Experience

Over the past five years I've gained a lot of experience doing different things at different companies, so I'm going to organize my experience by category, instead of chronologically. 

Project Management

Enterprise SEM Account Management, 2015 - Present

At Performics, I help manage a top ten domestic retailer's SEM program. The level of Paid Search investment was new to me when I joined the team and the sheer size of the account was impressive. The program had about 2 million unique keywords and a fluctuating SKU count of around 800K, across 5 or 6 different accounts, mirrored on 3 major search engines--not to mention Comparison Shopping Networks. Pretty massive.

Over the last 2 years I have developed the ability to determine monthly & daily run rates, allocate sometimes massive budgets across the account, and pull the levers of daily budgets and bids based on device, geo, audience, and behavioral data on a 24/7 investment schedule while maximizing ROI. I have driven the program on company record-setting revenue days and have been exposed to an around-the-clock pace of work. This "project" has taught me more about enterprise-level media investment strategies and enterprise-level business goals. It has been the most valuable work experience in my career. 

Extended Text Ad Copy Overhaul 2016-2017

As you may know, Google introduced the Extended Text Ads last year and although we were, as a team, excited to test out the new ad format, we knew with having such a massive account that the migration of about 50K ads would take months and months of grueling, painstaking work in order to transition with care.  Myself and two junior members of my media team worked with a copywriting team at the agency for about 6 months back and forth between drafts, edits, additions, etc.

During the process, I was able to develop an excel-based copy building tool that allowed for the ads to be bulked in about half the time. We were able to truly innovate and greatly improve workflow for not only our own future migration projects, but the agency copywriting team adopted usage of the tool as well, helping to add value across the agency. 

ArtSupply Brand Overhaul, 2014-2015

At Artsupply, we had our work cut out for us. The company had a small, local brick-and-mortar store location and a moderately successful website, both of which were in desperate need of a brand overhaul, for sake of both cohesion and style. My relationship with Rich Goldman, store owner, began as consultative, but as we delved deeper into the issues facing the store's identity & experience I was brought on full time to help.

The first phase of the project was all research, as we needed a solid foundation upon which to choose a clear local and national target market. After we made our decision on a target market, we needed to gather information on all strategies, assets, and finances in order to write a business plan. Writing a an extensive business plan for banks and investors is still one of the best learning experiences I've had.

After the business plan was complete, we needed to work with a designer to creatively translate the identity we had carefully decided we wanted to embody to relate to and encourage our target market of recreational artists. Once we received our beautiful new aesthetic and logo, the next challenge was applying it to all online entities, in-store signage, building signage, banners, t-shirts, the list goes on. 

It soon became apparent that Artsupply was also in need of new media strategies. We revised our approach to online advertising by overhauling the email campaigns, employing proper measurement strategies with Analytics, and by auditing the small paid search program in order to maximize efficiency instead of sales. 

In the process of rolling out Artsupply's new brand identity I gained new skills, including: Adwords & Analytics management, graphic design skills, and writing for business.

Process Innovation

Bid Strategy Innovation

The most advanced tool that I have built for the sake of both improved ROI search performance and bid strategy workflow would be the Bid Trimmer. The Bid Trimmer is essentially a tool that uses historical performance from the look-back window of the user's choosing and divides performance into even tiers based on spend potential, sorted by best to worst performance in accordance with the performance metric of the user's choosing. In my experience it has been ROAS.

The added value of having equal distribution across performance tiers by spend potential is that you can more easily estimate the effects of large-scale bid changes made and more powerfully optimize a program, which is especially useful when an account runs on daily spend goals and your budget is fluidly allocated across ad types and campaigns. The tool also saves the user time by generating bid optimization suggestions for each performance tiers based on the performance goal. 

In addition to the handy Bid Trimmer, I have also created formula-based performance signals that can allow the user to make budget optimizations in direct proportion the campaign's performance. In my use cases, the signal has been designed to use ROAS and Impression Share as performance goals. 

Over the past couple years, I have grown to love bid strategy as both a science and an art, and have committed to doing my very best to innovate and improve bid strategies on the account. 

