2010: The Year Mobile Took the Lead
Riding the Wave of the Mobile-First Invasion
by Matthieu McClintock
In Part III of my entrepreneurial endeavor series I discussed the factors that led to my dropping out of college, selling my car, raising money and founding a full-service mobile advertising agency at the age of 22 in the year 2010. Back then, there was no such thing as a mobile advertising agency and — for the most part — there still isn’t. There are companies that specialize in a specific type of mobile advertising, like search, display, location-based/SMS marketing, or Internet Radio — but no company that does it all.
In August of 2010, the day after my 22nd birthday, I incorporated Smith McClintock Advertising, more commonly known as SMA or SMA Mobile. We were very focused in our mission statement and were a mobile-only company. We didn’t try to scare potential clients into thinking we were trying to replace their existing advertising agency, we educated and informed potential clients on the emergence of mobile and the need for a separate strategy and the content that a successful mobile presence would require. We were a turnkey mobile solution and I had the credibility to run mobile campaigns as I had been head of mobile advertising for one of the largest REITs in North America for the past year amongst many other responsibilities.
So where did the “Smith” in Smith McClintock come from? I was the marketing guy, the account and product guy, the tech guy, I wore a lot of hats. I needed someone whose sole focus was sales and a friend from High School, Mr. Smith, who had been VP of Sales for a marketing company for the past three years, just happened to come back into my life around the time I resigned from the REIT and began putting what would become SMA together. The founding partners were myself, Mr. Smith, and “Mr. Right”, our primary investor, although due to the nature of his job at Lockheed Martin I will not divulge his full government name. His name also stayed out of our Operating Agreement and of course the name of our company although both were offered.
Why name the company after ourselves? For the sake of brevity, it was inspired by Mad Men’s Sterling Cooper (eventually Sterling, Cooper, Draper, Pryce). Smith McClintock had a good ring to it, gave our brand a sense of identity, and clarified that we were an agency, not just a product offering. It also helped that all of our clients dealt with either myself or Mr. Smith at one point or another which gave them a sense of closeness to our company leadership. Although we started out as a two man marketing machine, we had over a dozen employees 60 days into incorporation. Our bread and butter was SMS marketing, also known as text message marketing, and we had a strong partner whose software we white labeled and used to manage our client’s SMS initiatives.
Second to SMS came mobile search and display which, due to the recent sale of AdMob to Google, meant we could easily run mobile search and display campaigns for our clients by using Google AdWords. We had tremendous ways of showing our clients their successes and opportunities with mobile search and display as well as SMS as it all involved links whether it was a link to a website, click-to-call, click for directions, or click for more information. We had clients who wanted people to apply on their smartphones and build mobile landing pages we would connect to these links. 50% of our metrics were link based and the other 50% were mobile coupon based. Many clients used SMS to offer mobile coupons so a customer could ‘Text COUPON to 12345’ and get $250 (or whatever) off their product/service. We simply adjusted the message the customer got back, the wording of the coupon, and sent clients reports on their campaigns.
Clients saw success immediately as people flooded into their stores stating that they had mobile coupons on their phones but our clients didn’t do a great job relaying their new mobile initiatives to their staff. Most employees didn’t know they offered mobile coupons because their bosses didn’t think it would succeed so fast so there was a brief period of what I’d call a “high quality” problem in employee->customer arguments over the validity of the mobile coupons. We learned from this and I wrote up a 25 page “How-To” guide on all things mobile so companies could be better prepared for their new mobile business.
We had a lot of clients in a lot of different industries spending a wide range of money. We’d have a meeting with a client in our own town and face-to-face over strategy and campaign initiatives and then hop on the phone with clients in Alabama, Georgia, Vermont, New Jersey, California, and even Hawaii. The diversity in locations, industries, and marketing budgets meant we couldn’t approach our campaigns with a one-size fits all approach and my job as the strategic director meant I was always trying to find new ways to help new clients find success with mobile. I never found a client who couldn’t get a great ROI on mobile. Christmas was on the horizon and we had enough clients where we were no longer in panic and rapid growth mode, we were in maintenance mode as we struggled to serve the clients we did have.
We didn’t expect to grow so quickly and having only myself and Mr. Smith meant we needed bodies. I got in touch with UCF and within a couple of weeks I stole a few employees from Clear Channel and the rest were interns from UCF who Mr. Smith affectionately called his “phone monkeys.” If you’d like to learn more about management philosophies in a startup, you can read about it here. This article is more about the inception of the company and its strategy whereas the other post is about opposing philosophical views when it comes to managing a company. This post aims to avoid the politics that took place at SMA and focus on the company strategy and history.
