5 Questions with Caid Christiansen, CEO of Christiansen McCain

Caid Christiansen• March, 24 2015

Hi, Caid. To start, tell us a little bit about your background. You were President and CEO of Christiansen Design, your own agency, before forming Christiansen McCain. Why’d you make the transition over to this new agency?

When I graduated college in the late 90s, I moved to Columbus [Nebraska] and was hired on as a graphic designer for a printing company there. Because I was out there every day running presses, I really started to understand printing which I think made me a much better designer. I did that for almost a year and then moved to Omaha.

Throughout college and shortly after, I bumped elbows with a lot of agencies. Enough, I guess, to realize that there was a lot I didn’t like about the traditional agency world. I worked at agencies where we’d have meetings with 10 people, all on billable hours, and only 2 of those 10 people actually needed to be there. All of that cost got passed off to the client, which never made a whole lot of sense to me. I started Christiansen Design around 1998, largely in response to those things I saw about the agency world I didn’t like.

Our approach was to maximize efficiency—if you were a designer for a client, you’d be in the meetings you needed to be in, and nothing else. From the beginning, we’ve been focused around giving our clients a lot of bang for their buck. I continued working for myself at Christiansen Design and interacted with a lot of different agencies along the way, including Godigital Media, another company I started to do design services and film transfers—that kind of stuff.

Fast forward to about 2009, and we started to see the emergence of something that didn’t really exist before: interactive. I’d worked with Chris [McCain] on several websites and some other freelance work and approached him around that time about starting up an interactive department. Long story short, things didn’t work out that first time around, and in the interim I worked with a VC firm as a marketing director to help start some 9 companies. All throughout that time, Chris and I talked daily about launching that interactive department and moving on to the next iteration of Christiansen Design.

When we finally hammered out the process, we decided that it would be better to rebrand as a new agency rather than trying to pivot completely and integrate an interactive department headed by Chris into Christiansen Design. He was instrumental in positioning our new interactive department, and obviously instrumental in the startup of Christiansen McCain. I brought my extensive marketing experience—3 of the 7 healthcare companies I marketed at the VC firm went on to be sold off to Fortune 500 companies—and Chris brought his extensive interactive experience to the table, and so Christiansen McCain was born.

Strategy is a cornerstone of Christiansen McCain’s offerings—you even call yourselves a strategic marketing agency. Why is strategy so important to successful marketing, and what’s most important to a business when setting their strategic marketing plan?

You could build the greatest site in the world, but if you don’t have a strategy to drive traffic, then what do you have? A site that does nothing. In my view, if you don’t have a strategic plan, you’re wasting your time. Strategy tells you what you’re going to do, how you’re going to make sales, how you’re going to drive traffic—all of the questions that will inform your tactics and tell you how your investment into marketing is going to help your business. Too many companies think that a billboard or a branding investment or any other one-off project like that will work on its own, but if you don’t have a strategy thought out, you don’t have a real business.

To follow up on that, Christiansen McCain’s approach to marketing is very different from what you’re likely to find at a traditional agency. How exactly does your approach differ, and what was the genesis of your agency’s approach to marketing?

The easy answer to how we differ is strategy. We’re results oriented. Traditional agencies have no problem laying out an annual campaign or doing project work, or maybe even direct mail. But in a lot of cases, they do it just to do it. Whether or not they track results is beside the point. Chris and I have both seen how traditional agencies work and operate, and there’s a lot of waste that’s built into that old model. We’ve turned that model on its head because we’re results oriented.

If your company doesn’t have a marketing team, we can be that marketing team. Need an advertising team? We can execute that too. A lot of companies have CMOs or VPs of marketing who are brilliant at strategy and planning, but can’t execute. We can function in a more CMO-like, strategic role, but we can also execute. Understanding both sides of the equation allows you to tie in the tactical execution to results. It’s one thing to have a strategy and another thing to actually be able to execute it. We do it all.

Marketing has a bit of a bad reputation as an ‘ROI-less’ function—the industry has never been known for its commitment to clear ROI, which can be a challenge for business owners who want to advertise and market their brand. What would you say to those who still say that the value of marketing is difficult to track?

I don’t think it’s a ‘soft’ industry per se. Is tracking results in marketing an exact science? Not completely. But tracking the ROI is only as difficult as you make it. If you’re really committed to tracking results, you can do it. It has to be integrated in as part of your strategy.

Working closely with a team, we can track how many people we convert, or tell you how many people converted on a paid search program or email marketing. We can tell you how many people took an action, or how many people we brought to your landing page, or how many people filled out a form as a result of our marketing. Combine that with some lead tracking on the client side, and we really start getting serious.

Say a client comes to us and says that they’ve gotten 100 leads from a form we put on their site. Of those leads, 80 were good and 20 weren’t, so we killed those off. Of those 80 leads, the client closed 10 deals, and all of a sudden, we’ve got a real ROI. It takes a lot of work to do that kind of tracking, but working closely with our clients, we can make that part of the strategy and identify goals. From there, it’s only as difficult as you make it.

Finally, what makes your agency most unique? There are a lot of different agencies out there competing in the space—how are you different?

It’s a culmination of everything we just talked about. We have a strategic approach. Our tactics are results-based, and we’re results-driven. We’re goal oriented. We work as a team and we work as an extension of our clients’ teams. Companies have their own marketing departments for a reason—we’ll work with them as an extension of the team to make everything better. We apply the right tactics for the budget—we aren’t going to do something just because it makes us the most money. We’re going to do what works. It’s us second, you first.