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Friedman Basks in Bright Halogen Light

Apr 15, 2009  •  Post A Comment

Steve Friedman had never worked at a media agency, but he saw an opportunity at the intersection of dollars and data.
Mr. Friedman was named senior VP and managing director of Halogen Response Media, the direct response unit of SMG Performance Marketing, a company that focuses on client branding, performance and results.
When he was approached about the Halogen job, Mr. Friedman says, he realized the situation wasn’t really about media.
“I knew the media companies were not taking control of the dollars,” he says. “Being able to bring data in there, it was a really exciting place to be.”
Performance marketing goes beyond direct response.
“We’re more focused on the business goals, while Starcom and MediaVest are really focused on the consumer part of the business,” he says. “We want to leverage the brand equity they build and get people to do something, either click or call to buy now, but to really break down whatever that barrier is to action.”
Halogen monitors call-center data, sales data and Web traffic figures to judge the performance of its campaigns while they’re in flight, Mr. Friedman says. It also listens in on social media and blogs “to understand what the sentiment is today regarding what’s going on out there in real time.”
Halogen’s analytics and data group sifts the data.
“A lot of clients have a lot of ambitious goals, but the question we answer up front is what the investment is and how we’re working toward those goals,” Mr. Friedman says.
While some other agencies might simply assure a client that they can achieve the client’s goals, Mr. Friedman says Halogen performs a feasibility study to see if the goals realistically can be achieved.
“We do a lot of quantitative analysis and a lot of qualitative analysis that goes into creating the plans and optimize against those goals and be able to help clients with the feasibility of achieving those goals. And then we constantly optimize, so we’re always about continuous measurable improvement,” he says.
That tends to improve Halogen’s batting average for clients such as Wal-Mart, Capital One, Wellpoint, United Technical Institute, Avon and Comcast.
“We’re working with a great set of clients,” Mr. Friedman says. “We set client goals and it’s our job to attain or surpass them. In the last three years, I think we’ve had like 50 client goals that we’ve been working toward, and we’ve attained or surpassed 90% of them.”
Mr. Friedman was born in New York City and grew up in the suburbs of Boston. After graduating from the University of Massachusetts as a marketing major, he moved back to New York.
“A friend of mine said there’s this opening at this agency that works on Perrier,” he says. He landed that first job, then moved on to Scali, McCabe, Sloves, where he worked on the Hertz account, advancing from account executive to management supervisor.
After positions at Chiat/Day, Ammirati Puris Lintas and WPP, he co-founded a marketing data integration business called Swan Systems, which raised $18 million in funding.
“I went through a huge roller coaster,” Mr. Friedman says. At first, “My wife asked me, ‘What are you, crazy?’ Then she asked, ‘How wealthy are we going to be?’ and finally, “I told you you were crazy.’”
After that, he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do until his old client from Hertz, Malcolm Speed, called him to work at Rapp Collins.
That was his introduction to direct marketing.
He had just moved over to the Wunderman direct marketing agency when the call came from Halogen.
“Once I met the people at MediaVest and SMG, you just could tell how exciting I thought the opportunity was,” he says.
Mr. Friedman lives with his wife and has two grown daughters, one an assistant editor at Departures magazine and the other a student at Miami of Ohio.
Mr. Friedman jogs, having gotten into running because Perrier was a sponsor of most of New York’s road races. He ran a couple of NYC Marathons, which led him to quit smoking.
He also plays golf, although in this new job he thinks rounds are going to be few and far between.
Who knew? Because he worked on the Hertz advertising account, Mr. Friedman attended O.J. Simpson’s engagement party to Nicole Brown at the football star’s mansion on Rockingham Drive in Brentwood, Calif., “I’ve actually worked with a lot of infamous people. Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond king Michael Milken was a client,” and he worked on the Reebok account when the shoe company signed University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, who unexpectedly died the next day. “I don’t know what this says about me,” he says.

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