• by Shankar Gupta , December 19, 2006

After a three-month review, pest-control firm Orkin has retained search engine marketing firm SendTec as its online agency of record.

Rob Crigler, director of interactive marketing for Orkin, said the company anticipates upping its online marketing budget. "We are increasing our interactive efforts," he said, adding that Orkin had sought an agency capable of meeting "an expanded attack in the online space."

As the online agency of record, SendTec will manage Orkin's search engine marketing and optimization campaigns, and also will develop all creative executions and online media buying and planning. Eric Obeck, president of SendTec, said the company would look to bring Orkin into online channels that it had previously only experimented with, including e-mail, lead generation, and contextual ads. Previously, Orkin had focused its online efforts on simple display ads and paid search.

Crigler said that SendTec's search engine and direct marketing background made it attractive because the shop had experience in handling a large volume of data. "Orkin is a big company, and we have multiple locations, multiple data sources, a lot of moving parts for the data sources," he said. "SendTec is really used to thinking and quantifying all of those pieces, and that's something that really resonated with us."

SendTec's Obeck added that search marketing agencies today need to branch out into other online channels. "A pure search agency is probably less able to grow," he said.