[Top Agency Series] Navigating Agency Growth and Acquisition With Dustin Titus

Dustin Titus is the Chief Digital Officer at ZoomerMedia and the Agency President of t1tus/one. As a veteran in the digital marketing field with over 17 years of experience, Dustin has fostered a client-focused approach delivering white-glove experiences and high-impact advertising campaigns. With a background in computer science, he’s adept at merging technical strategy with creative marketing and has led t1tus/one to a successful acquisition by ZoomerMedia. Dustin values autonomy, agile marketing methods, and empowering his team to live their best lives, keeping them central to the process throughout his growth journey.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• [00:37] The evolution of digital agencies
• [5:04] Dustin explains how to carve out a niche in monetizing publishing networks
• [10:43] How Dustin’s agency helps publishing networks maximize their monetization strategies
• [13:21] The journey of Dustin’s company from acquiring ZoomerMedia as a client to being acquired by them
• [15:03] Navigating client relationships toward acquisitions
• [19:35] The valuation and structure of the acquisition process
• [31:33] The importance of team inclusion in acquisition processes
• [35:19] Top books and resources for aspiring agency leaders

In this episode…

Have you ever wondered how a digital marketing agency navigates the constant evolution of advertising, publishing, and technology integration to deliver high-impact results? How does an agency not only adapt, but thrive in the complex landscape of digital marketing, where consumer engagement and technical challenges demand innovative solutions? What does it take for such an agency to catch the eyes of larger media companies?

Dustin Titus delves into the evolution of t1tus/one from its founding, focusing on high-touch digital marketing methods, to its strategic acquisition by ZoomerMedia. Dustin shares his insights on carving niches, particularly in monetizing publishing networks and fostering strong professional relationships that can lead to transformative opportunities. He offers a candid look at how he navigated the acquisition process, including valuation, deal negotiations, and ensuring his team remained empowered every step of the way.

In this episode of Inspired Insider Podcast, host Dr. Jeremy Weisz sits down with Dustin Titus, the Chief Digital Officer at ZoomerMedia and the Agency President of t1tus/one, to discuss agency acquisitions. The two explore Dustin’s journey, examining the strategies and philosophies that have defined his success. Learn how his choices reflect his values, and uncover the approach and resources that have empowered him to make impactful decisions in steering both his company and his own career.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• Dustin Titus on Linkedin
• t1tus/one
• ZoomerMedia
• Scrum: The Art of Doing Twice the Work in Half the Time by Jeff Sutherland and J.J. Sutherland
• JIRA
• The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership
• The Intergalactic Design Guide
• Scaling Up: How a Few Companies Make It…and Why the Rest Don’t by Verne Harnish
• Built To Sell: Creating A Business That Can Thrive Without You by John Warrillow

Special Mention(s):

• Allan Candy Company
• Fierce Pharma
• Omri Tintpulver on LinkedIn

Related episode(s):

• [Sweet Process Series] How to Save Hundreds of Hours a Month Using Top Productivity Tools with Adi Klevit of Business Success Consulting Group on Inspired Insider Podcast
• [Top Agency Series] Navigating a Merger and Becoming an End-to-End Digital Partner With Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech on Inspired Insider Podcast

Quotable Moments:

• “Relationships are the cornerstone of how we operate — fostering deep connections is at the forefront of our methodology.”
• “We distinguish ourselves in the agency space with a robust customer service focus and truly white-glove experiences.”
• “The acquisition was not just a business transaction, but a strategic collaboration that aligned with core values and vision.”
• “Technical savvy coupled with creative marketing prowess has been the dual engine driving our agency’s success.”
• “Autonomy and agile practices are my non-negotiables when it comes to leadership and driving my team forward.”

Action Steps:

1. Cultivate strong relationship management skills: These foster trusting partnerships that can evolve into significant growth opportunities
2. Define and adhere to core company values: Align the team and clients with a shared vision, ensuring a harmonious pathway to success
3. Embrace agile marketing methodologies: They offer a flexible framework to adapt to changes and drive efficiency within your agency
4. Balance technical expertise with creative strategies: This combination ensures a comprehensive approach to digital marketing that sets you apart in the field
5. Involve your team in the decision-making process: As key stakeholders, their insights can contribute to a smoother transition during acquisitions or other major changes

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:14

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of InspiredInsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders today is no different. I’ve Dustin Titus, you check them out at Titus.one. And Dustin, before I formally introduce you and doesn’t have been doing this for over 17 years, I think I don’t want to age you or anything, Dustin but so I’m excited to hear your journey and experience before I’m going to mention a couple other episodes people should check out before I introduce Dustin and his company, but since this is part of the top agency series, Dustin, here’s a couple interesting ones. I had Kevin Hourigan of Spinutech, he’s had an agency since 1995. It was interesting to hear not just the landscape of the agency world, but also the landscape of the internet, and also the business world and the ups and downs he had throughout the journey. So that was an interesting episode.

