After a decade of working on television shows you’d think a career shift to internet marketing would be quite the change. However, Abraham Harrison Director of Client Services Daniel Krueger says there are certainly similarities between the two.
Dan produced, edited, filmed and directed shows for networks such as HGTV, CBS, TLC and ABC Family. He says the profession allows you to either “feast or famine,” jumping from contract to contract when a show doesn’t cut it—which is more often than not.
But what happens when a show survives the grueling initial stage of winning over critics and roping in audiences? That’s when the magic happens, when the raw ingredients bake into the delicious dessert of a hit TV show. Admitting he’s always been computer savvy, Dan says that this “conception to completion” mindset translates perfectly to digital marketing and especially to what he does for AH.
“The virtual realm is similar [to TV] because you’re taking clients’ ideas with your own ideas and bringing them to reality.”
So with all this vague talk about ideas becoming final products, let’s give you an idea of some of those projects Dan has been working on. In the past 6 months Dan got English, Portuguese and Spanish campaigns up and running for the international classifieds site OLX. He is now heading a new one in Russian and says it’s “pretty crazy to be managing campaigns in different languages.” Uhh, yeah it is!
“It’s completely different than anything that we’ve ever done, dealing with a language you don’t know,” Dan says. “It’s all about trusting the people you’re working with.” Trust is important in most if not all aspects of sales and services. AH is lucky to work with such great people who make challenges like venturing outside of the English language a business reality. Just like the same TV crew can produce different shows, the AH team is able to execute services tailored to each unique client.
As the intern, I was asked to help with the OLX Russia Twitter page and follow some of the Russian community. Let me tell you, they should change the saying to ‘It’s Russian to me’ because it was hard. I couldn’t imagine producing a project in a different language, let alone one that doesn’t use our alphabet. OLX Polish may also be in the works for fall … good luck!
Dan also works closely with the Fresh Air Fund, a company that gives inner-city children from New York the chance to have a fun-filled summer vacation with volunteer host families and at Fund camps. He gets the word out to potential host families and creates a general awareness of the program by using a method Abraham Harrison knows oh too well–it’s the monthly blogger outreaches that help get donations, find host families and recruit counselors.
Dan says AH blogger and journalist outreaches are so successful because a media post “basically lives forever on the Internet” unlike paid ads that come down after a certain time. “We’ve gotten it to a science, utilizing the blogosphere is huge,” he says. “Everyone is their own journalist if they want to be.”
His history in TV producing and working in so many different positions shows Dan is an expert at handling whatever is thrown at him. And because of this, AH is thankful that he is now applying such skills to Internet marketing—and that he left that other form of media.
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