’t get you there, you don’t pay us. So when people call and say, “Hey, GreenBanana, we need to get on Page 1 in a month for these keyword phrases,” I’m like, “Great. We have an AdWords campaign for that. I can guarantee you’ll get on Page 1 with a Google AdWords campaign because we’re going to bid higher than your competitors for that.”
But there are certain things Google takes into consideration, like domain authority, how long the site has been living, how much content is on the site, and that a lot plays into how successfu…
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Apr 28, 2022
Nonfiction Dreams: Science Fiction to Reality
Mardis & Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors & Founding Partners, Nonfiction Design (San Francisco, CA)
Mardis and Phnam Bagley are Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design, a company that started originally as an industrial design firm but morphed into a future-focused studio. The studio works with startups, Fortune 500 companies, and governments to solve huge, complex problems and “change the world for the better.”
Phnam says all of their clients are long term and come to them “to solve huge problems about the future of education . . . living on Mars . . . food . . . neuroscience.”. The studio strategizes with a lot of these leaders in innovation, technology, and science to help them get their products “into the hands of people that need them.” The studio pushes clients “into extremes” to solve technical, experiential, and design problems “through ergonomics, through human factors, through thinking about behavior change.”
Mardis explains one of the challenges of this work – that people have to “fight the biases of the past.” A recent project was with Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning, which wanted to rethink the future of education. Nonfiction set up two teams, one that dug into white papers from the past, and the other, a group of creatives unexposed to this data, that freely brainstormed the future of education. In the end, both groups came to the same conclusion . . . but the creatives had actionable solutions for moving forward.
What did this exploratory discover about education? In this interview, Phnam outlines a few conclusions – one, that children would benefit from letting them “be and stay absurd.” She says, “Not everything in life needs to make sense, needs to be efficient.” She adds that life would be better if we sometimes spent time “doing things that don’t make any sense.” She believes today’s society schedules too much of children’s time. Teens, especially, need “time to rest physically, to rest the brain, to talk to other people, and to be bored” in order to grow to be healthy adults.
Mardis says, “Developing a solution that’s completely individual to the client’s needs is really, really important to how we conduct business and how we keep satisfied clients.” With an eye to the future, the studio has started working on a “more circular economy model,” where design not only takes into consideration recycling, but also repair and remanufacturing.
The Nonfiction Studio team is diverse . . . from “many different cultures, many different countries.” Mardis, with a background in industrial engineering and branding, says they don’t look much at résumés or portfolios. Phnam, an industrial engineer with a master’s degree in (aero)space architecture, says the studio hires people “because they have something very interesting, and most likely that thing has to do with their past – what kind of career they’ve been through, what kind of country they come from, what kind of past they’ve had.”
The husband-wife team presented “Designing the Future of Everything” at South by Southwest 2022 two times due to demand. Mardis, Phnam, and Nonfiction are available on Twitter and post future of design videos on Instagram.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Mardis and Phnam Bagley, Creative Directors and Founding Partners at Nonfiction Design based in San Francisco, California.
We have a special two-guest episode because we had two speakers and they like to spend time with each other. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Nonfiction Design, and what is your superpower?
PHNAM: Sure. Phnam here. I’m the wife of the Bagley duo. Nonfiction is a design firm based in San Francisco. Originally it was started as an industrial design firm because that’s both of our backgrounds, and it turned into this future-focused studio where companies from startups all the way to Fortune 500 companies to governments come to us to solve huge problems about the future.
When we say huge problems, we’re talking about education, we’re talking about living on Mars, we’re talking about future of food, and we’re talking about neuroscience. This is what we do.
ROB: That sounds like a wide range of things to solve. How do you go about knowing how to solve all these things?
PHNAM: We are an extremely curious group of people. There is not one subject in the world that we don’t want to tackle because, in the end, what we want to do is change the world for the better. Impact is really at the core of everything that we do, whether it’s thinking about the future of future humans or what we need today in the medical industry. That’s what drives us. That gives us the motivation to work and make other people’s lives better.
But also creating the foundation of a future that we want to live in, because when you look at the news, for example, a lot of things are not going according to plan. And I believe, and we believe, that designers have the power to change that. That’s why we started this company.
ROB: Is there an example, maybe, of a future that you have had to recently think through? And what did you think about it?
MARDIS: Hi, this is Mardis Bagley. Great question. I think one of the things we like to do is shake up the status quo. When we’re thinking about futures, we often have to fight the biases of the past. Stepping out of this entrenched thinking. One of the projects we worked on recently is called Movida, the School of Lifelong Learning. Thinking and rethinking education is a very, very complex problem.
One of the things we did right off is we said that we don’t want to step too deep into research and repeat all the past, or even bias ourselves in thinking about the opportunity of the future. So, as we do this, we’re a number of creatives from all over the planet; we’re a very diverse studio of men, women, many different cultures, many different countries. But we all have some sort of experience. We have a certain amount of intuition. We all have been through school on many different levels. How do we redesign education in the way we think?
What we did is we started designing it straight out of the gate. We pushed research to the side, which sounds kind of crazy. We totally avoided research in redesigning this school and this education system, and we came up with these really unique ideas about how to approach school and expand the minds of young children in a way that spoke to their wellbeing. It spoke to future generations. When we’re talking about designing education, we can’t design education for jobs that we don’t yet know what they’re going to be or the technologies that are going to empower them using the thinking of education that is well over 100 years old in the process.
While we’re doing this wild ride of creativity and exploration on one side, we had a secondary research track talking to leaders in education from MIT and Stanford. But we never let them talk to our creatives on the other side. We let them have independent paths as they explored forward.
What happened is after a few months, we ended up at the same exact location in terms of knowledge, in terms of understanding education, and how to break the norms – except for we were reading whitepapers that are decades old on one side, and on the other side is purely months of creativity. We got to the same exact location except for the creatives came out with solutions that are actionable, solutions that are ready to change young people’s lives.
ROB: It might have even been hard to get to those solutions starting from the whitepapers, right? You started from another place and maybe even went some places you would never go. Part of brainstorming sometimes is proposing the impossible, the inappropriate, the unacceptable, but then bringing it back in…
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Apr 21, 2022
Engaging Experience Design through Technology
Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO, Blue Cadet (Philadelphia, PA and New York City, NY)
Josh Goldblum is Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet, an experience design studio with around 30 employees in Philadelphia and 15 in New York. Twenty-odd years ago, Josh worked in-house at the Smithsonian Institution, producing digital products and integrating technology into physical environments. Unfulfilled because big projects only came around every few years, Josh left and freelanced for a number of museums, doing single-touch Flash design and development. As his on-man Blue Cadet operation became a growing team, projects expanded to encompass touch tables, touch walls, and projection; technology evolved and became increasingly more sophisticated; and the organization’s internal systems had to be more formalized to meet the needs of the larger business. Today’s experience technology is far more powerful, interesting, and relevant than that in the past. Flash has been replaced by Real Engine, Unity, and JavaScript. The Blue Cadet studio continues to design large-touch surfaces and build immersive experiences but now works with augmented reality, haptics (touch-related communication), and using technology and digital products to make cultural content in physical spaces more immersive, engaging, and “magical.”
Although much of the firm’s work is for museums, it has recently expanded to provide these immersive services for executive briefing centers and such brands as Nike and Google. Josh says it’s important that the studio creates a “content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.”
In working with clients, Josh finds it helpful to carve out a little paid research at the beginning of a project to prepare an ideation spread where the studio can research client needs and present ideas. At the end of this initial period, the client can either work with Blue Cadet or take the ideas Blue Cadet developed and work with another studio. Josh says, “It’s better to carve off a little space to redirect (the project) than to get into that death march of implementing something that’s just not going to be that great.” That time upfront also helps Blue Cadet discover what it is that a client really wants, whether they can provide what the client wants, whether they want to do the project, and whether the parties can develop a solid working relationship. Josh participated in a panel session discussion of Trends and Challenges for Experiential Culture at the 2022 South by Southwest Interactive Festival. He says he is most active on LinkedIn, where he shares a lot of concept prototype material.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined live today at South by Southwest Interactive Festival by Josh Goldblum, Founder and CEO at Blue Cadet based in Philadelphia and New York. Welcome to the podcast, Josh.
