Behind the Screen with Digital Campaign Strategist Max Kanet

So take me through when you were first starting out in marketing and how you ended up as a Digital Campaign Strategist with 2060 Digital.

Well, I actually went to school for electrical engineering at Georgia Tech, until I realized I didn’t want to be an electrical engineer after an internship where I sat in a cubicle doing calculus all day. But my mom owned an ad agency, so I got started in the family business and I worked there for like 12 years.

Mainly we did traditional marketing, direct mail, outdoor, radio, TV, that sort of thing. It was great because since it was a small agency, I got to do everything – from creative direction to copywriting to marketing strategy. And that’s where I found my groove, the strategy. I could use what I’d learned in my engineering classes, like statistics, and basically apply it to market research.

I kind of found my niche there with the strategy, looking at data trends and doing market research. And then we started offering market research to clients instead of just using it as part of their advertising plan.

It’s ridiculous what you can find out about somebody. It’s almost scary.

Yeah, it is scary. We can look at Experian and TransUnion – the big credit reporting agencies – and get information from them, from the census bureau, from Neilsen. We can find out any time you swipe your credit card, any magazines you subscribe to, what kind of car you own, how much money you make, how many kids you have…

That’s really powerful information for people to have on their audience.

Yeah exactly, and that’s what we do here at 2060 – we take that same information and we look at the client’s industry and their geographical footprint, and make sure we’re targeting the right people. We want to make sure it makes sense to spend the money.

So how did you go from working in traditional advertising with your family business to digital?

So when my mom retired, she ended up selling the agency, and I stayed on for a few years. But I was starting to look for something different from traditional advertising. Something bigger – a challenge. And at that point I started getting into political campaigns, which use all those same market research skills. And while I was doing campaign management, I started getting into digital.

You dabbled in digital?

Yeah, dabbled in digital, exactly. We did a little DIY pay-per-click, and that’s actually one of the biggest things that made a difference in a particular campaign we won in an upset.  We spent about $5,000 in the last five days just in digital – just a big push. And I had so many people say, “Oh yeah, we saw that!”

So then you came to 2060 Digital.

Yeah, and now I do the research, and a lot of collaborating the Digital Brand Strategists and the Project Managers, to create a really great strategy. The DBS talks to the client and hears about their problems and their goals, and then they come to me and say, “Here’s what the client is struggling with, and here’s what I think will help them. Can you take a look at the numbers and put together what will actually work to get them the results they want?” And then when the client signs off on the strategy, the Project Manager takes over and executes it.

It’s a vital role, because there’s someone there crunching the numbers and saying, “here’s exactly where to direct your dollars if you really want to see ROI.”

Right, and I go in and see on a daily basis how campaigns are performing. Because I’m always thinking, when I’m building out a campaign, about how something is going to work. And I also have to keep teaching myself, too. Because with digital, it’s always changing, and if it’s not a new product, it’s an update, or a new feature, or whatever, so I’ve got to continue to learn, not just about it, but how it works and how to use it. And I love that part of it. I love researching the shiny new toys and seeing what they can do.

You like the shiny new toys, but you want to use them properly; it’s not just good enough that it’s new.

Definitely, that’s the thing – I want it to work. And that’s what we pride ourselves on. I want campaigns that work for our clients. That’s number one. It’s not a light matter to take someone’s money and promise them results, and that’s what we live on – the results we get for our clients – which is why our renewal rates are through the roof. One of our three tenets – don’t sell anything you wouldn’t sell your grandmother – I love that. When I was considering working for 2060 Digital, that was a big reason I was like, “sign me up!”