Michigan University Outpost Keeps Jobs in U.S.

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By WILL AKERLOF

Since we have a growing marketing agency with a focus on digital campaigns, our needs for data analysis are ever increasing.

The volume of data generated by our campaigns can be overwhelming; each campaign might generate tens of thousands of data points each day. We might be running 15 to 20 different campaigns at any given time. For each of these campaigns, we need to know daily what is going right and wrong. What has changed? How can we most accurately measure the success or failure of ad placements, and what can we do to optimize our performance? While automated tools might assist in these tasks, there is no substitute for daily review by individuals with high levels of skill in math and statistics.

The future of advertising looks pretty geeky. The skills we are looking for these days often involve programming, math, statistics and science backgrounds. And chess masters are always welcome to apply.

One problem we face is that while our billings are increasing, our data analysis needs are growing at a far faster pace. How can we keep pace with this growth without sacrificing profitability?

We could have tried for more fully automated solutions to the optimization of advertising campaigns, but we felt our clients would suffer. Automated solutions don’t ask why a site is doing particularly well, they just double down. But the why can be extremely important. Often when you find out the why, you might want to reduce spending, not increase it.

Could we look to tech-savvy but lower-wage countries like India or Eastern Europe for assistance? Many ad agencies are doing this, and we have experimented in this area. But we encountered problems with language, culture, time zones and employee turnover. In the end, we saw savings, but the work product suffered.

While we can find great talent in Los Angeles, we’re pretty much at capacity in our Venice offices and a move would be particularly expensive. Office space in our neck of the woods is pricey. Living in West Los Angeles is costly, and pay scales have to match that in order to keep and retain top-quality employees.

I started thinking about my roots in Michigan. Old high school friends who still lived there have purchased large houses with swimming pools and expansive lots for far less than the average Culver City 2-bedroom condo. Office space there was plentiful and extremely cheap. And classes had just ended at the University of Michigan, one of the better schools in the country, where it is estimated that about one in four students will be unemployed or underemployed after their graduation.

We decided to move quickly. We posted a job description on the university job boards and received some amazingly good resumes. Over a three-day trip, we met with top candidates at a local hotel and explored office space. It took two weeks to set up the new offices, and at the beginning of July, we opened the doors of our first satellite office in Ann Arbor, staffed with new hires and one of our media planners from Los Angeles, who came out to train the new employees.

Everything included, setting up a new office in Michigan cost a small fraction of what it would have cost us to move into bigger space in Venice. We have new employees who are currently exceeding our expectations. Because they’re in the Eastern time zone, we get our reporting and analysis done three hours earlier, which is a real bonus for our West Coast clients. And now we have a new base of operations for expansion of our services in the Midwest.

Over the past few months, and surely as we ramp up to the November elections, the Obama campaign has hammered Romney for his connection with Bain Capital, accusing him of being at the helm of the company while it invested in companies that shipped jobs overseas. The president recently stated, “If your main experience is investing in companies that are called pioneers of outsourcing, then that indicates that we’ve got a different vision because I don’t want to be a pioneer of outsourcing. I want to be a pioneer of insourcing.”

Political considerations aside, I think as business people we make decisions based on what’s best for our business. While offshoring might make sense for other companies, in a knowledge- and communications-based industry, when your product is brainpower and the ability to translate that into effective marketing, the best solutions were right here at home.


Will Akerlof is president of Liquid Advertising in Venice.

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