I recently had the opportunity to interview Don Mathis, CEO of Epic Advertising. Don's varied and accomplished career is a great example for all of us who have many professional interests that we'd like to pursue. He's someone who has never been put into any one box. Don's career took many twists and turns from the military to media to management consulting and now into advertising.
Now, Don leads an advertising agency that prides itself on being the leader in online performance marketing, a coveted field of expertise. His perspective and outlook on the future of online marketing is relevant to all companies that are looking to leverage the many customer communication channels that now exist.
Christa - You have had a varied career including time as a Naval Officer, COO of Small World Sports, time as a turnaround and management consultant, as well as being the CFO of a government consultancy. What's the common thread that you can pull through all of your experiences?
Don - I see them all as integrally connected. Each step on my career path has taught me something; each has better prepared me for Epic Advertising. For example, in the turnaround world, you need to manage rapidly, adjusting to a constantly changing environment with a strict discipline around operations and your P&L – which is a lot like online advertising - especially in this recession. Small World showed me what it is like to be a publisher in this business, and gave me first hand experience in both serving the needs of advertisers and in managing a tech-heavy enterprise. And of all my experiences, none taught me leadership better than the Navy. Think of it: as a Navy Officer, you are charged with leading a group of people from all different walks of life into dangerous work, and you have none of the tools of a civilian manager. You can’t fire people, you can’t pay them extra and you can’t choose whom to hire. Forget the idea that you can just “order them” to do your bidding – that’s only in the movies. Nonetheless, you must accomplish demanding, complex and, occasionally, life-threatening tasks. This isn’t possible if your team doesn’t respond to your leadership, if they don’t trust in you and believe that you will do your best to not just look out for their interests, but to put their interests ahead of your own.
When you have the privilege of holding a CEO position, the questions you get asked most often are about your industry’s dynamics, about how you as CEO are leading the charge in your sector. To me, while strategy and tactics are important, they mean nothing if you cannot lead a team effectively and execute. Without the team around me, I could accomplish nothing. The most damaging concept for business to arise out of the nineties – and it is still with us today far more than most people realize – is the concept of the “guru CEO”, the CEO (or founder) whose supposed greatness will lead a company into the stratosphere. This is sheer nonsense. If I am effective, it is because I have surrounded myself with outstanding folks who work together like a well-oiled machine. And I don’t just mean our executives, I mean right up and down the organizational structure. Build a dedicated and genuinely empowered team that is motivated to accomplish the mission, and you are on your way to creating long-term sustainable enterprise value. Build a team of entitled prima donnas managed by a “Guru CEO,” and you have a recipe for disaster. This fundamental organizing principal -- the power of the team rather than the cult of personality -- is far and away the most important common thread I’ve drawn from my various experiences, and the most important element in Epic’s success.
Christa - Epic Advertising offers a wide variety of services from basic ad placement to full-scale campaign creation from the ground up. How do you help your clients decide what they need within that spectrum in order to achieve their goals?
Don - The bottom line for Epic Advertising is that if it’s not good for the advertiser, it’s not good for us. In order for us to succeed, our clients have to succeed. After all, we don’t get paid if the advertiser doesn’t succeed … and that fact has a wonderful way of concentrating one’s mental energy. We have a very unique business model wherein our client does not assume the advertising risk - we do. Therefore, we must invest time and effort with our advertisers, learning about their goals and their target audience, and then helping set the right test campaign parameters for success. We then provide real accountability and measurability to our clients, which means the advertiser only pays Epic when we deliver a quantifiable action to them. Finally, we employ innovative technologies to ensure that we are targeting advertisements to the proper audiences and optimizing ads to provide the best chance for an action for the advertiser.
Christa - Compliance and integrity of online advertising is a hot topic, and one that a lot of companies are grappling with given the explosion in online platforms and channels that now includes mobile, gaming, and social networks in addition to traditional web advertising. Epic Advertising has a subsidiary called Online Intelligence available to both internal clients and third parties. How does it work and what advantages does it provide in the areas of compliance and integrity?
Don - This is an extremely important topic for Epic Advertising, and one that we’ve focused on in a big way lately. Moreover, it is near and dear to my heart; I was a principal organizer of the graduate Leadership and Ethics Forum when I was in business school, and I take my ethical responsibility to Epic Advertising, its stakeholders, customers, publishers, advertisers and ultimately, the consumer at the end of the click - very, very seriously. I know I speak for our full team when I say this.
The biggest challenge with the explosion in usage of the online medium is transparency: participants in the digital advertising ecosystem must know exactly what is going on in order to ensure the integrity of the online experience. We formed Online Intelligence as a wholly-owned subsidiary to provide our clients with exactly this kind of “full-spectrum” transparency. At OI, we proactively provide Web-crawling, “spidering” and other forensic services to ensure brand protection throughout the entire advertising process, arming advertisers with transparent traffic data. Using this knowledge, Online Intelligence protects clients from click fraud, negative keyword searches, adware and spyware, spam, off-brand ad placements and deceptive practices of nearly any kind. Recently, we also hired E.J. Hilbert to lead this new company. E.J. is a compliance veteran and former Director of Security Enforcement for MySpace, as well as an FBI Special Agent in its Cyber Crimes division. E.J. led a groundbreaking MySpace initiative that reduced fraudulent and spam activities by 98%. At the FBI, E.J. helped crack one of the largest computer intrusion cases ever, when the agency took down Carderplanet, a major part of the worldwide International Carder's Alliance.
We have been developing our compliance capability for several years now. These most recent moves are the latest in our evolution towards setting the standard for integrity in online marketing. We believe they signal our firm belief that having a clean, safe marketplace for consumers and advertisers alike will have major long-term benefits as digital marketing matures and as more ad dollars funnel online from traditional channels.
Christa - In the last few years, we've seen the online advertising arena expand and reinvent itself many times over. What changes do you think we'll see in the near future, particularly in relation to the way small businesses promote themselves in the online advertising world?
Don - What we’re seeing lately are the inherent benefits online advertising can bring to all businesses. Online advertising is relatively cheap to buy, and Google is proof of how many business owners are able to run Search campaigns cost-effectively. The real benefit to businesses marketing themselves online is measurability. Never before has there been a medium that is so conducive to businesses having data and being able to use that data to better position themselves to their target audience. I expect the recent trends of more advertising dollars shifting online to accelerate later this year and into next year. The barriers to entry online for small businesses to compete with huge multi-national companies will also continue to be relatively low.
For a small business, this is a very good time to be marketing online.
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