MattCreamer.com

Last spring, I attended a conference called The Marketing Forum, a strange experience that led me to spend three days on a cruise ship anchored off the coast of Long Island in a fog bank with hundreds of clients, agencies and other vendors. One of highlights turned out to be meeting Peter Hershberg and Josh Stylman, who had just sold their search-engine marketing firm to Interpublic Group a few weeks before. They struck me as approachable, smart, and amazingly down-to-earth. As two long-time friends who built and sold a successful business in just a few years, they also had a great, inspiring story. Peter, Josh, and I had a few drinks and watched the weirdness that transpires when marketers have a few too many. Out of that haze emerged the idea for a long project that appears on the cover of this week’s Advertising Age.

Between July and October, Reprise Media worked to optimize me for search, letting me observe the process. Going in, my search performance, candidly, sucked. Several weeks of immersion in social media later–including the creation of this blog–it’s vastly improved. The Ad Age story is my best stab at chronicling the experience, but, even though it’s one of the longest stories I’ve written for the magazine, a lot didn’t make the cut. Among that left out was a sense of what a great experience was working with a really smart, friendly staff that was patient with a guy who really knows only enough about the Internet to be dangerous. Though I’ve been covering the business of marketing for going on five years and learning a lot about all kinds of agencies in the process, this is probably the deepest I’ve yet to go into one. And it was a blast.

I’m grateful to Peter and Josh and Dan Kashman–my point man on the project–and, though she didn’t make the story, Kate Zimmermann, who did a lot of the grunt work in getting me up and running not only on this blog but also on a dozen other social-media platforms. Thanks also to everyone else at Reprise who had a hand in optimizing me.