JOSH: Thanks for having me.
ROB: Excellent to have you here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Blue Cadet and what is your superpower? What is your calling card? What do people come to you for?
JOSH: Blue Cadet is an experience design studio. Most of us are based in Philadelphia. There’s about 30 in Philadelphia, another 15 up in New York, and then actually, when I say “us” based in Philadelphia, we just moved out to LA. So my family moved to LA. We’re the only ones out there.
We’re mostly known for experience design in the cultural space, and also really a lot of technology in physical space. Twenty-odd years ago, I was inhouse at Smithsonian doing digital product work, but also integrated technology into physical environments. So we’ve been in that experience design space, figuring out how you marry technology into public spaces, how you take cultural content and make it interesting. That’s what we’ve been doing, and we do it across physical space; we also do it across digital products.
ROB: Got it. It rings of museums or themed places, but I can also imagine a building that wants to have something and not just be a hollow shell. What does a typical space look like for you?
JOSH: We do a lot of work in the museum space, like the traditional museum space. All the big museums are generally our clients. We’ve worked with a lot of them. Everything from like science centers to history museums to art museums. We did a Van Gogh projected experience with the Art Institute of Chicago way before they were doing all these projections.
ROB: All the immersive experiences.
JOSH: Yeah, we’ve been doing that for a long time. But then recently we’ve been moving more into brand work. We’ve been doing some work with Nike, which has been really exciting. We’ve done work with Google. trying to take a lot of that museum flair, which is an obsession with content and making sure that what we’re saying is true, and trying to figure out what’s interesting about a brand and giving it that treatment where you’re elevating the personalities, elevating the science. You’re making something that’s smart but also engaging.
ROB: Where are they doing those things?
JOSH: These are executive briefing centers, sometimes. These are museums or brands. Some of these are online. And then we started doing a little bit of work for real estate companies, just trying to – it’s not for me. [laughs] Just to activate some of their public spaces as well. Again, trying to bring in content experience that’s not just decorative, but actually tells a story that feels true to the space.
ROB: When I think about this space, I start off thinking about the sleepy old kiosk that became a touchscreen and the keyboard is broken. Did it start there and proceed from there?
JOSH: Yeah, I would say when we started out – Blue Cadet was my freelance handle. I was at the Smithsonian; I did a pretty cool project there that got a lot of attention. The Smithsonian being what it is, they only had big projects every few years. I was getting kind of bored, so I left and I started going around museum to museum. I was essentially picking up jobs doing Flash design and development. When we first started out, it was a lot of those single touchscreens and those things that were kind of cheap. No one was going to lose their job if we really screwed up.
But we overdelivered. We did really great stuff, and we grew on the backs of those reputations and then started doing touch tables and touch walls and projection mapping. These days, we still do a lot of large touch surfaces and things like that, but a lot more thinking about the technologies that are more interesting or relevant. Now we’re doing a lot more with AR, things that are haptics, camera vision. Also just trying to figure out how to make an environment more engaging and magical.
ROB: Some of the advantage, even, of the march of technology is that probably some of those early Flash things you were doing were still rather expensive and still took a big commitment. I think some of this has allowed the technology to come down into simpler spaces. My team’s done really simple electron-based kiosks with a little bit of sound, a little bit of animation, and it makes it more available to more places.
JOSH: Yeah. It’s interesting because Flash was an amazing tool. Flash really allowed you to do a lot of very, very cool things. When Steve Jobs killed Flash, essentially – which he pretty much singlehandedly did – there was actually a little bit of a lull in experience design where the tools had to catch up. But now you see things like Real Engine, Unity – but even what you can do with JavaScript. You can do everything that you used to be able to do in Flash now to the nth degree. And it’s much better. Flash probably should’ve died.
ROB: How often does as client come to you with an idea of what they want? How often do they come to you with a topic – “Here’s this topic, here’s what w…
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Apr 14, 2022
Diversity, Equity, Inclusion . . . Why? No . . . How to Make it Happen
Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, NY
Jennifer Brown founded her namesake Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion consulting agency 20 years ago. The agency develops top-down DEI strategies and training programs for medium-size to large companies; sets up effective, well-aligned affinity groups within those companies; and promotes inclusive leadership through educational initiatives.
Jennifer is a frequent keynote speaker, both virtually and live. She presented Beyond Diversity: Building A More Inclusive World at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference and followed that with a book signing of her third book, Beyond Diversity: 12 Non-Obvious Ways to Build a More Inclusive World, which she co-authored with Rohit Bhargava. Jennifer is the bestselling author of Inclusion: Diversity, The New Workplace & The Will to Change (2017) and How to Be an Inclusive Leader: Your Role in Creating Cultures of Belonging Where Everyone Can Thrive (2019). The second edition of the 2019 book will be released in October 2022.
Jennifer says there was “a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020” after the murder of George Floyd and the subsequent and still-ongoing social movement for cultural change. Jennifer feels that today’s workplace is “not built by and for so many of us if we . . . don’t fit a certain demographic.”
Jennifer explains the importance of this “sea change”: “If people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably . . . they do better work . . . and they stay longer.”
Jennifer says she is a “member of the LGBTQ+ community” who has “been out for nearly 25 years.” She believes half of her cohorts “are still closeted in the workplace,” but that, finally, people are no longer talking about “why” inclusion is important, but “how” to make it happen. She believes companies will be challenged in setting up equitable workplaces as they rebuild “post-Covid,” particularly with managing blended teams of hybrid (virtual and in-person) employees.
Jennifer warns that managers need to be vigilant in supportinging inclusivity. “Harassment has gone up in the virtual workplace,” she says. Why? “There are no witnesses,” she explains. People are “cut off from information” and don’t know their options on how to escalate a complaint and whether they can trust their employer to handle the issue.
Jennifer Brown Consulting facilitates the establishment of corporate affinity groups, which are often comprised of people who tend to be “overlooked in the talent pipeline because of bias” in hiring practice, promotion, advancement, and talent reviews.” Even smaller and medium-sized companies are adopting affinity groups to serve as workplace “sources of intelligence about cultural experience,” tap into what is working and what is not, and provide support and “community” to employees who may have, in the past, felt “marginalized.”
Jennifer can be reached on Instagram, @JenniferBrownSpeaks; on Twitter, @JenniferBrown, on LinkedIn, and on her agency website at: jenniferbrownconsulting.com, where those interested in DEI information can find the agency’s DEI foundations program.
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk. I am joined live at South by Southwest by Jennifer Brown of Jennifer Brown Consulting based out of New York, New York. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer.
JENNIFER: Thank you, Rob.
ROB: So good to have you on here. Why don’t you start out by telling us about the firm, about Jennifer Brown Consulting? What is your calling card?
JENNIFER: The firm I founded 20 years ago. It’s a DEI strategy and training company. We work with companies, medium-size and large typically, to help them build their diversity, equity, & inclusion strategy from the top down and help also set up what’s called affinity groups and make sure they’re effective and well-aligned. We also do a lot of education around inclusive leadership.
I have an amazing group of consultants who are, at any given time, working on client projects. And then I do a lot of keynoting – virtual, but now increasingly in person, I’m glad to say . . . as we come out of this into a new variant, I just read yesterday. [laughs]
ROB: Last night, yes.
JENNIFER: But anyway, I also love writing books. I just co-authored my third book with Rohit Bhargava, Beyond Diversity, and then I have a second edition of How to Be an Inclusive Leader, which was my book from 2019. I have a second edition of that coming out in October of 2022, which I’m really excited about.
ROB: Congratulations on the book. Rohit was a guest three years ago, the last time we were recording live at SXSW, and then we all skipped a couple of years because of that COVID thing we were just talking about.
As you’re engaging with these firms – you mentioned medium and larger firms – at what point are they coming to you these days? What do they know? What are they doing right? What are the blind spots?