Bulk Copywriting Innovation

The tool that provides the most time savings to the user would be what I call the "CopyCat." This tool is essentially an excel template that allows you to break down all the core pieces of messaging within your paid search text ad and uses a series of concatenations to rebuild multiple ad variations per ad group at a time. This tool was especially helpful when considering our new ETA's needed to have 3 shipping variations, a generic ad, and a service callout ad per ad group. In our case it helped us create 50K new extended text ads in weeks rather than months. The tool could be repurposed to build test ad copy in bulk, in a flash!

Copywriting & Storytelling

An essential piece of my experience is found in the writing opportunities I have had. I have written:

-Business Plan for ArtSupply.com

-Web Copy for ArtSupply.com, GiftProfessor.com

-Email Marketing Copy for ArtSupply.com, GiftProfessor.com

-Display Ad Copy for Performics Client, ArtSupply.com

-Print Ad Copy for ArtSupply.com

-Search Text Ad Copy for Performics Client, ArtSupply.com

-Native Ad Copy for Performics Client

-Blog Articles for GiftProfessor.com, ArtSupply.com

-72-Panel Comic for GiftProfessor.com

-Creative Writing 

-Lyric Writing

Genesis Art Supply / ArtSupply.com

PROBLEM

Genesis Art Supply was a small, but well-established art supply store in Chicago with a very successful air brush department and a formerly successful, yet declining online presence in Artsupply.com. Among many services and departments in addition to art supply retail, Genesis was facing the problem of having a weak brand identity, outdated marketing practices, and a need for a general visual overhaul in order to evolve into what owner Richard Goldman wanted to actualize. Mr. Goldman had aspirations of moving the store to larger space. I had advised that the current state of the brand would not help the business survive a very costly, large-scale move. 

A NEW IDENTITY

RESEARCH: The first stage in achieving a new identity for Genesis was conducting the research. I needed some time to familiarize myself with both the national and Chicago art supply markets, as well as the different segments of art supply buyers. 

Research showed that our top competitors were large, national chains that had a bit of corporate reputation. In order to position our brand accordingly, Genesis needed to create a very personal, caring and involved experience for its shoppers. 

In regards to the segments of art supply buyers, research from the International Art Materials Trade Association (NAMTA) showed there were three primary segments. These were professional artists, student artists, and recreational artists. Although professional artists spent the most annually, they only represented 10 percent of the market. Student artists spent the least annually, but had very consistent temporal purchasing habits, however, they too only represented 10 percent of the market. This left recreational artists to make up 80 percent of the market.

Additionally, recreational artists had a unique motivation for creating art and buying art materials. While all artists create art for passion, pleasure, or therapeutic reasons, professionals and students also do it for income or education. They depend on their art for more than just personal development, self-actualization or fun. 

For Genesis it made the most sense to target recreational artists with a brand experience that would be truly invested in their development as artists and as people. A positive and personal experience being the most important factor in their choosing one store over another, not just price points alone. 

Once the target market was chosen, a strong mission statement was written, and list of core principles was defined, I began writing a full business plan. The business plan was a confidential report used for banks and investors, so I cannot publish it online.  If you'd like to see this example of my proposal/report writing, feel free to contact me. 

Once the research and brainstorming had produced an outline for the creative translation of the brand, we gave some guidelines to the graphic designer we chose had the ability to carry out what we were looking for. The guidelines were that the logo and style must: 

1. have an inspirational image

2. be accessible to artists of all skill levels, including no experience

3. suggest reaching a level of personal acheivement

Through a few rounds of sketches and feedback, our designer delivered. 

Carlos O'Kelly's

Problem: Low engagement of target market (Millenials in Lawrence, KS)

My Role: Worked with a team on a full campaign including primary & secondary reasearch, message strategy, message development, and executions. Developed social media campaign, guerrilla marketing campaign on University of Kansas campus, video & print productions and full presentation for clients. 

GiftProfessor.com

Problem: Need to drive web traffic

My Role:  18 months as an online marketer, applying skills in social media marketing, viral planning, storyboarding and creative writing with a focus on multi-platform continuity. Managed all email marketing. SEO and Analytics management. Met our goal of reaching 100k unique visitors in the 4th Quarter of 2012.