Daina Middleton

Company: Performics

I moved around a lot growing up in the West because my dad worked on big ranches.  My first job in advertising came when I was just 16 years old when my dad owned a feed store and I volunteered to write the radio ads for horse feed.  I was a horse owner myself and felt I understood what horse owners needed and wrote the ads accordingly.  Looking back, it seems I had a passion for the industry at a very early age.  The majority of my career was spent at Hewlett-Packard where I managed marketing communications in a variety of different roles through the years. I left HP nearly four years ago and joined the agency world.  As the CEO of Performics, the performance marketing agency within Publicis Groupe, I am innovating new philosophies, tools and processes that will forever change how we approach our profession called Participant Marketing. 

I am passionate about sharing this approach with our industry and as such am a regular industry speaker with appearances at ad:tech, Conversational Marketing Summit, Digital Hollywood, VideoNuze and WOMMA, to name a few. I still have a passion for horses as well and live on a horse ranch outside of Boise, Idaho where we raise Andalusian and Lusitano horses.

Tell us about your background and your role in the company.
I have been a long-time advocate of Performics – hiring them as my agency in 2005 when I was at HP.  Even then I recognized the value in having a performance partner with a strong technology heritage. The company was purchased by Google in 2008 because the DoubleClick technology was considered industry leading at the time.  Performics is unique in the agency world because of our strong technology heritage.   Today, performance is not just about helping a company close a sale or capture a lead.  It’s about redefining performance across the entire marketing mix.  Consumers have evolved into Participants and inspiring them to join, share, take part, play a part, connect is key.  Search is one of the first channels that really demonstrated the power of participation.  It’s not sufficient for marketers to activate participation, it’s vital they adapt their programs based on what’s working and what’s not.  Average results are simply not sufficient in today’s competitive environment.  At Performics, we work with our clients to achieve quantum results.

What are your main services?
As a performance marketing agency, Performics applies the principles of search to create highly optimized marketing programs through a set of channels across relevant screens. Our suite of channels exists because we believe they should be managed collectively in order to optimize results.  We offer paid search (PPC), SEO, performance-based social and display programs, conversion optimization, and affiliate services.  Channels and campaigns are aligned to client goals – we do not have a preference for the channel as long as it is performing the best.  

What makes your firm different from other companies competing in your industry?
I have never seen an organization so focused on achieving client results.  We have an intense focus on our clients’ success and are willing to put skin in the game to prove it. In fact, more than 25 percent of Performics’ revenue is derived directly from client ROI – meaning we receive compensation based on actual client results.  Our focus on innovation and technology, combined with our goal of hiring and retaining the best people around the world, fuels our ability to combine what we call “the art and science” of performance marketing.  This enables us to provide superior solutions ahead of the digital curve on a global scale.  Our competitors really cannot compete with that.  Furthermore, through our rich history in the performance marketing space and experience with global brands, we have unrivaled partnerships, unparalleled relationships and influence with Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft, Facebook and other industry leaders.

Tell us more about your firm’s success story.
Performics has a long legacy of innovation having entered the digital performance space in 1998. The company has focused on performance innovation ever since, currently providing impressive results for more than 125 clients around the world. Our global footprint is significant and growing; our headquarters are in Chicago and we have regional hubs in London, Paris, and Singapore, with a total of 670 employees in 14 countries.

According to you, what are the most important questions a potential customer should ask a company before choosing a vendor like Performics?
1.    What are your employees passionate about and how does that fit with my company goals?
2.    Talent and Retention are key success factors for the agency and clients, so what are your strategies around hiring and keeping the best talent?
3.    What makes you different from your competition?

What are some of the myths in your field?
•    Search is only a demand-generation tactic.
•    Paid search and SEO should be managed separately.
•    Performance is just about demand generation and for direct marketers.
•    There’s not an overlap between media channels.

How do you develop your skills in this continuously changing environment?
I have an insatiable passion for the space today – technology, sociology, participatory.  It’s all fascinating and continually changing.  Keeping up with the change in our industry requires actively dedicating resources assigned to innovation.  Agencies have a history of not truly investing in this activity.  It’s usually part of someone’s job in accounting planning or strategic planning, but actually deploying resources to identifying trends, technologies, and developing test and learn programs is vital.

What do you see as the future of the industry? What will be the challenges? Do you anticipate any drastic changes?
We are already in the midst of a drastic change.  Over eighty-one percent of upscale Gen-Yers use Facebook every day, nearly twice the number who watch TV or read newspaper content, according to a report from L2 Think Tank.  Gen-Yers are commonly defined as the generation who are technologically savvy.  What perhaps is not commonly observed is that they were born participants and expect to engage in a participatory manner with everyone.  The relationship is one of equality, and the rules of participation in their eyes apply to everyone -- individuals, companies, government organizations.  They expect this because they have the technology means to demand it to be so.  Participation is innate to their identity – in the real world, and the virtual world – and the line separating the real and the virtual worlds is becoming increasingly thin.  Companies are now challenged to hire these participants as employees, and win them over as customers with hopes and dreams about fostering lasting relationships.  In both cases, understanding these changes have occurred and creating an environment specifically designed for participation is a prerequisite for survival and success. Most brand marketers are ill equipped and overwhelmed by the technology-enabled participant who expects to have a relationship with a brand that includes providing feedback, finding information 24-hours a day, 7 days a week.  This is the new reality marketers are grappling with and those who don’t adapt their processes, tools, and approach will fall behind. 

Where do you see your firm in the next 5 years? What about you personally?
Performics will continue to redefine performance across channels and screens.  Mobile adoption is perhaps the fuel that seals the fate for companies questioning the need to become more participant-focused.  A mobile device is the ultimate tool for participation: a simple vehicle of empowerment clutched in the palm of one’s hand.  A majority of mobile phone users report the device is so personal it is no more than a foot away from their person every second.  It took twenty years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide.  The second billion sold in four years.  The third billion sold in two years.  Over five billion people now use mobile phones — about sixty-two percent of the planet's population — compared to less than two billion who have a personal computer. This number is expected to reach twenty billion by the year 2020. Advances in mobile networks, platforms, devices and data have combined to create an extremely personal and participation enabling device.  Within just a few years more people will access the Internet from a mobile device than from any other technology.  

Can you think of anything that enables Participants to thrive in a self directed, autonomous environment enabling users to discover new ideas and connect with others more than the mobile device?   The mobile phone infrastructure, along with the device has helped to change nearly every aspect of our lives; the manner in which we work, shop, interacts with media, and most importantly, the way we communicate. That will not stop over the next five years or even ten.  I plan on being right there helping brands with new philosophies and new tools in this ever-changing and exciting world.