Advertising.com started out as a Baltimore startup in the late 1990s and rose to become a top player in the world of online advertising. Now, it's trying to reclaim a bit of its startup essence in its Baltimore office after years of mature ownership under AOL.
I visited Advertising.com offices yesterday overlooking the Baltimore harbor where I got an update on what's new at the company.
The news: Advertising.com is hiring again, up to 35 people this year (here's my news story in today's edition). The upshot is that the hiring surge the division of AOL is experiencing comes after it dealt with job reductions in December and January.
AOL is going through some major strategic changes, and Advertising.com is going along for the ride. But it's still in Baltimore and it still will have its identity as Advertising.com, David Jacobs, senior vice president of publisher services at Advertising.com, told me.
In fact, he said, the company, with 200 employees, hopes to get more involved in the local community. Jacobs outlined some new touches that Advertising.com has implemented in its Tide Point office.
They're building out about seven new small conference rooms to make it easier for teams of people to get together and brainstorm. They call them "scrums."
Free soft drinks, coffee and tea for everyone, all the time, in the company breakrooms on every floor. Plenty of Mountain Dews for anyone looking for a caffeine fix.
New creative artwork, from a huge picture of a blue crab with a white AOL logo in the entranceway (see above) to posters around the offices that shout: Beat The Internet.
What does "Beat The Internet" (see poster below) mean for Advertising.com? According to Jacobs, it's about beating out the company's competitors every day, and not just reaching its own internal goals.
Advertising.com has its work cut out for it, since revenues were down in the last quarter and there's a lot of competing pressures in the online advertising market. We'll see how they do.