Our Story: We KNOW failure.

15 years ago all the greatest minds in marketing chased after anything with a .com after it. So what did we do? We hung our shingle in the world of radio. Yup, that thing with a dial. We set out to be the analytic media placement gurus in the medium made popular by your grandfather. Not the sexiest of choices. But we loved radio, so we followed our heart.

Crazy right? You haven’t heard the half of it.

Being nerds bred from the world of Direct Response, we thought we’d bring DR advertisers to radio. Which, given you can’t see the product you’re trying to sell, again, this didn’t seem the wisest of business strategies.

We began airing our DR advertisers using live reads from major radio personalities. 9 advertisers total. And all 9 efforts tanked miserably. So much so we actually had announcers making fun of our advertisers’ products. They say no publicity is bad publicity.

“They” never worked in Direct Response.

So we went back to the drawing board, and developed a strategy aimed at pre-recorded radio advertising. Through elbow grease, late night brainstorm benders, and a good helping of luck, we made it work. And we made it work big. By providing our radio station partners with one-of-a-kind services to manage their inventory, we obtained prime radio time at sub-remnant rates. This translated to media efficiencies that made DR campaigns work. Today, 1 in 10 radio commercials are placed by Marketing Architects.

So then we got cocky. Our DR advertisers need great call centers. So we thought we’d build one. Easy-peasy right?

Boy did we fail big time.

However, in the process of closing down the call center, we weren’t sure what to do about all these fancy high-tech boxes we purchased. Apparently we owned a carrier-grade phone switch with IVR technology.

So we plugged it in.

We began running all our radio calls through our switch, allowing for extraordinary new reporting capabilities to our clients. We then upped the ante, and enabled the IVR technology. After several million dollars of additional application and telephony development, we introduced our exclusive call center solution, Vocé, to our advertisers. And this time, our solution worked better than we could have ever imagined.

Whew, we got lucky.

So while all this cool left brain techie stuff was going on, we knew we had to even out the equation by letting some right brain creative folks in the building to work on all the radio campaigns we had on our plate. We let them dress casual, but did require they shower at least once a week. They built world class audio studios, and started cranking out highly persuasive audio at an unbelievable pace.

Then we did something we said we’d never, ever do. We entered television. It’s not like anybody else was making DRTV commercials, so let’s take a dip in this bloody ocean.

Our first TV commercial bombed.  Our second TV commercial did worse.

So we decided to build an entire TV studio. Yup, nothing washes away the stench of failure like investing some serious capital. We furnished all the bells and whistles complete with shooting stage, editing suites and an audio finishing bay. We hired producers, editors and art directors. Then we ran hard at our third pass at TV.

This time everything clicked.

Today we’re fortunate enough to have helped innovative unknowns become household names through the power of TV. Some have even earned the bragging rights of being top 3 DRTV brands.

With radio and TV running at full-steam, we’re now hard at work building out an expansive suite of web and product development services. And we’ve begun to fund budding entrepreneurs and their big ideas. Will we experience some failure here as well?

Hopefully.