About Andrew Bloom

Hello!

I’m Andrew Bloom, a marketing communications expert most at home in the online and interactive spheres. My longtime confederate Gene Alder and I formed Bloom / Alder Marketing Communications in the summer of 2014 with one mission in mind: to serve enterprising clients large and small as the premier small-team strategy consulting agency in Los Angeles.

It’s been an exhilarating couple of months since we launched – fraught with danger and littered with peril – but first a little more about me…

The College on a Farm

Let’s drop in on myself in Spring 2011. I’m a junior at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, a quixotic little burg (referred to as simply “SLO” by the locals) situated midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco along the coast. Around this time, SLO was basking in its recent christening as “the happiest city in America” by none other than The Oprah Winfrey Show.

But I was too busy to pay much notice. Instead I had elected to study Literature under one of the most rigorous curricula at one of most universally highly-ranked public-masters universities in the nation. But for all its challenges, the reading and writing never deterred me; there was something about immersing myself in the English cannon, engaging with the greatest books ever written, that invigorated a certain mode of incisive thinking in me – something that still guides me when I tackle a brand position or ad copy.

If you took a stroll around the campus in this time, you’d notice an alarming number of students using their smartphones to scan nearby landmarks, reveal hidden texts and runes, coordinate with virtual and real-world associates, and then stomp off to the library to make sense of what could only be the next in a series of clues. These students were engaged in Look The Other Way, a campus and city-wide alternative reality game designed, written, launched, and executed by a team assembled as a daft experiment in adjoining liberal arts and engineering students.

I was the leader of the team. And though we’ve all since moved onward with our lives, the project still lives on, with new plots and platforms being created by incoming students each year. Nevertheless, I call that project the definitive trailhead of my career in advertising, incorporating everything from copywriting to systems architecture, audience engagement to KPI analysis.

But above all, I had my first taste of the awesome power that exists in the synergy of emergent technologies and consumer engagement. Given enough data, individuals, with all their aberrant interests and behaviors, unify to form predictable populations. And the sudden ubiquity of portable supercomputers in the pockets of, well, virtually everyone with disposable income and the inclination to use it spelled the promise of even more engaging constructs to follow. In essence, marketing had ventured to become “smart” – and I was poised for a career in the crux of this process.

“Business Acumen”

If there was any semblance of a career trajectory before university, it had involved software companies. I spent the first two summers of the Great Recession interning at NovaLogic, a videogame company whose brutally realistic military simulators and prescient massively-multiplayer online scenarios made them a household brand among gamers in the 1990’s. Soon after I interned with Escalate Retail (later Red Prairie, later still JDA Software Group) which powered endlessly customizable point-of-sale and eCommerce software (and even some cloud) packages for a number of industry verticals.

But I had found myself attracted to the notion of being involved in something from the ground up, in adapting to economized resources and relying on the strength of big ideas to – ideally – be a part of something really cool. I settled in with a number of innovative startups in manufactured consumer products – brands like Vapur, PackIt, and Pet Research – where I could take leadership over a marketing channel and chart my own course towards achieving the business objectives set before me.

Working with these brands also afforded me a valuable opportunity: an introduction to programmatic advertising, or PPC/PPM. In retrospect, I’m awed at the votes of confidence the leadership at these brands cast for me. I was given full reign over monthly budgets that could have paid for my college tuition thrice over and tasked with churning out measurable results. In some instances, this was easy. In others…. well, after I constructed entire drip marketing funnels from scratch and synchronized them with outreach efforts running the gamut from email marketing to radio ads to product placement on the Ellen DeGeneres Show, results flowed handily. To the tune of 400% ROI.

A Career In Advertising?

Word spread quickly. Soon I found myself in demand to apply similar touches to brands in consumer products, private security, B2B medical, and even Hollywood PR. The popularity was flattering, but presented another challenging – if also a tad semantic at times – decision: to continue my work as an employee, or to take the plunge and go freelance?

Lest we forget, the immediate post-Great Recession career marketing was a tumultuous place. I had never been less concerned about finding a job; I had been employed in one form or another since I was sixteen, and the job offers showed no sign of slowing down. But I did detect something more fundamental happening in America. It was the shift to a freelance economy, one which is still ongoing.

Going freelance isn’t for everybody. A business’s decision whether or not to work with you is either going to resemble employment, which is highly regulated to enforce fairness and propriety, or to negotiate a labor transaction with you, which is basically the wild west. You don’t get to be your own boss; you have to be your own boss or else the project won’t get done.

Long story short, I took the plunge and moved to Santa Monica, where I began to work as an independent contractor in an agency capacity under some of California’s most prestigious firms: RED Marketing Communications, Designing North Studios, and Nevo Solutions. In addition, I consulted independently to several medical enterprises, including IPM Rx, Vantage Toxicology, and Champion Medical Solutions. Over this time, I grew my skillset into a number of fortes: marketing communications & copywriting, brand development, eCommerce, programmatic advertising, enterprise analytics, and search engine optimization.

In this phase of my career, business moved at light speed. Sometimes I suspect if I ever had to revert to working client-side in a traditional marketing department, my heart would implode of inertia due to rapid deceleration. When you work as an account manager in an agency capacity, every day is a new set of goals, challenges, and relationships. It also teaches you to be deeply invested in your client’s success, yet detached from the product being marketed.

What will it be today? went the thought process. Dog vitamins? Sure! Motorcycles? No problem! Coolsculpting? Hell yeah!

Branching Outward, Looking Inward

Somewhere along the way, I developed relationships which germinated into full-fledged side-projects. I teamed up with the Lovecraft Group, some of the most talented audio, video, and production artists in Los Angeles to consult on media-heavy content marketing tasks as well as to create Live From Studio A, a program that provides free music video production services to independent artists. I collaborated with JavaScript prodigy Samuel Philip on projects such as BopNation, a Web 3.0 iteration of the closed social network for fashion models, and ChatBoxx, a secure peer-to-peer cloud-based video chat tool that boasts more features greater throughput than Skype.

In the midst of all this, it was observed that my longtime friend and collaborator Gene Alder possessed a skillset that remarkable overlapped with my own, and had himself been successful as a freelance marketer. We began to work in concert, processing workload at more than double efficiency, until it became abundantly obvious that our teamwork best facilitates the client’s objectives when packaged as a B2B partnership between companies. In July 2014, Bloom / Alder Marketing Communications was born.

Though this company is still youthful, it’s shown tremendous momentum. From co-ventures in the “guru” marketing field with legendary business coaches (you can’t help but be enamored with Dan Janjigian, inspired by Marshall Thurber, or incensed to purchase real estate from Jeff Perlis) to driving thousands of qualified leads to disruptive business models like TicketBust, Bloom / Alder has demonstrated its expertise and competitiveness on a national (and even international) scale.

The Future and Bloom / Alder

What might the future hold for Bloom / Alder and myself? We continue to expand our own enterprise, recruiting talent in mixed media, copywriting, and software development from across Los Angeles. And we continue to serve larger, and more complex advertisers, delivering value through results-oriented solutions that seldom emerge organically within traditional marketing departments.

But most of all, we intend to remain laser-focused on the evolving intersection of technology and ingenuity within the world of advertising. We’re betting on a more engaging, more immersive, more content-driven experience on the branded web than ever imagined, and we’re betting on ourselves to master it.

– Andrew

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