This five-year-old agency is aiming for billings of $125 million by making every member of its youthful team a CIO. Originally the outgrowth of a class project by a University of Michigan
business school student in 1995, Ann Arbor-based Beyond Interactive (BI), Inc., is today a subsidiary of Grey Global Group and one of the fastest growing Internet-focused advertising agencies, with
offices around the world. From 1998 to 1999, BI’s revenues increased from $1.2 to $7 million, a jump of nearly 600 percent, and billings for 2000 are expected to hit $125 million—an impressive
achievement for a company whose founder and chief executives are all around 25 years of age.
Typical of BI’s high energy crew is Brandon Rea, who just turned 26. He worked his way through high
school and college at Central Michigan University for Papa Romano’s pizza chain as a store manager and afterwards in corporate accounts, planning and marketing. Two years ago, he joined BI as its 25th
hire. He started in account management, migrated to media, helped devise their planning systems and worked his way up to national media director. “A year ago, we had only 3 people in media,” says Rea.
“Today, we have 52 and the company as a whole has over 350 employees.”
As far as Rea and his cohorts are concerned, BI’s youthful team is one of its key assets. “We grew up with computers and we
understand analytics. In a way, every one of our department heads and leading executives is a CIO.”
Because of their intense interest in technology, another company strength, he says, is its
global intranet, which provides interfaces tailored to different users, a centralized repository for purchase orders, and instant access to a database of online publishers. It currently covers 3,000.
“One of our goals is to increase our publisher count every single quarter, and we’re probably on a 400-to-500-publisher clip domestically. But internationally, it’s growing exponentially. We’ll
probably be around 8,000 publishers by the end of first quarter next year.
“Having this information available really helps us with excellence of execution—being able to turn around a plan in
Internet-lightning speed. At the same time, price is an important driver for clients. If they get sticker shock from a branded site like CNN, which has the greatest content on earth but not
necessarily the greatest click-through, the database enables us to offer them a wide variety of choices.”
A critical part of the planning process, he says, is consulting with clients to clearly
define objectives. “The Web is 100% accountable, and managing expectations is very important, because sometimes clients are looking for what cannot happen.”
To obtain the best results, BI media
planners use the Internet extensively for research purposes, as well as tools custom built by the firm’s Marketing Optimization Group to make test buys of statistically significant impression totals.
The ad-serving group, using DoubleClick’s DART, then sets up the campaign with unique ID’s per placement per creative per site. All of the tests are then carefully monitored and analyzed by Marketing
Optimization to “hone in on the sweet spots,” says Rea—”We really believe that the publishers are our clients and we always try to give them a legitimate shot.”
As important as technology is to
the whole process, when it comes to actually buying media, Rea believes that the human touch is essential. He likes to get to know the publishers and their reps, and once contacts have been
established, “two phone calls and an email” is his general rule for closing deals.
BI’s current clients include Nortel, Verizon Wireless, American Greetings.com, and ClassMates.com, among others,
and past clients have included Nickelodeon, AutoNation and The Wall Street Journal. But in a major coup, late last year, after proving itself in one or two campaigns, BI won and maintains virtually
all of Oracle’s interactive advertising business.
The firm’s San Francisco-based Oracle planning team is led by Jon Schaaf, senior media supervisor and Dave Terk, San Francisco media manager. “Our
initial campaign went out in two weeks,” says Terk, “and we did what we needed to do, which was to show them increasingly improving results in regard to cost per registrant metric. Since then, we’ve
had as many as 30 different campaigns running at one time with very different targets.”
On any given campaign, says Schaaf, “We start out doing small scalable buys, and within a short time we’re
able to find out what is working best and optimize in real-time—based not just on click-through rate but on effective conversion rate.”
The BI planners also make a concerted effort to coordinate
their efforts with offline advertising programs to create a synergetic “surround sound” marketing, says Schaaf: “One of the benefits that you’re getting by integrating a campaign both online and
offline is the combination of the branding effect of the offline campaign with the accountability and direct response of Internet advertising.”
Greg Jorgensen, vice president of Marketing for
Oracle, offers high praise for the San Francisco media group: “They seem to have their finger on the pulse of the Internet in terms of what are the best sites out there for us and whether we’re
getting the best bang for our buck; and they’ve been able to offer us quick flexibility when things aren’t working. They’re extremely knowledgeable, aggressive, and they really have understood our
business from day one. That’s why we’ve given them so much work to do.”
To further its reach, and in keeping with its name, Beyond Interactive is also aggressively positioning itself to handle new
digital advertising opportunities with the creation of six Emerging Media Services (EMS) groups within the company. Areas of focus include wireless devices, video games, iBroadcast media, public
access terminals and smart devices. For Oracle, BI will soon launch a wireless campaign using small banners on PDA downloads—the wireless venue that currently offers the most options, says Schaaf.
One thing is certain. In discussions with BI’s young leaders, the excitement is palpable, and they say they are determined to stay on the cutting edge of their industry. Says Terk, “We think our age
demographic is definitely the most qualified to set the pace and set the tone for the future of interactive advertising.”
Freelance writer Larry Estridge can be reached at Lestridge@aol.com.