Meet the Blackbirdies: Thomas Quinlan, Sr. Account Director

Welcome to our new series giving you a peek into the big marketing brains of our award-winning team! In the first edition, we’ll meet an Sr. Account Director who recently celebrated his six-year anniversary at Blackbird: Thomas Quinlan.

When did you join Blackbird PPC?

I joined in November of 2019.

When did you get started in digital marketing (and in what role)?

I originally started my career in software sales and technically started selling digital marketing software in 2008. After spending some time in sales and deciding that’s not how I wanted to spend my whole career, I made the switch to becoming a marketer myself in 2018. I started doing some pro bono project work for companies who were looking for some marketing help.

What do you like most about digital marketing?

I like how tangible everything around digital marketing is. As someone who uses search engines/social platforms and visits websites on a daily basis, I like having a hand in building these experiences for a wide variety of businesses.

What do you like most about working at Blackbird?

I love how collaborative the team is. Even though we’re all remote, we make it very easy to communicate with anyone in the agency. Whether it’s through Slack channels or getting on quick syncs, everyone on the team is very open to helping each other out.

What’s your favorite accomplishment as a digital marketer?

Winning Search Engine Land’s best B2B PPC marketing initiative for Customer.io recently was pretty cool. It validated a lot of hard work and experimentation that we had been putting into our Google Ads efforts.

What are you most proud of in your marketing career?

I think I’m most proud of the strong relationships I’ve made. I keep in touch with many of my clients I’ve had throughout the years, on both personal and professional levels.

What do you think is a common misconception in advertising?

That you should be able to directly measure the exact impact your ads have on your business. The customer lifecycle isn’t always a straight line, and the benefits of advertising to your business won’t all show up in directly attributable outcomes. That’s why it’s always important to look at your ad campaigns beyond the normal scope of attribution, and make sure you’re always running incrementality tests to understand the full impact.

What makes for a good agency culture?

I mentioned it in an earlier answer, but I think it’s the openness to collaboration and the willingness to help each other out with any task or initiative. Everyone on the team here is willing to go the extra mile for our clients, even if it’s not in our traditional scope of work.

What’s one crazy prediction you have for marketing channels, features, or functionality for the next 12 months?

My crazy prediction is that Google is going to more formally start phasing out match types. There’s no question that Broad and Phrase match keywords are mapping to a much wider range of search terms than they did 3-4 years ago, and Google is heavily touting that they’re using deeper AI/ML signals around the user than just pure search query mapping.

Seeing how much of a move they’re making towards leveraging their AI/ML capabilities in these match types and some of their newer campaign types, I think the next possible step here is for Google to migrate search more and more to this ideology. I’d be surprised if it happens real soon, so this is more of a crazy prediction that we may see roll out more beyond the 12-month phase.

When you’re not growing clients, how are you spending your time? (please add pictures of kids, pets, vacations, hobbies, etc.)

Historically, I would have spent my free time playing golf, traveling, and seeking out good places to eat throughout the Bay Area.

In the last couple of years I’ve still tried to mix those in but have had a good amount of my time taken up by my almost 2-year-old daughter, Chloe.