It was a great time. Great for all of the people here at the agency. A chance to stop for a moment and take a breath. Say thank you to all of our wonderful clients who trust us to help them grow their businesses. A chance for me to deliver a well deserved pat on the back to all our hard working creative problem solvers. And well deserved it was. The agency in every discipline continues to surprise and impress even its toughest critic. Me.

Over the course of the past several months this agency has received accolades for a very diverse collection of problem solving creative ideas. Serious accolades for television and print, multiple awards for interactive (including Best of Show), awards for success in events & promotion and even a couple of awards for what essentially is a pro bono account that we didn’t just do work for — we created the entire Eat Out For A Change movement ourselves. Want more? Well we certainly didn’t cure cancer, but we did the best we could.

Impressive.

Want to know what’s even more impressive? The real success lies in the performance this work has helped to make happen for our clients.

Now, clients are modest, and a little sensitive about broadcasting their particular results here on the interwebs. So I will be a little guarded in telling you that the approach we have here at Firehouse is working.

However by working I mean:
-Driving a guest count increase of more than +10% vs. previous trend
-Reversing a sales trend to positive that had seen 12 consecutive quarters of declining sales
-Setting a monthly sales record – for a multi-billion dollar company – four different times over a 15 month span
-Helping to increase a company’s 2009 system wide sales by +4%
-Driving a YOY +55% sales increase in a featured menu item
-Driving a +31% sales increase in features products in a brand’s emerging markets
-Delivering a +8% YOY same store sales increase – and that was for a client’s QSR partner

The people of this agency are committed. They are focused. They are making a difference.

And I am happy for them, and their accomplishments. Forgive me for taking an indulgent moment to let them know how proud I am to call myself the president of this agency.

Cheers,
Mark

Until now, paid search has always been a pull medium with unknown amounts of inventory. The amount you get is dependent on the amount of times searchers hit the search button — which is currently around 530M times a day. This seems like a lot of inventory, but advertisers want more. Because of the consistently high ROI that paid search delivers, a lot of brands have allocated more and more of their budgets to it over the years. And even though this is good news for the medium, several industries are seeing a rise in rates to record highs — posing an uphill battle in continuing to achieve effective ROI metrics.

Behold…

Access to more scale is now available with search retargeting. Here’s how it works. I like to think of it like a boomerang.

A searcher types something into a search engine, but then they get distracted or they aren’t happy with the search results and walk away. A day or so later, that same person receives a display ad that is directly related to what they’ve recently searched for. In other words, it takes a qualified lead based on real and recent consumer intents, and gives your brand another chance to get in front of that person moving them along the purchase funnel. They threw something out there with search, and a relevant offer or product came back around to them through display – like a boomerang.

Even cooler are the different ways to target based on the search query data. You can target by keyword, topic or category. Location targeting is also an option. And frequency capping is another important consideration.

We’ve now met with over 10 ad networks that offer searching retargeting based on search queries from Google, Yahoo! or Bing. And as we introduce more clients to this product offering, we hope to have more success stories to share. There are endless opportunities for targeting scenarios and compelling creative! More boomerangs to come.

We should all be ultimately accountable to business results. And, at times, it has seemed some BK initiatives build no brand more strongly than CP+B’s. Often, these have been followed by numbers pointing to BK’s failure to create gains on their arch nemesis.

But, in some ways, I root for the agency and The King. They have been bold. They have taken risks together. And some part of me believes that had it not been for their efforts the BK brand would have slunk into the shadows altogether.

Sure, we can measure and re-measure how much real growth BK has had versus McD’s. But, can you measure what would have happened to BK in a world where the work from CP+B never existed?