ROGERS, Arkansas – At a time when most of America is wondering whether the economy is recovering, Rockfish Interactive’s business is growing by leaps and bounds.
Founder and CEO Kenny Tomlin said the company – recently named Small Ad Agency of the Year by specialist publication Advertising Age – has grown 900 percent over the past three years and should grow 100 percent this year.
“If this is a recession, then we’re really excited to see what our growth is like once there’s a recovery,” Tomlin said at his office in Rogers, just a few miles from the headquarters of retail giant Walmart, one of Interactive’s customers.
Although about 90 percent of the company’s revenue comes from digital media advertising, Tomlin said much of its future growth will be driven by creating innovative products to sell to its customers. He started the company four years ago using his laptop in a coffee shop. Rockfish now has around 70 employees and aims to expand to 100 by the end of the year.
The inventions Rockfish has come up with include a secure web-based coupon service, a web-based video chat service and a customized corporate blogging package.
Tidy Tweet is another Rockfish invention, designed to remove unwelcome language from infiltrating a corporation’s public Twitter feed – the program simply weeds out profanity from Tweets.
“We found that we encountered a problem with this (Tweets of the uncouth kind) and developed an app to deal with it,” Tomlin said. “We were then able to sign customers up to the service.”
Some 700 corporate customers have already signed up for Tidy Tweet, which carries a monthly fee.
Rockfish tends to leave employees to their own devices to come up with new products that the company can then sell to customers.
“Unless we have a really good reason to believe that someone is not doing what they should, we let them get on with their work,” Tomlin said. “A lot of our staff have come from large corporations. Corporations tend to move slowly, so they appreciate the freedom they have here to work on their own.”
Tomlin and his staff – many of whom are software engineers – say that the advertising world is heading toward tremendous change.
“Under the old model, companies traditionally bought a tremendous amount of media to reach a large number of customers,” said Chief Operating Office Jeremy Wilson. “But advertisers are learning to engage more directly with customers without having to spend so much money.”
According to Tomlin, Rockfish’s strategy is to find ways to help its clients engage with consumers where they are rather than make them visit specific sites, through, for instance, starting out by them a free application for their cell phones that they can share with family and friends.
“As long as advertising is defined as interruption then it’s going to continue to decline,” he said. “It’s rare to talk to people today who don’t digitally record their TV shows so they can cut out the commercials when they watch them.”
“The way forward is to engage with customers where they’re at,” he added.