gearDigital: Pioneering the Next Generation of Accountable Marketing
gearDigital, a Columbus-based startup, helps clients measure the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns in real time.
And that’s a very big deal.
The faster a company knows whether or not their messaging is hitting the right audience and creating the desired reaction, the faster the company can make mid-course corrections to more efficiently and effectively drive sales.
“It’s the difference between knowing today what happened on Monday and autopsying a campaign that ended last November,” says Chris Anderson, gearDigital’s managing director of business development.
Officially launched at South by Southwest this past March, gearDigital is a technology offshoot of Wilson RMS, a direct-response marketing agency founded over a decade ago in New York City. Wilson RMS delivers marketing campaigns for such well-known brands as Charter Communications, PayPal, MasterCard, and Kaiser Permanente.
“More than ever before, we see a tremendous opportunity to empower accountable marketing with consumer data science,” says Dave Wilson, Wilson RMS and gearDigital founder and chief strategist.
Today, gearDigital is up and running as the data hub and technology studio for existing Wilson RMS clients as well as a laboratory developing next-generation technologies to transform the way consumer insights can be discovered.
“We can pull most types of real time data that you can imagine,” Anderson says, “from TV and direct mail, to banner ads and Google search ads to see real time what is happening across a campaign.”
A nimble company can use that information to build more effective marketing campaigns.
Decision-making based on cost-effective, data-driven insights translates into smarter media placement and improved use of marketing dollars.
And that matters, because every successful company, large or small, seeks to optimize the cost of acquiring a customer.
The gearDigital team is nearly ten full-time professionals with aggressive growth plans including a comprehensive talent incubation program in partnership with The Ohio State University.
The company graduated out of the SpringBox Labs accelerator earlier this month and is a job creator for Ohio.
“Businesses like ours require a specialized skill set that is just now starting to be addressed in post-secondary institutions,” says Chris Anderson, managing director of gearDigital.
“We are actively developing talent incubation programs to provide real-world training opportunities for the next generation of data scientists, and we don’t think there is any better place than to do this than here in Columbus, Ohio,” Anderson says.
