Celebrating 20 Years of Agency Innovation, Agility & Fortitude

How We Roll

In this post

Closed Loop recognizes 20 years of service excellence and announces its continued promise to achieving exceptional results.

This month marks a very important milestone for the Closed Loop agency family: 20 years of entrepreneurship, innovation and dedication to providing exceptional results from paid media advertising for clients who entrusted us to grow their businesses. 

Truth be told, I have a tendency of looking forward, and I nearly missed celebrating this milestone. Twenty years ago, I founded this company…. 

That sounds so grandiose. I was just a young guy scrambling to make ends meet at the time. I had no concept that I was founding anything, certainly not an entity that would oversee billions of dollars in ad spend and become the primary focus of my professional life. 

But from the smallest seeds grow the mightiest trees.

And compared to where we started, Closed Loop really has become mighty. It still seems like a dream to me sometimes, as I don’t feel too different from that young guy in his kitchen brainstorming company names. 

As many of my peers who have founded and run advertising agencies may know, this endeavor is not for the faint of heart. Achieving this milestone, through all the changes the digital industry has seen–surviving and thriving through economic fluctuations, a global pandemic and countless other challenges over 7,300 days–is nothing short of an amazing accomplishment. I am both tremendously humbled and unspeakably grateful. 

I could not be more proud of everything the Closed Loop family has become and accomplished as a team, and for the clients we have served over the last two decades. I am especially thankful for the talented team members we’ve hired and retained over the years, which speaks to the growth culture we’ve created here. 

Our employees are challenged and motivated by the complexity of solving tomorrow’s problems today.

The team consistently crafts impressive strategies and then executes them flawlessly to ensure we always exceed client expectations. As a result, many of the clients we have served over the years trust us implicitly as an extension of their own team. As many of them grow or move on in their own careers, we’re often along for the ride. I must confess it’s fun when your peer group includes C-level execs at $1B+ companies. I didn’t see that coming during the early years when we were all marketing managers and grinding. But I’m glad I put the work in and stuck with it. 

I’m so grateful to my team, our clients and industry peers for their support and encouragement over the years. If you become the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with, I’ve been fortunate to be able to surround myself with amazing people who challenge me to up my game. 

Throughout the month of April, our team will be celebrating “20 years in 20 days” within the company blog and daily social posts each week that highlight our core values, the motivations that keep us forging ahead, the innovations that drive our output and our vision for the future as a company who consistently challenges the status quo, embraces social responsibility and never settles for average. 

So I invite you to follow along over the next four weeks for an inside view of what we believe, how we think, how we operate and how that translates into the market-beating results we consistently generate for our clients. 

You’ll learn more about: 

Table of Contents

WHO WE ARE & WHY WE DO IT

Our organization’s purpose is simple—to help deserving people and companies achieve their potential.

We apply this thinking to our employees, clients, partners and everyone we interact with. The word “deserving” may seem odd and judgmental in this context, but it is purposeful. It means we are selective in choosing who we work with. That’s reasonably obvious when it comes to hiring employees.

It’s somewhat shocking for an agency to enforce standards on their clients, though. That’s a good thing. It makes us different. It means we won’t tolerate assholes, ego-driven politics, institutional mediocrity or idiotic bureaucracy. In a nutshell, we only work with people who deserve to work with us. And, we can authentically say our clients are great people.

WHAT WE DO

At Closed Loop, we specialize in strategy, data, creative and media. Our tactical expertise informs our strategy, and our strategy informs our execution. 

As the digital advertising industry has evolved, so have we. We’ve taken advantage of the platform and tools at our disposal as search and social advertising have matured. Over time, we’ve added a number of new channels and tactics to our arsenal, including programmatic display, content syndication, and other placement options to expand prospect targeting options for a suite of full-funnel marketing capabilities.

We’ll soon announce new capabilities that we’re excited to add to the mix as we begin our next 20 years.

HOW WE DO IT

The foundation of every client relationship we have is fundamentally aligning with your unique business objectives and true KPIs, in order to build a customized strategy to drive the most qualified results and generate real growth, whether that means valuable leads or direct sales.

Our goal is to understand the full funnel of your customer behaviors while optimizing to deep-funnel metrics and structuring ad campaigns to ensure machine learning capabilities maximize your marketing spend. Our test and learning process, paired with our in-house technology platform, FORAGER, unlocks insights that give clarity to properly allocating your media budget across the wide swath of ad platforms and targeting options that have evolved since we began this agency endeavor.

While integrating hyper-granular ad platform data with our client’s back-end systems for powerful, custom BI dashboards is a core value-add of our technology, it is nothing without the strategic insights of our data-driven team. 

Our engrained process goes beyond just managing accounts, keeping status quo or looking for small incremental improvements–it’s striving to never settle for average, making powerful strategic recommendations and leveraging new features in the marketplace to gain first-mover advantages. Experience and innovation work harmoniously within our company culture and extend throughout client communications, ensuring confidence in our execution at all times.

OUR CONTINUED PROMISE

 As we begin our third decade (wow, that sounds crazy as I write that)–the future is brighter than ever, and Closed Loop is here for it. We’ve been laying the foundation for the future with a number of positive internal changes, hiring more exceptional talent and expanding our dedication to delivering client services at the highest level.
 
To all of our past, current and future clients, you are the reason we celebrate this momentous milestone, and we will never lose sight of that.
 
Humbly yours, 
 
Lance & the Closed Loop team
 

It's Finally Here

Average is Losing: A Playbook for Dominating Digital Advertising

My new book, “Average is Losing” is finally here! I created this playbook to help savvy advertisers close the gap between winning and run-of-the-mill paid advertising campaigns.

It’s filled to the brim with the latest strategies, tactics and tips our Closed Loop experts use to help our clients seek exponential growth.

Are you ready to rise above average campaign performance? Start your business on the path to PPC domination today!

– Lance Loveday