Marketing in the Modern Age

For the past two summers, I have had the great pleasure of working with Robert Mulcahy, the Search Engine Marketing Manager at TIG Global. TIG Global is a hospitality-marketing firm based in Chevy Chase, MD with over 800 clients worldwide. A McDaniel College graduate, Rob worked as a National Traffic Coordinator for Comcast and a member of the TOEFL Site Readiness Team for Thomson Prometric before he turned his focus to the realm of Internet marketing. With specialties in increasing the visibility of his clients’ ads on the three major search engines—Google, Yahoo, and Bing (formerly MSN)—Rob served as the perfect candidate for my interview regarding communication issues in the marketing field. He is also a frequent contributor to TIG Global's blog, particularly in the "Ask the Expert" series.

Rob was easily accessible and flexible despite his busy schedule. I met him at the familiar location of his cubicle in the TIG Global office just a few blocks down from the Chevy Chase Metro station. His familiar face and down-to-earth personality greatly quelled the anxiety I had about interviewing a professional. After all, how could you not feel at ease with someone who calls you “dude” and loves to crack a joke after every few questions? Despite the formality of the interview’s structure, Rob transformed our question-and-answer session into a comfortable and casual chat.

We began by catching up; I filled him in on my first couple of months as a college student while he told stories about more departures at TIG Global, new hires, acquisition of clients, and more personally, his recent wedding. After we had both loosened up a bit with this easy conversation, I began to pose my questions regarding the largest communication issues he faced during his daily line of work. In response, Rob shared with me two major concerns that he felt were most significant in his interaction with the company’s clients as well as the search engine managers. He first identified the source of these concerns before digging deeper into how he strives to solve each issue.

The first topic of discussion focused on visibility of the clients. Because a consumer’s encounter with an online ad may only last a very limited number of seconds, Rob stressed that any ad he creates must be eye-catching, aesthetically pleasing, informative, and accessible (or easy to understand and follow). This “algorithm” for the perfect ad also pertains to the homepage of a client’s website; Rob informed me that, above all, ease and clarity of a website’s navigation is essential and directly tied to successful generation of revenue for that client. In this case, the central problem at hand for Rob is to create an ad—whether text or Flash-based—that will be memorable enough to consumers that they feel motivated to click the ad and generate revenue for the client. Similarly, one of Rob’s greatest challenges is creating a clean-cut navigation system for a client’s website. Through his use of tracking codes and revenue-monitoring programs such as Ominture, Rob discovered that revenue generation tapers off dramatically if users are forced to spend over five to ten minutes on a client’s website. According to Rob, the communication of information from the client (a hotel) to the consumer (a potential reservation) must embody the 3 C’s: concise, comprehensible, and creative.

Next, we discussed the conflicts that exist in interactions with difficult clients or with search engine managers. He reminded me of a particular situation this past summer where an enormous project was nearly destroyed due to a miscommunication between his marketing team and an outsourced team in India. Because these two teams operated on differing levels of expertise and also faced a minor language barrier, what should have been a simple task of renaming accounts turned into a near-disastrous situation of misnamed and scrambled accounts. Rob emphasized the importance of simplifying and clarifying requests so that there is no question what the demand is. He also suggested keeping a hard copy of all requests for future reference. Besides dealing with people on the search engine’s end, Rob must also manage his relationships with his clients. He tells me that he tries his best to stick to the “listen more, talk less” technique during conference calls; he first allows his client to voice all of their opinions regarding their vision for the ad campaign. After the client is given the opportunity to share, Rob steps in to offer his expertise, tweaking the client’s demands to best meet the client’s budget as well as provide them with the greatest visibility and potential for revenue.

As always, my interview with Rob was informative, refreshing, and highly enjoyable. I was reminded not only of all of the fun memories I had during my two internships under his guidance and leadership, but also of his immense wealth of knowledge in the marketing field. Under his coordination, the majority of TIG Global’s clients have been able to reap generous increases in revenue/room bookings as well as rave reviews by travelers regarding ad campaigns they have seen or their own experiences navigating the website. Despite the two major issues Rob faces in his job as an Internet marketing director, it is obvious that he has learned the ultimate key to mastering to overcoming each of these communication conflicts: listen to your clients and work in collaboration with them, rather than for them. To quote his wise words, “At the end of the day, it’s all in the perspective of the client, but it’s up to you to mold the client’s desires the best way you see fit. There’s got to be a balance between your expertise and the client’s wishes.”