JENNIFER: There was a huge wake-up call in spring/summer of 2020 on multiple levels. I think the big one for us, obviously, was George Floyd murder and the social movement that occurred and is still occurring. A massive shift in attention and prioritization of the fact that the workplace as it is currently is not built by and for so many of us, if we basically don’t fit a certain demographic.
Finally – we’ve been talking about this for many, many years – finally there was attention and resources available. For the last couple of years, our firm has doubled in size and number of companies, and we’ve been incredibly busy. We were ready for this. This is the conversation we’ve been having for many years. I’m a member of the LGBTQ+ community, and I’ve been out for nearly 25 years – I’m dating myself.
ROB: Early.
JENNIFER: Early, early, when we were still arguing for domestic partner benefits with big companies. Those were the early days of my own activism. Then we grew Jennifer Brown Consulting to be a full-service DEI firm.
So, they come to us now and say, “Okay, Jennifer, we get it. We know that it’s important. But we don’t know how to tackle this, and we don’t know how to equip our leaders with the skills and also to awaken their motivation to care about this.” But really, Rob, I’m so excited that it’s not a “why” conversation; it’s a “how” conversation now. We all are a little bit worried that the urgency is flagging as the world continues to be so chaotic and business priorities shift around, so we’re trying to really make sure the burning platform of this remains on fire in people’s minds. We know it’s on fire, but it’s easy to move on and say, “We got this. We’re doing enough.” But I can tell you no company is doing enough.
ROB: Right. You have two lanes. A lot of companies are going to install somebody with a title in DEI at some level, and then there’s actually integrating it into the cadence of the firm. How do you make sure it sticks? How do you keep it from regressing to “business as usual” plus somebody with a title?
JENNIFER: I think the way we speak about why this is urgent really matters, and how it can drive business. It drives innovation. Literally, if people feel welcomed, valued, respected, and heard, and a deep sense of belonging and being treated equitably – which means those day-to-day support mechanisms, resources, pay equity, all that good stuff – they do better work. And they stay longer.
We’re in the midst of a talent crisis. Literally, it is the Great Resignation, and I can tell you from my point of view, it has a lot of reasons, but one of the big reasons is toxic workplaces – workplaces that feel like “I go through my day and I don’t see anyone that looks like me. I don’t feel trusted or trusting of others. I have one foot out the door…
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Apr 7, 2022
Virtual Influencers – How to Grow Gen Z Followers with Tech
Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder, Offbeat Media Group (Atlanta, GA)
Shep Ogden is CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group, an agency that helps “some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to use TikTok, Web3, and meme marketing to reach Gen Z customers. Originally, the college friends who started the agency owned and operated an Instagram account, Humor, which drew four million followers . . . and a lot of interest from brands that wanted to partner with the account.
The agency moved from working with memes to working with influencers, and from there, to developing virtual influencers. Today, the agency’s clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.”
When the partners realized the Humor account did not have an associated “face,” they decided to build one virtually. For the past few years, Offbeat has been working to establish “virtual influencers” to serve as identities behind “faceless” accounts. Virtual influencer development is what the agency is best known for today “and its clients are typically the 10% of businesses that “are constantly looking for that new thing.”
Shep says that today’s photorealistic virtual influencers “don’t look 100% real yet” and the technology to perfect them is extremely expensive. The other end of the spectrum, cartoony caricatures, does not work as well as stylized animated characters that “are not meant to trick you,” but to serve as characters “to tell a story” using “humanized responses and emotions.” The first of seven stylized virtual influencers the agency is creating for Nexus, named “Zero,” launched on Twitter in February and has drawn the interest of major investors.
The agency’s content studio creates a constant stream of content on the internet (mostly on places like TikTok and Snapchat) with close to a dozen shows that reach hundreds of millions of people monthly. By building virtual influencers and developing an NFT (nonfungible token) project for themselves, then iterating, testing, and innovating to improve their “product,” the agency demonstrates that it “gets” the new technology. The shows are monetized when platform partners direct ads their known audiences and share the revenues with Offbeat. The agency plans to sell NFTs to crowdsource virtual influencers’ story development, help “build community,” and further monetize the agency’s work.
Shep talked about the intersection of the virtual influencer industry, Web3, digital ownership, and NFTs at the 2022 South by Southwest Conference. After his presentation, “The Future of Influence Doesn’t Involve Humans,” he brought Nexus’s Zero up on stage, on screen, to converse, unscripted, with entrepreneur Mark Cuban.
Shep says the goals for his presentation were to:
* introduce the virtual influencer industry,
* establish Web3 for the audience,
* discuss how these two intersect,
* explain the agency’s work and the thought behind the Nexus universe growing around Zero, and
* show the stuff in action.
Shep can be found on LinkedIn as Shep Ogden. Offbeat Media Group is also on LinkedIn. The Offbeat-owned website, VirtualHumans.org, serves as the industry-leading website on virtual influencers. For those interested in the development of Zero, follow @ZeroFromNexus on Twitter.
Transcript Follows:
ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I’m joined today live at South by Southwest, interactive, by Shep Ogden, CEO and Co-founder of Offbeat Media Group based in Atlanta, Georgia. Welcome to the podcast, Shep.
SHEP: Awesome, Rob. Thanks so much for having me. I’m having a blast.
ROB: It’s good to have you here. It’s always fun to have these people we know in Atlanta – we know each other, but we’re in Austin and getting together to talk. It’s all well, good, and fun, but why don’t you start off by telling us about Offbeat Media Group and what is your superpower? What’s your calling card?
SHEP: Our superpower has changed over the last few years. It’s been a really fun experience. I’d like to back up and give you the quick origin story. We started this business while we were in college. We owned and operated an account called Humor on Instagram with about four million followers. It was a really large meme and viral community, basically. It was something that we started for fun and then it turned into something that brands really wanted to partner with us on.
The next thing you know, we’re helping some of the biggest brands in the world figure out how to reach Gen Z and how to do meme marketing and how to tap into an account like Humor, but also hundreds of others and then thousands of others.
That led to us working with a ton of influencers, moving from just meme accounts to influencers, which then led to this whole new crazy idea, which I think is our superpower, of virtual influencers – taking this concept of an account like Humor that has millions of followers but doesn’t have a face attached to it and thinking about that, but doing it with a virtual face. Building an account, building a personality, building something that someone wants to follow, but giving an identity behind it – that’s the idea of a virtual influencer, and we’ve been doing that for the last few years. It’s definitely what we’re known for most now.
ROB: It might sound a little bit out there to the audience; is this an influencer who is obviously not real? Or do they appear real? How does that happen?
SHEP: That’s a great question. Sometimes it’s both. There’s photorealistic virtual influencers that look pretty real. They don’t look 100% real yet. There are ways to make it look 100% real, but it’s very, very expensive. What we like to do, and what we’ve seen work much, much better with the audience across the board is more of a stylized animated character.
We recently launched Zero for Nexus on Twitter, who you saw, I know. He’s a stylized character. While he has very humanlike responses and emotions, and when he talks to people you get that human feeling from him, you also know instantly that he’s not meant to be real. He’s not meant to trick you. He’s just here as a character to tell a story. I think that’s what works really well in this space.
ROB: And it sort of helps you get past the uncanny valley problem when they look stylized versus real. How do you go about thinking about who this character is, though? I suppose every influencer to an extent has to decide who their persona is, but you’re writing a script from nothing. Or is it rooted in something real?
SHEP: That’s a great question. With Zero, it’s not rooted really in anything real, but the way we counteract that and think about that is we’re including the community. A real influencer has a real backstory and has a real life, and you can’t really change their backstory, change their life. They are who they are. But with a virtual influencer, we’re writing lore for Zero. Who is Zero? What’s his background?
But we’re including the community that follows him now. The thousands of people following him and engaging with his content are helping us make this decision. We can do a top-level, “Hey, is it A, B, or C? What do you like better?” and then someone on our team will go deep into that concept and bring it to life when our community says, “We really like this direction.” We crowdsource it. We crowdsource the storytelling of these type of characters, which I think also gives the fans more satisfaction seeing them brought to life.
ROB: You mentioned hundreds and thousands of these accounts before on more of the Humor and accounts like that, the non-influencer side. How many influencers are you running? How many do you want to run?