Another one was with Adi Klevit, Adi Klevit has an interesting niche. And we’ll talk about your niche like she does SOPs, so she comes in. And it’s an easy button for a company to do SOP. So like they want to smooth out the Client Onboarding, the staff onboarding or any operational pieces, they call her. And that was a good episode because we kind of geek out on productivity tools, operations, all the, you know, the non sexy stuff that makes things work. So that was a really good episode as well. And this episode is brought to you by Rise25, at Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. And how do we do that? We actually do that by helping you run your podcast or an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do.

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I also love just introducing my guests to each other. It’s one of my favorite things to do. So I’m excited for Dustin Titus. He’s the Chief Digital Officer at ZoomerMedia, but he is agency President at t1tus/one will explain what that means. And the journey there but they power advertisers and publishers scaling to make the biggest impact on the world. They do that by connecting them to the right people’s ideas and addressable audiences. And t1tus/one has helped a lot of clients. You know, I just mentioned, you know, monetizing publishing networks to vodka or alcohol brands to cannabis brands to lots of other types of brands and niches. So Dustin, thanks for joining me.

Dustin Titus 3:23

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Jeremy Weisz 3:25

Just start off for a second and talk about t1tus/one and what you do, and there is a video component to this. So if you are listening to the audio, I’m going to pull up their site, and we’re going to take a look.

Dustin Titus 3:39

Yeah, awesome. Thanks. So yeah, t1tus/one is a digital marketing agency. You know, originally, he actually started in the CPG space. You know, we were working with a number of different confectionery and chocolate companies. And that sort of grew from there into alcohol, beverage, and then marine recreation and facilitating are helping to facilitate publishing relationships as well. You know, as we spend more money on advertising and working with pubDirect, we thought, hey, it’d be cool to help pubs, you know, help advertisers as well. So we as a well-rounded agency focused on full service, but our version of full service, you know, you mentioned that, you know, relationships are important to you. They’re also very important to us.

But the way that we execute our relationships is probably the most important part for us. And so, you know, working with multiple integrated agency teams over the years, what we really felt was missing in the agency space was a very customer service-focused agency that really did actually deliver white white glove experiences. So t1tus/one is definitely built on a couple of different principles, our core values, which are freedom, flexibility, hard work, dedication, and then you know, focusing on working with clients that are aligned to those values. And then, you know, building team members that are also there too.

Jeremy Weisz 5:04

So then talk about the niche, how you eventually made it to monetizing publishing networks? Because it sounds like you started off with CPG, or the evolution of the niche, the niches that you’ve gone through.

Dustin Titus 5:17

Yeah, sure. So my backgrounds, computer science, and, you know, oddly enough, where we really started, you know, 17 years ago was helping CPG take advantage of news feed algorithms through content programming. And as that sort of evolved, more and more, more, more clients started asking for more technical based services.

Jeremy Weisz 5:37

What does that look like?

Dustin Titus 5:38

Yeah, so if you’re, if you’re building content programs, and somebody needs to don’t want to start an email, in the email platform, and integrated with their website, and so on, you know, we really started to help out with the technical aspect of their systems. So, you know, today, we probably do just as much technical work as we do sort of like brand and creative strategy. Because we can kind of dig really deep into technical strategy and move that across your CDP platform, and into your monetization systems as well. So as we do more work there, what we found was we were working with or buying advertiser direct, or straight publisher direct media, and we were getting terrible results from some of the pubs we were working with.

And so then you start digging into why you’re getting those results, you know, and, and most brands have one of two problems, right, they have a, they have a funnel problem, or they have a traffic problem. And, you know, if you’re confident that your funnel is running, well, then you know, you’ve got to take a look at your traffic. And so working with a number of different Canadian publishers, you know, we felt we could really help them do a good job of working with them, with their traffic and their audiences and helping support advertisers. So that’s when we started taking on, you know, taking on publisher stuff.

Jeremy Weisz 7:00

Give me an example of what that looks like. So first, it was like, I don’t know, whatever the cannabis ban or vodka bringing or like, what does that look like, when you were working with them, and where they’re being placed, etc.

Dustin Titus 7:14

So, you know, the, I think the most important part to understand really was like legalization in Canada, from a cannabis perspective happened, I think 2017-2018 If I can remember. And, you know, there was a significant age gating component that needed to be in place in order for cannabis brands to advertise with publishers. And so as we were kind of approaching different pubs that we were interested in working with, or placing advertising with, we noticed that they didn’t have they didn’t have first party data that we could absolutely identify, have birth dates on and so on. And so we needed to start putting in a platform, start putting in programs with them, so that we could get the kind of data and age-gated sort of experience that we needed in order to serve our cannabis ads. So for the most part, that sort of foray into working closely with publishers was helping to integrate the technology they needed to help serve as the cannabis advertising that we wanted to place.

