Location: New York
URL: www.steinrogan.com
Key executive: Tom Stein, president-chief creative officer
Employees: 40
2010 revenue: $12.4 million
2010 b2b revenue: $10.6 million
Key clients: D-Link Systems, IPC Systems, PR Newswire, TheLadders, Syniverse Technologies
Major 2010 campaigns: D-Link, “Dare to Compare,” online; TheLadders, “Position Accomplished,” print, online; PR Newswire, “Engage Opportunity Everywhere,” print, online, events
Comments: Grew total agency revenue 22%; added clients Alvogen, ClassLink, D-Link Systems, iLevel Solutions, PR Newswire, Receivables Exchange, Syncsort and uTest; named BMA Agency of the Year
Stein Rogan+Partners, New York, had a remarkable year in every way—it grew its revenue 22%, added eight new b2b clients, created award-winning campaigns and was named Agency of the Year by the Business Marketing Association.
“We saw significant revenue growth for the company, and we also saw growth in our client base,” said President Tom Stein, noting that in addition to having 100% client retention, the agency picked up new clients including pharmaceutical company Alvogen, networking company D-Link Systems and news distribution company PR Newswire. It also pushed the envelope creatively, as demonstrated by its 16 awards in the Business Marketing Association's B2 Awards competition last year.
For executive recruiting company TheLadders, Stein Rogan created an integrated campaign encompassing brand strategy, advertising, social media and content marketing.
“The work we do for TheLadders is such a poster child for how b2b marketing should be done these days, with absolute integration from positioning and segmentation to integrated go-to-market campaigns, flowing into social, content marketing and every channel, all driving toward common objectives tied to specific metrics,” Stein said.
For the campaign, called “Position Accomplished,” the agency created fictitious characters based on ideal job candidates, including “The Hammer,” a hard-driving VP-sales; “The Machine,” an efficient CFO; and “The Wizard,” a brainy IT director.
Stein Rogan wove these characters into print ads, online ads, email, social media and a 3-D movie that was shown at a Society of Human Resource Management conference last June.
“The number of leads we signed up at the show was more than 3,000,” Stein said.
Within six months of the campaign launch, TheLadders had generated more than 7,000 qualified connections across LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and it increased its enterprise revenue 67% for the year.
Another key client win last year for Stein Rogan was PR Newswire, a 60-year-old news distribution service that engaged the agency to develop a repositioning campaign to show how it is distributing content across multiple channels. The resulting campaign, “Engage Opportunity Everywhere,” was launched at the Public Relations Society of America International Conference in October, including print, online, social media and mobile marketing.
As part of the effort, Stein Rogan embedded quick response (QR) codes throughout content at the conference, such as in programs, on hotel room keys and in keynote session presentations. Attendees who scanned the most QR codes using their smartphones won prizes.
“We even put QR codes on the name tag badges of salespeople at the [PR Newswire] booth, so you had to put your smartphone close enough to the salesperson to scan their name badge,” Stein said.
For new client D-Link Systems, which provides networking systems for businesses, Stein Rogan created an integrated campaign called “Dare to Compare” that showed how D-Link stacked up against larger rivals in the marketplace. The agency used rich media ads and email to drive users to a microsite, where they spent an average of five minutes per visit.
Stein said a big focus of the agency last year was understanding the intersection of paid media, owned media (original content that becomes its own channel) and earned media (through social media).
“It is very much the way world is evolving,” Stein said. —K.M.
