James Finlayson
I decided to build a website for my girlfriend for Christmas.
I was studying to be a lawyer and I didn’t have much money (over a decade later, we’re happily married with a wonderful son, so it turned out pretty well).
After I’d built the site, I wanted to see if I could get it to appear in Google. Then, being competitive, I wanted to outrank other lawyers despite the fact that she hadn’t even qualified as a lawyer yet. Somehow, through reading half of Moz, it ended up on page 1 for ‘medical law barrister’.
She got called into a meeting on her second day of being a lawyer, asking…“Who did this?”
Turns out they’d heard of SEO, but didn’t really know what it was. I got called in to speak to them and confidently agreed I could do the same for them. I went home and hurriedly read the other half of Moz. By this time, I had started working full time at University College London working on Intellectual Property and research contracts. Despite never advertising, or really even asking for it, I kept picking up more freelance SEO clients.
It got to the point I was going into my day job, running home, working on trying to get tiny companies to beat household names all night, and going back into work exhausted.
One of my clients decided to start his own agency and asked me to join him.
There were only a couple of us initially. We were really just figuring out what worked, every challenge was genuinely new and so it taught me to think laterally, experiment and that nothing’s impossible online.
I later joined e-commerce agency Pure Blue, where I built up the SEO and PPC team from scratch over the course of two years.
We were creating a lot of guest articles but I wasn’t happy with the results.
We started doing creative campaigns.
After all, everyone was saying to create great content; I just had to work out how to get people to cover and link to them.
I was making these campaigns work on budgets of 3k a month. Well, we were over-delivering to make it happen.
We were so keen to do them, we just made them work.
During this time, I got to know Lisa. Her company, Verve Search, was a 15 person agency, with some impressive brands as clients, and their Head of Content was moving to Barcelona. This was the perfect next move for me.
When I started at Verve as the Head of Content, they were mostly doing guest blogging. We quickly decided we were only going to do these big campaigns, and we trained up the team to reach out to journalists. I took on the Head of Search role too, because the guy running that had left.
That first year, I came up with half the ideas the agency created, as well as running the SEO team.
For a while, I was doing a bit of everything, but later moved to become the Head of Innovation, focusing on what we could do that nobody had ever done before. The things that other agencies would shrink away from. Ideas so audacious that they stood a chance of going stratospheric. Things that really stood out; campaigns that won awards; content that made people go ‘Holy crap, how did that even happen? We want to work with you based on this campaign alone.’
By the time I left Verve, we’d won 53 for that kind of content.
During that time, seeing our campaigns appear in the biggest newspapers, radio and tv stations, I’d been on a journey around taking the effect content has on society more seriously. In my TEDx talk, I spoke about the issues that are created by content, PR and journalism that solely chases clicks.
I feel very strongly about creating meaningful content – content that makes people stop and think, or simply raises a smile.
Verve would go on to be acquired by media giant Omnicom; I was part of the senior team that led the agency through the acquisition.
Shortly after this I caught up with Mark in a café on the back streets of East London. We started bouncing ideas around and we got excited about what we could create together, which led to the birth of Resonant, an agency that specialises in innovative content campaigns.
I really care about the content we create and I want the people who consume it to care about it. I want the people I work with, colleagues and clients, to care about it too.
If that sounds like you, we’d love to chat.
You can drop us a line at hello@thisisresonant.jeltz.dev.