Most clients didn’t have the money for effective location-based marketing or Internet radio campaigns but we were prepared anyway and had solid deals with Pandora, the only Internet radio leader at the time, as well as a slew of LBS companies. The most fun I had in my job were our big time clients who had a comprehensive mobile approach, which we always recommended. Internet Radio was fun but I enjoyed location-based marketing the most. If you’re not sure what I’m talking about, it involves apps like Foursquare (now Swarm), and a hardware provider we partnered up with that would send SMS messages using our other vendor to customers passing by. We also lumped QR codes into the location-based offering and partnered with any third party we needed to in order to adapt to client needs.
I say “we” a lot but it was simply me. Mr. Smith’s job was to bring in clients and turn them over to me. As time went on and Mr. Smith stepped back as our chief salesman, I took on both roles which frightened him as he saw I no longer needed him. Assuming everyone thought as he did, he thought I’d cut him out and plotted to start his own company. I never cut him out, it never crossed my mind. Our clients were happy and business was booming. It took about six months for me to find my footing in the mobile advertising world and in a case of irony, my previous employer saw my newfound success as an opportunity and became one of our largest clients. I remember a conference call with the property manager of every property in the portfolio and walking them through our comprehensive mobile strategy and thinking, wow, I used to work for these people. Now they’re my clients and they pay a lot more than they did before.
Mobile was growing and we couldn’t keep up and at nights, when I often couldn’t sleep, I began devising a more effective way to serve our clients. This lead to the birth of a concept that to this day has yet to come to fruition although it has appeared in post-SMA endeavors in a fragmented way and will appear in future additions to the series. I knew that the whole agency model was doomed and the way to better serve clients was an intuitive platform where they could easily plan, launch, and manage their various mobile ad campaigns. I began with the concept and wrote about 50 pages after doing a ton of research and began mocking up how the product would look. I had a cursory knowledge of HTML/CSS/JS but hadn’t learned sever-side coding yet so mocking up the product and creating a business plan was about as far as I could go. It wasn’t something I brought to Mr. Smith, the arguments had become more and more frequent and I learned he was trying to go off on his own so showing him my next project was out of the question.
Money, as I’m sure you’ve seen in film and on TV, or perhaps in your own life, does odd things to people. Money made me want to make more money, it made me want to find new opportunities in our business and work harder to do so. In the case of Mr. Smith, it made him decadent and content. He began spending money like a billionaire, going out every night of the week and spending like crazy, and worst of all, not picking up the phones and closing deals. Whereas Mr. Smith started out as a major asset to the company, he had quickly turned into the biggest liability the company had and I had to man the ship and keep it going in the right direction. Whilst doing so, I didn’t realize just how off the deep end my partner had gone and after a review of our finances, I was shocked to realize that due to his spending and the nature of our cash flow, we could no longer afford to pay our employees and other fixed costs. I don’t blame Mr. Smith. As a leader and entrepreneur you always have to keep yourself accountable. Yes, he did things that ruined a potential billion dollar company but it was my choice to bring him on board without properly vetting him. I ignored the red flags, the buck stopped with me.
To this day I see the various mobile ads we sold at SMA everywhere I go and I always think “if only.” I shake my head, I think of the things I could have done differently, or done at all, and I have a lot of regret. I was in the perfect place at the perfect time to capitalize off of the wave of mobile but sometimes it only takes one bad decision to bring it all tumbling down and my decision was bringing in Mr. Smith and not having the confidence to try my hand at sales. Everything he did ultimately was my responsibility.
Running your own startup is a high-anxiety, stressful job and can have a major psychological effect on you and after my time at SMA I was tired. I remember spending three weeks catching up on sleep after moving in with my brother. It was officially the end and I was without a car, living with my brother, and recently unemployed. My brother kept urging me to go find a job and re-enroll in college but I only pretended to, I wasn’t ready to make a move just yet. I had some deep “soul searching” to do.
And then word got around about the fall of SMA. At the time, mobile was a small world and there weren’t any thought leaders. That’s what added a premium to my expertise in all things mobile as well as our product offering at SMA. In the time of my absence from the REIT whilst running SMA, the REIT had expanded its mobile campaigns portfolio-wide and no one had stepped in to run things because I was running their account at SMA.
Conveniently for me, when SMA went under so did the REIT’s mobile campaigns which they needed someone to rebuild and manage and within a few weeks of closing the doors of SMA, I was back at the REIT only now my salary had aligned with my job title and I was ready to focus exclusively on marketing for the REIT without having to focus on “property” issues. I re-enrolled in college at the University of Central Florida where I had recently been accepted and began close to where I left off. Little did I know that actually going backwards would propel me into an entirely new world, one in which I had been trying to gain access for years, the startup world of Web 2.0. and the true beginning of my life as a tech entrepreneur.