SHEP: Virtual influencers?
ROB: Yep.
SHEP: Right now, we’re running one. We launched in February, Zero. We d…
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Mar 31, 2022
Designing Organizations for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Minal Bopaiah, Founder and Principal Consultant, Brevity & Wit (Silver Spring, MD) Minal Bopaiah is Founder and Principal Consultant at Brevity & Wit, a strategy and design firm dedicated to “designing a more equitable world.” The original focus of Minal’s agency was on graphic design. Today, the agency provides full-scale, full-service, human-centered graphic design; strategic marketing and communications; and the application of behavioral change science and organizational development to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion. Typical clients are mid-size companies of 200 to 3,000 employees, but Brevity & Wit has also engaged with public media work, non-profits, and tech and government agencies.
At South by Southwest 2022, Minal presented “All About Equity: Future-Proof Your Organization” with the intention of moving people to ask for observable behaviors that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (which Minal refers to as “DEI work”). Accessibility is another issu…
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Mar 24, 2022
Marketing Long-Cycle B2B Tech
Mike Maynard, Managing Director and CEO, Napier Group (Chichester, England)
Mike Maynard is Managing Director and CEO at Napier Group, an agency focused on marketing technical products to technical audiences. Clients include major companies selling semiconductors, industrial automation systems, cellular communications infrastructure, complex software, and even a baggage-handling system manufacturer. The customer “audience” for these products is “super-targeted, super technical, and . . . demanding.”
A disillusioned engineer who loved talking tech, Mike stopped designing products and re-engineered himself as a tech salesman. In 2008, he bought out the tech-focused marketing agency his company had been using – two weeks before the dot com crash. With ALL of his money invested in the agency, Mike had no choice but to make the venture succeed. Today, the agency is a mix of geeks – engineers or technical journalists who understand the technology – and marketing experts. Base…
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Mar 17, 2022
Public Relations Power Plays
Annie Scranton, Founder and President, Pace PR (New York, NY)
Annie Scranton is Founder and President at Pace PR, a media relations shop that partners with its clients to discern and achieve goals through getting its clients “featured in the media.” Annie believes that traditional media (television) is still strong and its real-time immediacy “brings credibility to a person or a brand” in a way that “holds a lot of meaning and is different from a newspaper article or a digital article or a podcast.”
Pace PR works with a wide variety of clientele, but its three “pillars” are business (B2B, tech startups, corporate clients, climate sustainability initiatives), lifestyle (nutritionists, authors, fitness instructors, products, and brands), and thought leadership (political pundits, financial analysts, attorneys).
Annie says her firm selects clients they find interesting and exciting . . . ones that will interest the media and have something “meaningful to say.” Clien…
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Mar 10, 2022
Small Businesses and Nonprofits Win with Organization, Strategy, and Personality
Emily Heck, Owner and Founder, Evergreen Strategic Communications (Indianapolis, IN)
Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications, started her agency in the fall of 2019. With no job in sight and no career plans, she started meeting with people, chatting over coffee, and trying to figure out her next chapter. Emily picked up some freelance marketing projects from a former co-worker and networked more intensely. Her business, helping nonprofits and small businesses organize their marketing, establish processes and systems, and more efficiently engage their audiences, grew.
Although in-person networking dropped off during the pandemic, Emily is now finding contacts she did not see during the “isolation time” of Covid eager to meet and “catch up” and more interested in re-connecting face to face. Potential clients are responding to her cold-call invitations to explore partnership opportunities a lot more quickly and with a lot less requisite “relationshi…
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Mar 3, 2022
Marketing to Keep the Kitchen Open: Profitable Hospitality in a Pandemic
Robin Blanchette, CEO and Founder, Norton Creative (Houston, TX)
Robin Blanchette is CEO and Founder at Norton Creative, an agency focused “narrow and deep” on restaurant and hospitality branding. Their primary client base includes multi-unit operators, mid-size and larger chains, and franchises. They also work with independents . . . but never with conflicting brands or direct competitors in the same time frame.
Over the eight years of its existence, the agency has worked with over 150 different restaurant brands, developing strategies, doing creative work, finding whitespace, differentiating positions, and designing brand standards that allow room for franchisees to “own their businesses” while maintaining what Robin calls “brand purity.” Clients have included Buffalo Wild Wings, TGIFridays, Bob Evans Farms, Mellow Mushroom, Friendly’s, Fuddruckers, Sonic, and Luby’s . . . .
Robin started her career on the client side and said that the agencies she worked with “d…
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Feb 24, 2022
When It Ain’t Your Grandma’s SEO
David Finberg, CEO, Peaks Digital Marketing (Denver, CO)
David Finberg is CEO at Peaks Digital Marketing, an SEO and lead generation firm that focuses on a comprehensive, aggressive approach to “addressing all seven areas of an SEO campaign to get ROI rolling as early as possible.” Clients range from small, local businesses to major enterprises. Today’s solutions must be comprehensive.
Peaks Digital’s fractionalized team operates as a cohesive unit and integrates multiple areas of expertise with its clients’ teams . . . filling in the “gaps” and providing support in areas that will most impact its clients’ campaigns. Highly agile, the team can address page speed, backlinks, content, reputation, user experience, and technical site auditing in a customized way that can truly “move the needle.” Newly built or restructured websites typically rank in an exponentially shorter timeframe than might be expected, and sometimes in as little as three months.
Clients work wit…
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Feb 17, 2022
How to Apply AI to Email at Scale
Erica Salm Rench, Chief Operating Officer, Rasa.io (New Orleans, LA)
Erica Salm Rench is Chief Operating Officer at Rasa.io, a company that supports marketers, business owners, and large associations by applying AI to generate automated, smart, personalized email newsletters. Rasa’s mission? T0 better inform the world through relevant content.
Clients import their subscribers. Rasa plugs in subscribers’ super-relevant content – their own blogs, their own LinkedIn company page, their Facebook page, their Twitter profile – plus relevant external sources. From this rich pool of content, Rasa automatically selects which stories go to which subscribers . . . and refines that selection process as the system learns more about the individual subscribers.
Articles are first selected from sources a client trusts for content, then filtered by trusted keyword and topic. Through an editorial review window, the client can scan the engine-selected articles and deselect those that s/he does…
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Feb 10, 2022
Structuring for the Personal Touch
Flynn Zaiger, CEO, Online Optimism (New Orleans, LA; Washington, D.C.; and Atlanta, GA)
Flynn Zaiger, CEO at Online Optimism, started his agency on a laptop in 2012 by reaching out and offering SEO services to the 6 companies where he had interned while he was in college. Today, his remote, across the country staff of 23 supports businesses with “everything they do online” – social, search, SEO, SEM, and website design. Clients are small- to medium-sized businesses (5 to 500 employees) that are either startups looking to rapidly expand or more traditional family businesses, that, in the process of being passed down to the next generation, are looking to expand.
The agency strives to contribute to the communities surrounding its three offices. A cadre of interns maintains a networking calendar, tracking the activities of fifty chambers of commerce. The intern program, built internally from the ground up, is the source of many of the agency’s new hires.
In this interview, Flyn…
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Feb 3, 2022
Thought Leadership and Case Study Niching
Erik Jensen (Salt Lake City, UT), Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer, Predictive ROI (La Crosse, WI)
Erik Jensen is Co-Owner and Chief Strategy Officer at Predictive ROI, a remote-first firm that helps “agencies, coaches, and consultants plant their flags of authority and monetize that position.”
In this interview, Erik addresses the difficulties service businesses may encounter in developing a “position of thought leadership”:
* Poor discovery and development processes.
* Failure to treat themselves as a client.
* Failure to understand “what it means to plant their flag.”
When agencies try to be everything to everyone, their messages will be inconsistent and unfocused. True thought leaders do not have messages that lack clarity and strength.