Jeremy Weisz 8:12

So talk about them from the publishing network side and what you do with them..

Dustin Titus 8:18

So with publishers at the moment, we’re focused primarily on SSP integration with both open bidding and header bidding type environments. And then, you know, working through DSP, and then into identity, identity, identity graphs, or in some cases, content graphs that we’re working on, taking a look at what advertising products they have on on online, what we can optimize more of what’s not working, what is working, how we integrate higher impact. I mean, everyone’s asking for higher impact ad placements, I think we’re done with, you know, done with MP use and, and sort of, like lower impact stuff.

And so you know, one thing about the publishing space is that, you know, they’re really behind on, on high impact ad placements. I mean, some of them are doing a better job than others for sure. But when you’re up against some of the larger, let’s call them programmatic resellers, who have beautiful creative experiences, but might not be able to have the kind of control they want over those creative experiences. And working pub direct, we can increase that, that high impact availability with better, bigger, more interactive ad units. And we can do that without having to go through the traditional means, which is like a big box and then expanding that big box into a more elegant experience. We can actually just start with them and launch with that elegant experience.

Jeremy Weisz 9:42

What does high impact look like? Give me an example of that within a publishing network. Yes, maybe it has a specific ad so I can kind of visualize it.

Dustin Titus 9:53

A lot of people like to look at high impact. I mean, in the traditional sense, you know, billboards, half pages, you You know, 970 by 250 300 by six hundreds, you know, inter scrollers we’re looking at,

Jeremy Weisz 10:06

maybe there’s a site, we can pull up what you know, I know you mentioned before we hit record. Yeah, I don’t know if daily high or the peak or one of those, and we can take a look and see. Yeah,

Dustin Titus  10:15

I would take a look at what you want to see like some really great high impact stuff. Take a look at fiercepharma.com. Fierce is doing a really great job of, of higher impact ad units. And you’ll see that sort of pop.

Jeremy Weisz 10:28

It’s just fiercepharma.com.

Dustin Titus 10:32

Yeah, you got it. Yeah, I mean, these are all really great experiences that we’re working on, on providing and working with advertisers, you know, as an agency to help take advantage of these and then working with publishers to help implement them as well.

Jeremy Weisz 10:43

Alright, so let’s take a look here. So here we go. Yeah, so this one, you’ve

Dustin Titus 10:50

got to, you’ve got a big one up top. And then as we sort of scroll down through the site, you’ll see some in-stream outstream video placements, and you’ll see some sticky ad units on the side. I think that the box at some point will stick as well. But we’ll kind of see these ad experiences kind of get a little bit better. As we go through the page, you might need to go to an article to see sort of like the true experience. So maybe click on click on a link here.

Jeremy Weisz 11:17

Are any of these like this?

Dustin Titus 11:23

Yeah, cool. Yeah. Yeah. So here’s, here’s, here’s a half page showing up on the right hand side, every Google workspace. And then you’ll see just as you scroll through the article, you’ll see different ad placements sort of pop up. So yeah, our goal is to help publishers continue to deliver what advertisers are looking for. And so having experiences on both sides of the fence, we can work closer with those publishers to help them get advertisers what they’re looking for.

Jeremy Weisz 11:50

Got it. So these types of, you know, publishing networks, you’ll help them further kind of monetize the content and the site and the traffic with various placements, whether it’s on the homepage, or different articles and everything like that.

Dustin Titus  12:07

Yeah. And now we’re getting into more of the audience side of things, right, because, you know, the content, monetization is cool, and the placements are great. And the different types of experiences we can deliver are pretty neat, too. But now, you know, again, you know, we sort of spoke about it earlier, but the, you know, the third party deprecation stuff is happening, you know, from Google Chrome perspective, anyways, over the next, you know, sort of six to 12 months is really going to impact the type of adjustability that we have, and how we can access those audience. So audiences are the sort of the next step of monetization with publishers.

Jeremy Weisz 12:41

Also, we could see a long table here. It’s funny, because I just had someone on the podcast who helps with their fulfillment. So here they are, long tables, that nature. I think pancakes or waffles mix. So that’s awesome. I want to talk about an interesting journey with ZoomerMedia. And t1tus/one, from client to acquisition. Can you talk about it? When does ZoomerMedia first enter the picture for you?

Dustin Titus 13:21

Yeah,sure. So Zoom entered the picture in 2017. Our agency was focused on helping them with newsletter subscriptions and memberships, subscriptions, and running a lot of traditional sorts like ad AdWords, Google Search, Google Display programmatic retargeting, and Meta Ads, and so on. And our goal was to help increase the size of their first party audience database, and both memberships for their magazine and for their not for profit that they work with, as well as carp.

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