We’ve grown RMM from a five person shop in 2005 to a national company with fifty-seven employees in six states. I thought it would be valuable to share some of the keys that have propelled our growth over this time.

We’re big believers in process definition & continuous improvement. We’ve gone through almost everything we do as a company and have defined the process to ensure that we offer consistently high levels of customer service, including minimizing “dropped balls”. By clearly defining our procedures, everyone involved knows exactly what to expect from each other & we find that we can offer consistent excellence in running campaigns for customers. Defining procedures also helps us identify inefficiencies and continuously make changes to ensure maximum effectiveness. This has become critical as we run hundreds of client campaigns per month, and our growth is a testament to our teams’ ability to deliver excellence consistently.

Another key component of our process definition is employing the KISS principle.  I don’t mean dressing up like Gene Simmon’s band, but the adage “Keep It Simple, Stupid”. Online advertising involves lots of complexity; each of our display campaigns has over twenty steps from initiation to fulfillment across six different teams. There is a significant amount of work that goes into defining & refining procedures, but the bulk of the work really comes from keeping it simple: defining the mechanisms to simply handle the majority of cases, while allowing the flexibility or having exceptions for the edge cases. The hard work is to simplify a complex process.

We love automation. We use it not for the purpose of abstracting human contact & intelligence, but for mechanizing rote or routine tasks so our talented team members can focus their efforts on what they do best! We have found that investing in automation results in happier team members who are more productive and can offer more creative, “solution-oriented” responses to our advertising clients.

I’d love to hear more thoughts & ideas on how others are finding results by focusing on improving operations.

In the past five years, give or take, product placement has gone from carbonation to technology. We’ve had the Apple logo shoved down our throats so much so that every time I eat a granny smith, I think about how much I spent on my iMac – no regrets of course,  just high tech advertising at its best.

Before digital media, the sponsorship heavy hitters included Coca Cola, Budweiser and car dealerships. When Brad Pitt drinks it, we drink it. Now that search engines, subscription and social networking sites have become “products” in themselves, we are seeing more and more of their presence in commercials, feature films and on our favorite TV shows.  So, just how far away are we from hearing the words, “this broadcast is brought to you by Twitter?”

Living rooms across the country were astonished by this year’s Google ad during the Superbowl. Does Google.com really need a commercial to grow its profit margin? “How much did that air time cost?” an eager Saints fan asked me. I have a good guess, but I bet Ancestry.com could tell you, considering they’re running Sunday ads on NBC during “Who Do You Think You Are.”

And let’s take the recent blockbuster graphic novel turned movie, Kick Ass. If any film could’ve snuck in a subliminal Pepsi can, Doritos or pizza, targeted at teenagers, it was this one. On the contrary – in this day in age, it was comic books, iPhones and MySpace.com. MySpace you ask? Yes – that blast from the past networking site is the communication device used to call the title character into fighting crime. Okay, a little behind the times in my opinion but perfect if they are trying to drive traffic back to  their site, right?

Is this an example of product placement? Absolutely. Free advertising? That still remains a mystery. Corporate sponsorship deals are very hush, hush – especially in the film industry. So, whether consumers will be rushing to their computers to join MySpace.com (again) or buy a set of nun chucks after seeing Kick Ass – that remains to be seen.

Move aside Pepsi and Starbucks – I’ll be drinking the iPhone and Facebook from now on!

So, your co-worker coaxes you to watch the trailer for Twilight when you came in for work this morning and it convinced you to be Team Edward all the way. Well, you’ll probably see the preview again in the theater a couple of times and wonder all along why you weren’t Team Jacob in the first place?  Regardless, you’ve seen the trailer twice as many times as you would’ve seen it ten years ago and you’ve invited all your friends to the midnight showing – now that’s how advertising works!

It’s almost impossible to go about your day online and not see an advertisement for an upcoming feature film.  The ad may be a banner across your e-mail server, or a pop up ad on your favorite news page.  It may even be free ticket dancing across your screen or a contest that entices you to check out the trailer.  What ever it is – online advertising for movies has become more and more aggressive since the first preview showed up on our laptops.