Erik emphasizes that it is dangerous for an agency to assume it knows why a particular potential client approaches the agency for help. Customers may come because:
* They know you, don’t understand their problem, and a…
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Jan 27, 2022
Media Relations for Technology: Marketing the Science Fair
Donna Loughlin, is President and Founder at LMGPR, a public relations agency that works with “emerging market players and visionaries” to help them build out their Leadership (the “L” in the agency’s name), Momentum, and Growth. Key to this effort is researching the client’s “story” and the drivers for the client founding the business. The client/agency relationship typically takes a minimum of a year to launch and continues, in some cases, for up to 8 years until the client goes through its IPO. Media relations initiatives include earned content – “talking to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg and trade publications” – and/or “creating original content” (such things as whitepapers and podcasts).
Donna began her career as a journalist, working with Reuters, BBC, and Washington Post, and migrated into doing PR inside technology companies going through IPOs during the dot-com bubble. Donna, in her role as a “corporate person,” deflected phone calls fro…
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Dec 30, 2021
Strategy Rules!
Avi Kumar is Founder and CEO of Kuware, an almost 14-year-old business that bills itself “as a full-service agency, but a little bit more focused on strategy than actual implementation.”
The shift away from “traditional marketing services and taking customers as they came” started 5 years ago. Today, the agency works with clients who want to put some strategy behind their efforts and are less concerned about the agency providing implementation. Avi says it was very difficult when the agency first made that transition to, while it was trying to grow the business, turn away customers that did not have a strategy focus. Current clients not only need be willing to work with Kuware’s fractional CMO to develop a strategy . . . they also have to be ambitious about “big growth,” have funding or be ready to move to the next level, or to be invested in brick-and-mortar with a solid, fixed budget. When all the pieces are In place, the agency can say, “Get the whole package. We ca…
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Dec 16, 2021
How to Suck at Sales and Charge More Money
Matthew Hunt built and sold two agencies over the past decade. Automation Wolf is his third iteration.
In his second agency, after losing almost two years of momentum because he never “got around” to marketing his own business, he hired another marketing agency to promote his agency. Although he was not completely satisfied with the result, he says, “80 percent done is better than not done at all” and his agency finally gained momentum and grew.
In this interview, Matthew explains his understanding of what a lot of agencies don’t understand – that clients are “not looking for a do-it-yourself model or a done-with-you model” and “not looking to coach-and-consult it.” He claims, “They're looking for done-for-you model.”
Matthew believes that most agencies should probably not be trying to do for themselves what they do for their clients. He has found that webinars, epic inbound-outbound marketing efforts, and labyrinthine Rube-Goldberg-machine sales funnels don…
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Dec 2, 2021
When Consolidated Agencies are Not a Holding Company
Tim Ringle is Global CEO of Meet the People, an “international family of unified but independent agencies. In the three months since its inception, Meet the People has acquired 3 agency brands. Tim has bigger plans. He intends to bring in a total of up to 15 agencies, reaching from Canada and the US to Europe and Asia. “We have 400 people in North America right now. We want to be 2,000 people in at most 18 to 24 months globally.”
Even though he is acquiring agencies at a fast pace, Tim says what he is not building a holding company. He explains that holding companies have been consolidating the industry, the trend a “survival response” to complications from the digitization of processes and channels and, more recently, because covid has changed how work is done. He says small agencies may need to hire one or more people “just to handle the benefits, taxes, payroll, inflation, and salary increases” of those employees who now want to work from “anywhere,” where “anyw…
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Nov 21, 2021
Fast-track Facebook Sales Acceleration
Kevin Urrutia is Founder of Voy Media, a “growth marketing agency” focused on helping marketing executives grow their online businesses – but not from the “ground up.” Voy Media does not help companies that want to get started in online marketing, build clients’ businesses, or act as any client’s marketing team. Instead, the focus is on scaling successful client companies and taking them to the next level, moving them from 6 to 7 to 8 figures in monthly sales . . . and doing it fast.
These clients already know what they need to do to build a business and they’re doing it. They already have mature systems and processes in place for emailing prospective buyers and getting online content and reviews. Voy takes this collected information, breaks it down, and uses it to feed the creation of new ads, new videos, and new images for clients’ social media – their already existing Facebook pages, Google Ads, and LinkedIn, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and TikTok accounts.
K…
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Nov 18, 2021
Old Agency Flexes with a Focus on New
Jamie Michelson is President and CEO of SMZ Advertising, a Detroit-based agency that started in 1929, producing and distributing jeweler artwork ad kits. These ad packages, delivered as a monthly subscription service, provided graphics to promote and showcase jewelry and were used in catalogs and newspaper advertisements.
Early advertising, Jamie says, “was much more informational” than today. As advertising evolved, information had to be packaged with some entertainment and hooks to get people’s attention. The agency adapted and grew through that transitional period.
Today, at 92 years old, the still independent, family-owned full-service agency focuses on communications, planning and strategy, research, design, advertising heavily, retail, events, mobile, social, and “moving our clients’ businesses forward.” Jamie says, “All that history doesn’t mean we know everything. It teaches you to question everything.”
He then describes his agency as “a team of around 40…
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Nov 11, 2021
Franchise: Focus, Scale, and BOOM!
Adam McChesney, Owner, and Partner at St. Louis, Missouri franchise of Hite Digital, a service digital marketing agency with 15 locations. Adam’s agency provides logo design, branding services, website design, search engine optimization, paid advertising, and recently launched Hite CRM, a technology-based software based on GoHighLevel’s white-labeled CRM.
The goal? “To create an ecosystem that . . . helps us generate more business for them, . . . turn(s) those leads into customers, and then turn(s) those customers into walking billboards for our clients.” He wants to “turn a client’s business into “a scalable model” that helps them reach their goals and helps them get more out of what they put in.” Adam says over 75% of his clients are in a home-service or contracting-type industry.
Before Hite, Adam sold medical devices for around five years. When Covid hit, he decided he wanted to get into marketing. His background in prospecting, sales, and growing business gave…
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Nov 4, 2021
Branding for Fast, Disruptive Growth
Sara Helmy is CEO at Tribu (tribe in Latin), a 20-employee digital marketing and branding agency that prides itself on “building tribes for the brands that we serve.” Sara, with a passion for SEO, started the agency ten years ago with about $6,000, no outside funding, no debt . . . and for the first three years, doubled-down, boot-strapped, added things over time, and eventually morphed the agency into a branding powerhouse with close to $3 million in service revenue this year.
Tribu serves a diverse group of clients . . . facilitating government-supported projects (like San Antonio’s 300-year anniversary celebration), B2C (Devils River Whiskey), B2B, and healthcare . . . but most clients have one thing in common: They have high, ambitious growth goals . . . and they want to be disruptive in some sense.
Tribu’s view of “brand” is far broader than having a logo and a website. Sara includes in “brand” the assets a company creates and deploys, the nurturing, the daily…
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Oct 28, 2021
Utility, Meaningfulness, and Relevancy . . . Aha!
Leeann Leahy is CEO at VIA, a full-service advertising agency/communications company and winner of AdAge’s 2019 Small Agency of the year. Via‘s 100 or so employees work their creative magic to unleash growth for such name brands as Arm & Hammer, Unilever (ice cream novelties Klondike, Good Humor, Popsicle), Perdue Chicken, and CarGurus. The agency has a few clients in Maine . . . a lot more nationally . . . and even some that are global.
Leeann says the agency makes small budgets work “much bigger and harder than they should” and runs on a critical balance of head and heart. In this interview, Leeann outlines the agency’s 5 responsive principles: “be curious,” “think like the audience,” “be on time,” “be on budget,” and “create respect,” and 5 artistic principles: “figure it out,” “find the magic,” “believe,” “do work that makes you proud,” and “honor the process.” It’s a formula that succeeds . . . as evidenced by the agency’s 28…
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Oct 14, 2021
Never-Ending Stories and Beyond
Matthew Berman is President/ co-founder of Emerald Digital, a full-service data- and creative-driven digital marketing/ public relations agency that specializes in generating quantifiable leads and sales by:
* Mapping and generating consumer-journey-stage-specific touchpoints across multiple digital channels,
* Developing and delivering personalized, consumer-journey-stage-specific content.
Typical clients are B2C premium consumer goods providers, B2B clients, and professional services (legal, healthcare, and some financial companies).
