5 Questions with Chris McCain, President of Christiansen McCain
Caid Christiansen•Hi, Chris. To start, tell us a little bit about your background. You have quite a bit of experience in design/creative—how has that carried over to your job today, and why did you make the transition over to your own agency?
The best place to start is right at the beginning. I graduated from Dana College with a triple major in business marketing, graphic design, and fine art in 1997. My first job was with Huntel Communications working on website development during the infancy of what we now know as the internet.
When I graduated, I landed a gig at Lawrence and Schiller in Sioux Falls. That’s where I really got hooked on the whole agency mentality. They had everything in house—TV, photography, print, radio, and online. At L&S I wore a lot of hats, from working as a key grip for a videographer to fishing for “B Roll” for Abu Garcia to acting as a print and online production artist. I fell in love with the whole industry and I still think that’s where a lot of my inspiration comes from.
After that I moved on to Leopard, Inc. [Now Iridian Group] where I remained for 12 years. I helped to build up the interactive department from a small part of their business to the main source of revenue for the agency when I left. I couldn’t have asked for much more. I gained the experience of building a department from scratch, managing a full interactive team, and helping to execute every aspect of every interactive job that came through the agency. The knowledge that I gained by developing processes, identifying strategies and executing successful projects for my clients is something that I utilize even today.
After Leopard I moved onto OBI Creative as the Creative Director and then to Anderson Partners, where I took on the role of Interactive Strategist and Department Lead. Both positions served to further cement my understanding of how a solid strategy can work in tandem with innovative design to deliver results. At Anderson Partners I helped a traditional agency shift its traditional media mentality to one that embraces a constantly evolving online world.
All of this brings us to today.
I’ve worked with Caid in the past and when we finally geared up to launch Christiansen McCain, we were able to bring both of our past experiences together. We both have deep roots in strategy and execution and we wanted to take the best of what we’d seen in other agencies and combine it with a process that reacts quicker to an ever-changing online world.
As someone who’s worked at a few ‘traditional’ agencies throughout your career, you have a good bit of experience with the more traditional agency model. How have agencies changed in the last few years, and what do you see for their future?
What’s most clear to me is that agencies are really starting to realize how important it is to adapt to the new media world. That’s a struggle for a lot of agencies. Some have tried to do it by just shifting their culture, but that’s a really difficult thing to do.
A lot of other agencies have tried to adapt through acquisition. These agencies will acquire a new media agency with the hope that it will help them better understand what it takes to survive in a digital world. Whether they succeed or not comes down to how agile and adaptable they are. A lot of these agencies fold after an acquisition because they tried to adopt a new culture that didn’t fit their own agency personality. It’s hard, I get it. I don’t think it’s impossible to do, but I’ve yet to see an agency make a truly successful shift through acquisition. Most traditional agencies just aren’t built for change. Unfortunately this is going to be essential to the traditional agencies’ success in the long run.
Design trends come and go—our perceptions of what websites ‘should’ look like change a lot even over just a few years. What’s most important to you when designing a website, and why?
Like you mentioned, design trends do come and go. But, to a point, they’re irrelevant. Regardless of how pretty your website looks, the most important thing you should be concerned about is what your website does for your organization. What’s the strategy you’re going to implement to meet your goal? If your online initiatives don’t help you achieve a specific goal, they shouldn’t be there.
Metrics for measuring the success of advertising and marketing are, in a lot of ways, the final frontier of the industry. What’s your approach to measuring the success of marketing, and how does that carry over into tangible results you can show your clients?
The first step is identifying a client’s goals and objectives. Once we know that, we can choose the tactic or tactics that will best help achieve those goals. We always try to select tactics that are measurable and work hard for your dollar.
For example, many online campaigns allow us to track opens, clicks and conversions. Couple these tactics with a strong branding initiative, and your organization gains a comprehensive marketing program that generates awareness as well as sales. This type of campaign is measurable to the point where it is simple to apply an ROI. It takes the guesswork out of marketing.
To wrap up, what to you makes Christiansen McCain unique?
You probably already see this coming based off of what I’ve already said, but we really do execute off of a results-oriented methodology. Once we know your goals, we put together smart, innovative, strategic campaigns and tactics that are the best fits to achieve your goals. We make ourselves accountable towards results and are nimble enough to constantly shift tactics and even strategies to ensure that we meet those goals.
We gauge our success on our clients’ success. Are we getting leads for our clients? Are they quality leads? If they are, we’ll build and refine to try to make the process even better. If they aren’t, we’ll adjust our tactics. We’re beholden to results, not tactics.