Take the movie Paranormal Activity.  This film was made for a dime in 2007 and sat on the shelves at Paramount for two years.  Needing to close out its fiscal year with a bang,  Paramount dusted off a copy and brought in the ad wizards.  With few dollars for marketing, a specific approach was taken: the movie would NOT carry a wide release unless 1 million votes were received on their official website, trailer included of course. And even though the indie hit was slowly making money already, the online approach to getting this film out and about was simply genius.  Once people heard about the scary flick on sites like Twitter who aggressively helped pushed the outcome by telling folks to “tweet the scream.”  People everywhere logged on to the site, watched the preview and made their choice.  When someone tells me I can’t watch a film – you better believe I will see it. And for online ad companies, this was a unique way to track what sites people were surfing, what advertisements linked them to the film’s website, how many people participated and how financially effective the campaign was. To date, Paranormal Activity has grossed $183 million worldwide so, you tell me.

Wikipedia claims that ten billion online videos including movie trailers are watched annually; while previews at movie theaters trail this number by thousands. Over 15 million people viewed the trailer for Paranormal Activity on YouTube, and that’s how online advertising has proved to be changing the film industry one click at a time.

We custom build your site list into three separate blocks that are designed with a maximum of ten sites in each block. Your campaign is assigned its own campaign manager that has the ability to manually adjust sites per block after the campaign has started to fully optimize to achieve the best possible performance. After we developed Block by Block Reporting, we were able to track additional data very easily and split it out by blocks and verticals, making our reporting structure unique and valuable to our clients and to us.

Block by Block Reporting was designed to be transparent and make campaign reporting easy to access for our clients. It started out as an internal tool, but as we grew, it was realized that we could open it up for our clients to use directly, saving time and giving them more flexible reporting.

This feature is the third of many products we will introduce to the online market in 2009-2010. These products are what we have built our foundation on and moving forward you can look out for our network expansion in comScore.

SMS-based marketing is an emerging tool that is delivering strong results; our clients are already building an active mobile database that’s driving sales, increasing their brand awareness, and promoting customer loyalty. Clients can use mobile marketing for many purposes including coupons, sweepstakes, text-to-buy or text-to-give. In addition, our Bluetooth systems can target customers within close proximity to send full motion video, audio/ring tones, coupons and more directly to the phone in your target area.

“We are very excited to introduce mobile marketing to our clients as part of our overall strategy to offer clients an integrated, multi-media advertising campaign that reaches the consumer at the right time with the right medium,” said RM Media’s President Jon Flatt. “Our Mobile Marketing Solution’s targeting capabilities maximizes our clients’ marketing dollars by directing offers to the most valuable customers and our real-time reporting provides complete transparency and ensures results.”

We offer a 24/7 content management system with a client’s mobile campaign that gives easy access to the client’s database which makes it simple to change their offers to distribute to their subscribers. Clients also receive a user-friendly reporting dashboard that tabulates the opt-in and opt-out process and is presented in real-time with measureable results. Mobile advertising is a great lead generation tool because, like surveys, it captures consumers in the moment and allows them to quickly and easily request more information.

RM Media’s Mobile Marketing Solutions is part of a robust suite of products that provide clients new and improved ways to track, report and optimize search marketing, display advertising on its premium network, mobile and email marketing, and custom channel building.

Have more questions about our Mobile Marketing Solutions? Contact us for more information or call us at 512.380.4400.

“Savvy trend spotters and those who invest in private companies know that the Inc. 5000 is the best place to find out about young companies that are achieving success through a wide variety of unprecedented business models, as well as older private companies that are still expanding at an impressive rate,” said Inc. 5000 project manager, Jim Melloan. “That’s why our list is so eagerly anticipated every year.”

Red McCombs Media was founded in 2004 and has posted a 230.6 percent growth between the qualifying years 2005-2008. They were also awarded No. 25 in the Top 50 Businesses in the Austin, Texas area. “Red McCombs Media continues to develop new media marketing products and technology that provide our clients quantifiable value. We have a clear understanding and direction of new media and why it is so valuable to the rapidly changing economic world. Our work ethic and dedication to servicing our clients is second to none,” said Red McCombs Media CEO, Jon Flatt.

Red McCombs Media’s philosophy of focusing on the client resonates throughout the company. The foundation for success continues to be providing unparalleled client service and achieving client ROI.

About Red McCombs Media –
Red McCombs Media is an online advertising and media services company with a network component based in Austin, Texas. They connect targeted audiences with advertisers and publishers based on demographic, psychographic and consumer behaviors to enhance branding and maximize client ROI.

Red McCombs Media focuses on delivering the human element in advertising campaigns through their display and video network, custom built site lists, search engine marketing, search engine optimization, creative and web development. They provide measurable results to local, regional and national clients including several Fortune 500 companies.

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