Matthew talks about journey stages as being three funnels: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Awareness involves highlighting a consumer’s major” pain points, introducing the client, and clearly presenting the client’s unique benefits. At the purchase stage, where the user is already familiar with the client and trust and authority have been established, the message can be “a little more aggressive.”
The client, its product, and it…
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Oct 7, 2021
Visions of Success
Lisa Vielee is President at Well Done Marketing, a 15-yer-old full-spectrum, strategic, creative, and technical agency that provides design, branding, content marketing, public relations, and digital strategy services . . . but not traditional media-buying.
Lisa claims this small, independent agency is unusual for its size in that it has a full web development team and can “go straight from web design to UX, UI, and development, testing, and then continue with ongoing maintenance web development. Lisa explains that “design to development” can be a rocky handoff – but keeping everything “in agency” eliminates this problem. Today, websites, which used to be one-and-done “catalogs,” require constant updating to make sure they provide great customer experience, enhance and support the customer journey, and align with changing customer needs.
New business comes into Well Done in one of three ways—through referrals, through “the dreaded RFP process, and finally, and thr…
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Sep 30, 2021
Deep Diving to Sell What’s Hard to Sell
Heather Isch is CEO and President at LKF Marketing, a B2B-focused full-service marketing communications company that specializes in working with manufacturers with complex, often highly technical products and complicated sales channels; governmental agencies working on regional economic development; and local community-focused arts organizations and nonprofits (the agency’s give-back “passion” projects).
Heather describes the process of getting to know LKF clients as a “deep dive” – into understanding all of the different industries they work in, the “customer levels” within each of those industries, who clients are trying to reach (which may vary by product application), what clients are trying to sell, and how they are trying to solve their customers’ problems – and compiling that information into “customer maps.” In addition to questioning clients, the agency gets industry information through accessing existing research, consulting with trade partners, follo…
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Sep 23, 2021
Calming the Chaos of Agency Operations
Karl Sakas is an Agency Consultant and Executive Coach at Sakas & Company where he consults with, coaches, and trains marketing agency owners struggling with various challenges related to their teams, their clients, and their services. His focus? To guide agency owners through risky decision-making, help them overcome constraints, enable them to grow profitably to the next level, and to make them “better bosses.”
Karl has a strong agency operations background and has worked with agencies around the world. His team is often called in when an agency:
* Founder’s network runs out and the agency needs to find new customers,
* Is slammed by new growth opportunities, or
* Needs help on a sales process . . . figuring out team member and client onboarding processes, smoothing delivery, or developing strategies for building long-term relationships.
In this interview, Karl identifies six agency “roles”:
* Account managers sell additional services to existing clients and kee…
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Sep 16, 2021
Innovating with Imagination and Intelligence
Paul McDowall and Catherine Clark were neighbors when they founded ClarkMcDowall, a 21-year-old agency that with “intelligence and imagination” architects growth for “visionary companies.” Originally starting with big clients Catherine “inherited” from her previous employer, the agency had to put in effort to bring on the startups and mid-size companies that keep an agency nimble, fresh, and entrepreneurial – where there is a higher chance of “getting stuff done.”
Paul says the agency’s most productive relationships come with clients that want to think ahead and think differently, make changes and do something different, and push boundaries – that these companies have a “sophistication in the way they think, but also a progressive way of thinking about their own industry or their own business.” Catherine notes that the human side is important to the mix and that today’s clients are far more savvy about marketing and innovation than they were even six years…
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Sep 9, 2021
Removing Friction
Ken Magma Marshall is Chief Growth Officer and Managing Partner at RevenueZen, an agency focused on helping high-growth-oriented B2B, SaaS, and professional service brands generate more demand and leads through SEO, content, and LinkedIn . . . to get real leads that actually convert.
Ken started his agency four-and-a-half years ago. His first milestone was developing a successful, process that worked and that he could pass onto another person with his SOPS and get the same results. Instead of waiting for clients to request particular services like keyword research or gap analysis, Ken could tell a client, “In the first 90 days, we’re going to do these two things that will lead to X outcome based on the research and analytics from my previous clients.”
The second one, he says, came about when the repeatable system evolved to the point where he no longer had to tweak the system himself to continue to get targeted outcomes.
About six months ago, Ken’s agency reached its third m…
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Sep 2, 2021
Moving Quickly
Josy Amann is Co-founder at Media Matters Worldwide, an analytics-driven, brand-power-focused omnichannel media buying, and planning agency serving B2B and B2C clientele. In 2005, Josy and her co-founder left a large agency where they had been providing media buying and planning to start Media Matters – with no money and a two-pronged plan – to get their own clients and to freelance with other agencies. Their first client was a “gift” from their prior agency. Josy says referrals sustained the agency for the first ten years. In 2019, MMWW hired a leadership team to help scale the business, to be able to serve larger clients and to meet the variety of technological demands. Completely remote from day one, MMWW tripled its employees from 20 to 60 in two years – during Covid!
Omnichannel marketing encompasses both traditional and digital advertising. Traditional advertising includes linear (scheduled broadcast) TV and radio, outdoor displays, direct mail, and print. Digital adve…
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Aug 26, 2021
Push-Pull Transformations Drive Rocket-Ship Growth
Julie Koepsell came into Horizontal Digital as President of the North America division in December 2020 at a time when, due to Covid, the company was “fully remote.” Horizontal Digital is a 17-year-old global, “experience forward” consultancy that puts people at the center if its efforts by creating deeper, end-to-end-connected, seamless, relevant, and personal customer relationships that boost client ROI. Because Horizontal is a boutique consultancy, clients get a “very high touch experience.”
Julie says it is important for leaders to “listen.” One of the first things she did after joining the company was to connect one-on-one with all 50 division employees. Due to continued growth, the division has hired an additional 150 employees over the first part of this year. Globally, the consultancy has 500 employees.
Many of Horizontal Digital’s B2B clients sell through multiple distribution channels and dealer networks. The desired push-pull challenge is complex – comp…
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Aug 19, 2021
Capitalizing on Opportunity and Fixing What’s Broken
Ten years ago, Ryan Frederick, became a partner at AWH, a now 26-year-old firm that builds net new software products, solves data problems, and integrates systems across platforms and products (phones, the web, Internet of Things [IoT] devices).
The client mix is split in thirds:
* Funded startups building disruptive products to capitalize on unique opportunities
* Midmarket companies (manufacturers, distributors, or nonprofits/social enterprises) who don’t have much technological knowledge or “horsepower” and a one-time or only sporadic need to build a “digital fix.”
* Enterprise clients that need prototypes and proofs of concept for corporate innovation initiatives (e.g.; leveraging blockchain technologies, integrating machine learning, and utilizing artificial intelligence). These companies have the resources to build the needed system but need guidance on how to approach a problem and what needs to be done. To ensure the best outcomes, AWH consults with clients an…
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Aug 12, 2021
Storm Survival Strategies
In 2006, Angie and Will Scott, COO and CEO and co-founders, started Search Influence as a technically oriented search, social, and digital marketing agency, supported with tracking and attribution, and demonstrating value across very complex systems. Challenged at the beginning to find people with the needed skills, the agency outsourced its production work and developed an intensive training cycle and “robust” documentation for new hires. Will claims that, to this day, the agency’s internal-facing superpower is training and education.
For the agency’s first six years, SEO required seeding web content with relevant keywords. Will says that today’s content has to be more nuanced . . . that SEO is now “more about meeting the customer where they are in the buyer’s journey.” The agency concentrates on three verticals: midmarket healthcare (driving patient visits to individual practitioners on up to regional medical centers and, on the practice side, generating more leads),…
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Aug 5, 2021
Holistic Alignment and When Do We Stop Lying?
Scott Couvillon is CEO and Executive Strategy Director at Trumpet Advertising, an agency that strives to create purpose-aligned, believable ads. Scott says that companies succeed with their advertising, not only because their creative product promotion is compelling, but more so when the ads “compel an honest connection between a person and a brand.” Scott says there is a lot of talk in the advertising industry about purpose. What is more important is “What do you do with it once you’ve got it.”
