How have you seen Zozimus/451 Marketing evolve over the past 19 years?
AJ Gerritson:
“We’ve evolved along with the times, but we have always kept the focus on putting our clients first. Our mission hasn’t changed – which is to help our clients succeed in whatever their marketing needs are. What has changed has been how we do this. With technology and marketing evolving we changed with it maintaining the focus of clients first.”
Nick Lowe:
“When we started in 2004, AJ and I were coming from working on a website for a digital marketing company, but this was at the beginning edge of the digital age. Print advertising and TV ads were still mainstream, and we realized that wasn’t going to be the future. This inspired the name 451 Marketing (the temperature at which paper burns). Not only has digital marketing evolved the way we predicted, but even more so than we could have imagined. Social media is one example of this evolution. Paid advertising on social media and search advertising has changed data analytics and measurements drastically. Now in 2023 we are looking at Chat GPT and AI wondering what’s going to happen the same way we looked at social media in 2008. We knew it would be big, just not what that role would look like. I would coin this evolution we have seen as a massive shift in industry. What has not changed is that things will keep changing.”
Tom Lee:
“When we got started, we could see that digital marketing was the future not long after the .com world started, and people weren’t very online in 2004. The idea that someone would be brave enough to use a credit card on the internet was entirely new. Very few agencies were focusing on online and digital marketing at the time, and we all watched how that evolved. Now we can’t imagine a world where things aren’t online. Smartphones for the public didn’t exist yet. People were using Blackberrys, and email was just beginning to be widely used by everyone. I started my career as a reporter and then moved into PR. We had to send faxes until like 2002. The evolution we have seen then to now has been amazing and over the course of 19 years the evolution of technology and how people purchase has changed. In 2008, Twitter came out and social media really started to take over. People were no longer just looking at billboards and ads. People would communicate with the advertiser via social media. We were one of the first Boston agencies to really develop social media marketing for companies. When meeting with clients, they didn’t have any social media or even know how they wanted to use it. This allows us to start working with social media at its dawn. Taking the digital expertise, we already retained and evolved as an agency with the technology that was crucial. If you had the media writing about your product or service, then it came with more validity. News and media were also much different at this time. Search engine algorithm development began, and we got behind helping companies optimize search capabilities. Then hopping into online advertising once google rolled that out. Always trying to stay a step ahead of technology even now with the development of AI. As an agency we have always tried to be a step ahead. As consumer behavior has evolved, we have evolved with it, and this includes our rebranding from 451 Marketing to Zozimus.”
What are you most proud of from the last 19 years as Zozimus/451 Marketing?
AJ Gerritson:
“What I am most proud of is the amazing work that we have been doing for our clients. The second part is providing a great place to be part of a team. Zozimus/451 Marketing has been a great place to work, and people have done great things whether growing professionally or starting families. We are here to provide a great place for them to learn and grow. Our people love their jobs and that’s what I am most proud of.”
Nick Lowe:
“It would have to be the team we put together over the years. We have always had great people that are super smart, motivated, and interested in what they are doing. Most importantly these people are team players and collaborative with a desire to work with the other people on our team. Our clients enjoy working with us because of how fun and enjoyable the people on our team are.”
Tom Lee:
“I am most proud of the work. The work we have done for our clients is something to be proud of. Everything has been done with integrity and that is of the utmost importance. Every campaign and every strategy aren’t always a homerun, but I am confident that as an agency we have always done what’s best for our client and not always what’s best for us. We have never been afraid to take chances on things and never been lazy in that sense. We have never wavered on this. A lot of companies potentially fail because owners don’t have the same vision or pull in different directions and what is remarkable about us three partners is that although we’ve had our differences, we always pull in the same direction and listen to each other. This strengthens the agency we run and the work that we do.”
Where do you see Zozimus in the next 19 years?
AJ Gerritson:
“One of the things that helps our success is we are always looking to the future for what we can leverage for our clients to get an edge on the competition. Looking at AI will be important and incorporate more data science which we are already dabbling in. As tech continues to accelerate who knows what the next 19 years could bring.”
Nick Lowe:
“To some degree that depends on what the future of marketing and continued technological evolution has in store for us. I hope to continue having a great team and having growth within that team and our agency as a whole. I’d love to see us expanding our client base and continuing to innovate. We never want to look back to find that we haven’t innovated, and we want to remain ahead of evolution. In the next 19 years I see us continuing great work using the most cutting-edge technology and pioneering while doing great work for our clients.”
Tom Lee:
“If you asked me 19 years ago or even 10 where I thought we’d be today I couldn’t have answered it correctly because I couldn’t predict how much technology has evolved. Everything is moving quickly, it’s hard to predict where tech will take us. Our work is at the mercy of that technological development. The media went from being the most important source of information to now still holding a strong place, but not as strong as it once was. 19 years from now we will be a larger agency. We had three physical offices at one point, but now with tech – physical offices aren’t needed as they once were. We will grow internationally as far as employees. Remote work makes this growth easier. I believe we will have physical locations just not the way they would’ve been 10 years ago, and I predict these locations will be smaller. We will continue to stay ahead of technology by using it for our clients. Which is exciting and now we have people all over the world working for us not just nationally. The client pool is now much greater than it was before, brought on by moving remote due to Covid-19. I foresee a larger more diverse base of employees, continuing to do great work with the integrity we have always had.”
BOSTON, MARS
