Those who don’t work in paid search marketing, (and even many who do), are likely to look at me blank faced if I asked them what they thought of Frederick Vallaeys. By comparison, in the SEO arena, everyone knows who Rand Fishkin is. His regular Whiteboard Fridays and Moz blog have propelled him to marketing stardom, but in the PPC world things are a little more low key.
However for me, Frederick Vallaeys is someone who has had a very important impact on my past career and continues to do so even now.
Frederick was one of the first 400 employees at Google and in the 10 years he worked there, was intrinsically involved in the creation of AdWords. Without his work (and that of many others of course), I would not have the job role I currently hold. I was attracted to paid marketing 8 years ago because of the blend of statistical work and creative ad writing. It tickled both my inner geek and creative. I wonder what I would be doing now if AdWords had never been created or wasn’t around when I was looking for a new career path?
Whilst Frederick is no longer employed as a Google evangelist, he instead runs his own business, he is still a regular keynote speaker at conferences around the world. He is also a regular content creator and is a part time columnist for news sites such as Marketing Land. His posts regular feature content that provides information on new Google features, provokes thought or inspires solutions to PPC account management problems. I actually have an IFTTT rule set up just to alert me when a new post of his appears online.
In the present day Fredericks career has still had a big impact on my work. After seeing Frederick’s presentations at HeroConf and the testimonials from other presenters, I trialed using software from a company he co-founded. This Software is called Optmyzer and to say that I am in love with it is an understatement. This software has changed the method in which we work in the best of ways. It allows us to use tools that take a big chunk of the manual legwork out of data analysis so that we can give our clients much more regular, in depth reporting. We can now do this without sacrificing time spent actually working on the account. As anyone in the industry knows, saving time whilst still producing high quality results is the holy grail of agency upgrades.
It is for all of these reasons that I have chosen Frederick as my Marketing Bromance this Valentines Day.