Scott holds that advertising needs to be aligned with a company’s core beliefs. Organizations need to think holistically and ask, “If you put purpose in the center, how do you:
* Get the company culture aligned with that purpose?”
* Get the advertising and communications pieces aligned with that purpose?” and
* Get the customer experience aligned with that purpose?”
Advertising agencies typically work on communications – but may neglect a company’s culture and c…
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Jul 29, 2021
CRISIS!
Mary Patrick is CEO and Managing Partner at Jasculca Terman (JT) Strategic Communications, a 40-year-old public affairs firm that provides issue education and crisis management and builds support for its clients’ controversial legislative, regulatory, and public policy issues.
Over the past few years, crisis management has been close to 50% of the firm’s business. “Topping the list” over this past year were Covid and social issues, but the agency’s scope is broad: workforce and labor issues, leadership misconduct, immigration, environment, non-Covid healthcare, protest and rally management, and contentious leadership changes . . . anything where there is controversy or two or more sides to a story.
Organizations might engage JT at any time – when they want to plan ahead to avert potential problems, when they know something is coming and want to put the key pieces in place to manage it, or . . . when the news chopper is overhead and news media are banging on the door.
Mar…
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Jul 22, 2021
How Best to Invest when the Brand is Bland
Bill Durrant is President at Exverus Media, a paid-media agency (TV ads, print advertising, sponsorships, and other types of media) that serves culture-creating, growth-stage brands. The agency’s focus is not so much on big-budget, long-term brand building as it is on consulting with clients and recommending “how best to invest” to produce significant, trackable and measurable short- to medium-term results.
Bill says, “all media is performance media” and that it can be very challenging to quickly determine the effectiveness of branding efforts and traditional marketing media. To address this, his agency tries to establish a “performance mindset” and “a structure to capture things that aren’t directly trackable.”
Bill finds it exciting that today’s solutions for modeling are “significantly less expensive” than those that were available in the past. He says modeling has been “democratized” – that you can build and launch a model in weeks, update it conti…
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Jul 8, 2021
Simple Truths for Success
1984. Maybe ’85. Take a 26-year-old art director who loves her work. Put her in a big agency where she is surrounded by middle-aged white guys. Strangle the agency’s creative work with politics and bureaucratic overhead. Ask a simple question, “How long can this last?” Sue Kruskopf’s answer? When both the employer’s and her futures looked bleak, it was time for change.
In 1988, Sue and the copywriter she worked with started KC Truth, with a focus on truth, simplifying the complex, and serving clients by –
* getting to that core truth about their businesses,
* stripping away all the B.S., and
* making the message as simple as possible for target audiences.
Sue says, “Simplifying things is always a lot more difficult than complicating things.” Her ideal client website is one the communicates what the company does and why they are different from everyone else . . . and does that in the shortest (simplest) way possible, which is both an art and a science.
The la…
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Jul 1, 2021
Building Powerful Online Relationships
Beth Trejo is CEO at Chatterkick, a digital marketing agency that focuses on using social media platforms to connect businesses in a “real way” with their customers and drive to their businesses forward. Beth warns social media is complex. Time is everything on social and companies do not have the luxury of crafting content and sending it through committee approval processes. She cites studies that show that “about 80% of all businesses are not responding to their social media messages” – they only look at Facebook Messenger, skip the other places messages come in, and potentially miss out on big opportunities.
Beth believes that many companies cannot effectively manage social media internally. They may not have the time to handle the volume of content needed to build relationships. Coordinating messages across the range of platforms customers may be using adds to the challenge. In addition, businesses often do not realize that these platforms are communication channels and…
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Jun 17, 2021
Building to Sell
Brandon Edwards started his career in the issues management / crisis / grassroots / public affairs-focused healthcare division of a multi-industry, multi-practice Santa Barbara agency. In 2009, a toxic rift developed between Brandon’s growing medical services division and the rest of the faltering agency. Brandon and his division associates bought out their piece of the business and formed ReviveHealth. It took almost 6 years to go from being issue based to what it is today – a full-service. integrated, all audiences, all channels firm serving B2C, B2B, and B2P, the business to physician/provider side.
Santa Barbara was “an extremely high-cost market” with neither a strong employment nor a strong healthcare base. In 2011 decision was made to move to Nashville, TN, which Brandon refers to as “the Healthcare Capital of the World.” He cites Tennessee’s central time zone, big airport, abundance of talent, and lack of a state income tax as major incentives for the move.
Bran…
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Jun 3, 2021
Reddit’s Ask Me Anything: Turning Curiosity into Understanding
Will Cady heads the Creative Strategy Team at Reddit, which he describes as a platform of more than 100,000 different, intent-driven, purpose-driven communities representing 100,000 distinct cultures . . . and an “incredible petri dish of niche subcultures that are emerging and influencing or becoming mainstream culture.” He says that “people go to Google to search for information . . . and to Reddit to search for what other people have found.”
Reddit’s Creative Strategy team sits between these “very curious” subculture communities and the brands that want to find their place in these communities. Will says the Creative Strategy Team’s mission of “turning curiosity into understanding” runs both ways . . . 1) brands need to understand the different cultures on a deeper level to know what is coming in the future and 2) Reddit need a deeper understanding of the brands and how they meet cultural needs of the different communities.
He explains. “Brands are made up of…
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May 27, 2021
Meeting the Challenges of High-Tech Marketing
Sandra Fathi is President and Founder at Affect, a public relations, marketing, and social media agency that focuses on B2B technology, healthcare, and professional services. The agency clients range from “startups to large multinational publicly traded companies.” B2B tech includes such things as “cryptocurrency, data, cybersecurity, supply chain and logistics, mobile application development, and cloud computing.” Healthcare includes healthcare IT, devices, MedTech. and services but stops short of highly FDA-regulated areas. Clients’ products tend to be complex but further challenges for the agency include multiple decision-makers and multiple considerations.
Sandra says people seek out her agency because they appreciate the agency’s focus on business outcomes and want an agency with “deep technical expertise.” To meet this technical challenge, the agency selects its team members based on three criteria.
* The ability to communicate verbally . . . to explain comple…
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May 20, 2021
You Know What? They Get Me.
Steve Connelly started Connelly Partners (the defiantly human agency) in 1999 after he, as President of another agency, decided that the next time he got shot in the head, it would be by his own hand. For the first 6 months, his startup operated out of loaned office space in the backroom of another agency, Partners & Simons, Connelly Partners grew to cover all disciplines through acquisitions and organic divisional spinoffs. Today, the agency has a 42,000 square foot office in South Boston, and satellite offices in Dublin, Ireland and Vancouver. The broad, international range of the agency’s B2B and B2C clients range in size from very small to large. The agency even supports low-cost or pro bono services for creative opportunities.
The core values of the agency include all things anthropology, with subsets of empathy, studying human behavior, observing people and being able to “figure out what they’re thinking, even if they don’t know that’s what they are thinking.” Steve…
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May 13, 2021
Moving to a Client Perspective
Steve Denker, most recently Vice President of Marketing and Digital for Turner Classic Movies, chats with Rob at the virtual 2021 South by Southwest. In this interview, he gives his perspective on what he looks for when “working with agencies.”
In the mid-90s, Steve worked for Aramark at Fulton County Stadium/Turner Field, managing relationships with the brands and products that were part of that stadium experience. He observed how fans interacted with Coca-Cola and highlighted opportunities for Coke to increase sales and strengthen the link between the experience and the product. Coca-Cola liked his approach and brought him onboard to develop the experiential look and feel of Coca-Cola in a wide variety of venues.
After a while, Steve understood that Coca-Cola was large enough that it would be a long time before he would have the opportunity to manage people, explore the emerging field of digital marketing, and gain product sales experience.
He took a position with RentPath, le…
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May 6, 2021
Getting the Picture
Amy Balliett is Founder and CEO at Killer Visual Strategies, an agency that specializes in visual communications design – creating such “products” as info and motion graphics, data visualizations, virtual reality, and interactive content. An Inc. 5000 company for four years in a row, Killer, now part of Material, has won over 30 excellence in visual communication awards. Clients include such Fortune 1000 companies as Amazon, Boeing, the Discovery Channel, Edwards Lifesciences Corporation, and Microsoft.
