For agency owners and executives, the digital marketing landscape is always changing.With interviews with thought leaders and those “in the trenches” of the industry, the Performance Delivered digital marketing podcast will keep you up-to-date with current industry best practices… and also give you a glimpse into what innovations the future holds.Hosts Steffen Horst and Dave Antil are big agency “refugees” who know that the industry is going through drastic changes right now. And they offer insights you can use to stay on top.Tune in now to find out…
- A new take on marketing at the agency level
- The most important elements of digital marketing today
- The way performance marketing fits into your current efforts
- How you can be “first in line” for new episodes
- And more
Listen now...
Episode Transcript:
Steve Gordon: Welcome to Performance Delivered, insider secrets for digital marketing success, my name is Steve Gordon.
While I'm not your host for this podcast, I am here today on this trailer episode, to introduce you to your hosts, and I’ve got to tell you, I had a little peek inside of what is coming with this podcast.
If you're into marketing and particularly in you're into performance marketing, this is going to be something completely unique. I'm excited about it. I know that your hosts are excited about it as well.
I want to introduce you to Steffen Horst, and Dave Antil. These guys are ... They've been doing this for a long time. They've got just a depth of knowledge that I think is going to really surprise you as you get into the episodes that are to come in this podcast and the contacts that they have, the people they are going to bring in for you to listen to are going to be absolutely phenomenal.
First, let me introduce you to Steffen Horst, Steffen, please tell everybody a little bit about yourself, give them a little bit of background, so they can know what to expect.
Steffen Horst: Thanks Steve. I've over 15 years of digital marketing experience, working for regional, as well as global agency in Europe, as well as here in the U.S.
I started off my digital marketing journey back in Germany, working for a small search engine marketing agency and helping them, and build out their UK department, before moving them to London and joining two global agencies, for which I basically run their search engine marketing department across Europe, The Middle East and Africa.
Then, I came over to Los Angeles, that's where I currently am, and worked for a company named Mediabrands and run the entire department here out of the office and that included search [inaudible 00:02:04] advertising social media, as well as mobile marketing.
During all that time, I worked with lots of 'Fortune 100' companies in my past, and nowadays, I'm the CEO of Symphonic Digital, which is a small agency that now works with small and mid-sized companies and we decided to work with those companies because we love to be 'hands on' and see the results of all the media campaigns and strategies that we come up with for our clients.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, it’s fantastic to have had a little bit of an opportunity to get to know both you, and Dave, and your approach to both marketing and how you take care of your clients and I'm excited to see what you put together in the podcast.
Dave, Dave Antil, let's hear a little bit from you about your background and where you're kind of coming from, coming into the podcast.
Dave Antil: Yeah, so like Steffen, I'm a big agency refugee. In fact, Steffen and I worked together at Mediabrands when he was in Los Angeles, and I was in San Francisco.
I worked for Cadreon, which is the Mediabrands trading desk running clients services in North America. But my history goes back, all digital agency side, everything from starting off in the old days of web dev, web design for bigger companies, to demand generation search, media for companies like 'Chrysler' and 'Hilton Worldwide'.
And then onto the media side, which is the most dynamic part of the industry right now, particularly in the ad-tech space, which is the programmatic space which is where Steffen and I most recently came from and that's allowed us to really help the small and mid-sized companies that Symphonic is now focusing on, kind of take advantage of some of the big agency tactics and strategies and tools, but we're really trying to bring it down to the small, mid-sized company level.
So, it's exciting for us now too, after spending years helping these big clients take advantage of these tools, we're now being able to help smaller clients take advantage of some of these big tools, and we really like seeing the results and the performance, and the revenue, flow into these smaller clients.
That's what we are really trying to hope, that's what we are hoping to do, both with Symphonic and with this podcast.
Steve Gordon: Well, that really brings me to my next question, which is why did you guys decide to create the show? What's the motivation behind it?
Steffen Horst: Well you know, Steve, while we have our own blog and we share our thoughts on digital marketing and performance marketing rated topics on our blog, we're really looking for medium to, kind of, reach even more people and be able to, on a one-to-one perspective, to interview interesting people from the area of marketing.
We really think that getting together with agency owners, agency executives and digital marketing executives will allow us to actually get interesting information from those people on the challenges they faced, and how they overcame the challenges, to ask them questions that, sometimes hard to find someone to give you a different perspective and talking to the future guests of the podcast, hopefully will be able to get some answers to questions that either people are afraid to ask, or couldn't find answers and to be honest, it will probably also help Dave and myself, to increase our own knowledge when it comes to digital marketing.
Now, the landscape always changes, and on a daily basis, you learn new things.
Steve Gordon: Well, I can tell you that I'm a big podcast listener and what I love doing most, when I listen to podcasts, is listening to shows where you have a host, who's really an expert in their field and they bring on guests who are really top experts, in that same field, and some of those conversations, the things that come out that, the interplay between the two, the insights that can come from that are really quite incredible and amazing. So, I think this is going to be just super valuable for everybody listening.
So, Steffen, who did you create the podcast for? Who is kind of, as you think about who you are trying to impact, who is that person?
Steffen Horst: Well, I think predominantly, we created this podcast for agency owners, for people who think about planning their own agency and wonder “How do I overcome all the obstacles that come with it?”, you know.
One of the big obstacles, how do I find new customers? How do I price my services? And how do I hire a team? Am I going bring important people or am I working with freelancers? What processes do I need to take care of?
All the questions existing agency owners, or aspiring agency owners have, that's where we want to dig in to and its companies, E-commerce directors we've pieced from companies, find information on our podcast in regards to how performance marketing should be done. What are the latest tips and tricks on how to squeak the last thing out of your campaign, so that if they feel there's value for them to, then I think we will be really happy.
Steve Gordon: That's fantastic.
So Dave, what are you kind of most excited about as you look forward to the podcast moving forward?
Dave Antil: I'm most excited, as Steffen mentioned, about learning more. Not one of us is smarter than all of us, so I'm really hoping that from talking to a lot of people that have been through the inception, and the growth, and the evolution and potentially even the exit of an agency, I'm interested to learn how these things happen.
The industry is changing significantly right now and we really expect to have some interesting insights into what's happening in the industry, and how agencies, agency owners, agency executives, can make some of these pivots and how they can turn with the tide. It's an exciting industry and it's an exciting time to be in this business, and I think both myself, and our listeners, can really expect to learn a lot from the experts that we bring in.
Steve Gordon: Yeah, just being able to be a part of the planning of all of this and see what's coming, I think this is going to be a phenomenally great, and a new take, on marketing at the agency level. I think there's a ton there for agency owners who are really looking for new and innovative ways to approach digital marketing, and particularly performance marketing.
So, for those of you who are listening, I hope you've enjoyed this quick little introduction into the Performance Delivered podcast and you'll be able to go and get additional episodes on iTunes, and all the places that you'll normally find podcasts and you can also get them, I highly recommend you go here because you'll get the episodes first, go to: symphonicdigital.com/podcast, that's symphonicdigital.com/podcast and you'll be able to get all the episodes right there, on the Symphonic Digital website, and you'll be able to get in touch with Steffen and Dave and interact with them. It's a great, great resource for all things performance marketing related, so gentlemen, thanks so much for taking the time to put this episode together and again, I can't wait for the first interviews to start rolling out, in fact by the time people find this episode, there'll be at least two more interviews available for them to go listen to, and thanks again for taking the time to put this podcast together for all of us.
Dave Antil: Yeah, it's going to be fun.
Steffen Horst: Thank you, Steve.
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