In this interview, Amy talks about the “spammy” beginnings of infographics, when people slapped up on their websites images that had nothing to do with their brand. She says, a high-quality infographic visually communicates significant meaning so efficiently and effectively that little text is required. Amy notes that around 10,000 infographics are released daily . . . and 99% fail. The 1% that succeed don’t use much text, use custom (as opposed to stock) illustrations, pro…
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Apr 29, 2021
50 Years Marketing (in the) Black
Lewis Williams is Chief Creative Officer at Burrell Communications, an African-American-focused, female-owned agency that started 50 years ago to address the interests of Black consumers. Historically, African-Americans often have not been portrayed favorably in the media. Burrell focuses on depicting African-Americans in a positive, realistic way. The very first national-scale client? McDonalds. Other big-name organizations the agency has worked with include Toyota, Walmart, Proctor & Gamble, Google, Major League Baseball and Coca-Cola.
Majority-owned by Fay Ferguson and McGhee Williams-Osse, Burrell Communications maintains a strong partnership and affiliation with Publicis . . . and shares clients with other Publicis Groupe agencies. The agency maintains its independence, but the association with Publicis provides synergistic backup and resources.
Early in his career, Lewis was often the only person of color in an agency. After working five years at Burrell, he left to pursue othe…
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Apr 22, 2021
The Art of Plein Air Marketing
Esther Raphael is Marketing Officer at Intersection, an out-of-home media and technology company that uses proprietary technology to electronically paint its client’s stories on busses and city, transit system, airport, and interior and exterior “destination” walls around the country . . . anywhere outside the home where brands can deliver content, information, and wayfinding to consumers as “they journey through cities.” Intersection’s technology supports dynamic program execution and unique campaign flexibility. A Harris Poll survey reported that 69% of urban consumers are noticing “out-of-home” now more than they were pre-pandemic.
Headquartered in NYC, the agency has offices around the country, so the six-year-old agency has always had a bit of “remote” about it.
Esther was on this year’s South by Southwest panel discussing “When ‘Go Away’ Is a Powerful Brand Message.” The agency partners with Foursquare and uses that platform’s aggregated location…
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Apr 15, 2021
Making SEO Work in Your Neighborhood
John Vuong started his Toronto-based agency, Local SEO Search, in 2013 with the goal of helping small- to medium-sized businesses in North America, UK, and Australia improve digital presence in their local communities.
John had ten years in advertising and sales for print media directories with their online performance-based networks and then worked for 5 years at Yellow Pages. Through this experience, he honed his understanding of how to dig out a business’s gaps, opportunities and challenges, its potential customers, where those customers were located, what those customers wanted . . . and what businesses themselves were looking for in an agency. John explains that product characteristics, physical proximity, convenience, and/or services are only the beginning of the variables to consider in “positioning” a company. Whatever it is that a company’s customers want needs to be prominent on its website. John says, “Make it easy for people to realize what you offer.”
John be…
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Apr 8, 2021
Hook No Hack Video Production
John Limotte, Founder and CEO of Mustache Agency, started his career as a film producer making indie and arthouse films. When that business became more difficult (impacted by, among other things, the rise of the internet), John looked for a way to use his skills doing something that looked more like a real business. He saw potential in the field of marketing for “more cinematic . . . epic . . . more longform storytelling.” So, he started a very small video production agency and took jobs one by one to see where things would go.
Ten years later, Mustache is a creative content agency with client services spread across three lines: integrated campaigns, video production and post-production, and social. The core of the agency’s work is content and digital content, with a focus on storytelling and creating epic, engaging video content . . . doing high-quality, cost-effective work. Even from the early days, the agency produced hundreds of videos a month. The client “playlist” incl…
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Apr 1, 2021
No Jerks Allowed: Purpose-Driven Story Slinger
Ashley Logan is the Founder and CEO at Yakkety Yak, a full-service purpose-driven content marketing agency that provides blog writing, social media marketing, video production, and website design and development for brands and organizations that want to make the world a better place.
Ashley says that the agency’s “sweet spot” is content creation and storytelling. She believes alignment with the greater good and “giving back” are two things that are necessary for changing the world. “You have to be purpose-driven,” Ashley says. “You have to stand for something.”
A writer from age 5, Ashley graduated with an undergraduate degree in creative writing and landed a job selling for a private label candy manufacturer. She was “a creative person trapped in a corporate world.” As she traveled around “slinging candy,” Ashley saw that widely different companies used the same words talk about themselves in the “digital space.” She decided she wanted a “bigger ticke…
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Mar 25, 2021
Balance Direct Marketing Brand and Demand: Build your Company’s Future
Carl Fremont is CEO at Quigley-Simpson, a direct marketing/direct to consumer marketing agency with its roots in longform television infomercials. The agency has pivoted numerous times from informercials to shorter form direct response TV to full-service media with a focus on digital marketing.
With an almost 40-year career in direct marketing, Carl joined Quigley-Simpson. Six months later, Covid sent the company virtual.
In this interview, Carl reflects on the history of direct marketing. Twenty years ago, the required tasks included setting up call centers, and providing fulfillment, pricing, and promotion strategies for a variety of products. In today’s digital world, the agency helps clients determine how to sell their products in different digital marketplaces and the mix of creative and messaging content that will be most effective. Carl explains that over the 18 years this agency has been around, it is well grounded in “in driving sales and building relationships with our…
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Mar 18, 2021
Start with Core Values to Grow an Evergreen, Employee-Owned Agency
Chad Crowe is CEO at Techwood Digital, an employee-owned agency that provides B2B, e-comm, and lead generation services for around 100 clients in a variety of U.S. industries. Founded on SEO, Techwood has over the years added paid search, branding, and some design elements and development – in a gradual transition to becoming a full-service agency.
Chad had been doing SEO and paid search in a job he loved when he met Jack Ogilvie, owner of Techwood. Jack wanted to add paid search capabilities to his organization’s offerings. How did he win Chad away from his dream job? With the opportunity for ownership at Techwood.
In the first month, Chad started changing Techwood by defining four components for the onboarding process: core values, mission, process, and value chain (how does the agency continually add value to the client?). The agency’s core values, to which any new clients or new employees have to agree to accept and focus on include:
* Have a “How can I help?” attitu…
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Mar 11, 2021
Spy in the Sky Strategies
Melanie Querry owns Beyond Spots and Dots, a full-service advertising agency that frames its work around analysis, keeps client budgets on target, and utilizes proven marketing success in one industry to help businesses in other industries grow. Spots and Dots has been on the Inc. 5000 list five times.
In this interview Melanie discusses how her agency helps clients understand the customer journey and how prioritizing and implementing tactics will do exactly what a client wants . . . and meet budget constraints. Melanie claims that, for a roughly equivalent impression count, digital marketing can cost one-third of what traditional marketing costs. Still, all the layers have to work together. “You have to have synergy within your marketing budget,” she says.
Tactic selection and prioritization are critical, customized to meet a client’s needs, and are based on a mix of Beyond Spots and Dots’ experience, knowledge, and research.
As an example, Melanie talks about geofencing, c…
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Mar 4, 2021
Extracting Meaningful Data from the (Fascinating) Journey
Brian Phillips is Co-founder and CEO of The Basement, an integrated (technology + creativity + measurement) B2C and B2B marketing agency with its roots in production. Brian dabbled in art and worked in architecture before he took the artistic principles of rendering positive and negative space to marketing. He explains, “The positive space, the consumer journey, is one we can see and everything works.” He believes marketers can get a lot of understanding out of identifying and analyzing negative space – the things that don’t work – and that these, too, can help define the client journey. He believes “Negative space helps define and form the positive space.” His interests today remain diverse. For the past year, he has avidly read scientific books, pursuing ideas related to how genetics might impact buying and selling.
The agency manages all media and destinations (the social channels and websites where consumers engage), extracting and analyzing as much data as possible…
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