When I started Ripple Effects Marketing, phones didn’t pay for your groceries at the checkout, you had to sit through commercials during TV programs and people didn’t have to sell big ideas in 140 characters.

It all feels like a lifetime ago now. But in tech – and so too in online marketing – a lifetime of advancement (and extinction) seems to fly by in the time it takes to say “Myspace.”

Evolution; survival of the fittest; adaptation; whatever you want to call it – at a rate that challenges anything we understood before – quickly became a definitive trait of the online marketing arena. And while the flux and impermanence of this new media marketplace, and the unprecedented rate at which it changes, struck fear into the hearts of many traditional marketers, this was not as true for those with expertise in direct mail marketing. No. For them, the Internet held the promise of a veritable paradise!

I think my background in direct marketing, which strategically exploited ongoing measurement to tweak performance, positioned me to comprehend early-on the opportunity Internet marketing presented by way of the easy-targeting / easy-analysis / easy-tweaking feedback loop that’s an inherent trait of the digital realm.

Ripple Effects Marketing was born of the idea that remaining fluid in order to adapt – while capitalizing on readily available and ongoing analysis to inform that adaptation – is the key to achieving maximum digital marketing results relative to resource inputs.

Constantly assessing perpetual flux to allocate resources in a way that makes waves from ripples became the way to do things. And surprisingly to many, the direct mail marketing know-how so many thought was on its way out would be the key to making the most of new media.

Borrowing liberally from the proven legacy of direct marketing’s, performance-metric- ROI- driven toolkit was an approach perfectly suited to the perpetual data-collection, change-on-the-fly machinery of digital communications and social media marketing.

For people like me, the challenges other marketers were confronted with looked a lot more like opportunities.

For someone who also has a sports marketing background, and enjoys competition and statistics, the dynamic, strategic, linear, nature of winning market share on the web meant the Internet was the place I wanted to work: the place where I felt home-field advantage.

And so, that ripple back then became the wave it is today. It is my hope that you will consider allowing us to show you, not only how to successfully navigate, but how to exploit the dynamic, exciting ebb and flow of the web.

Make a ripple. Ride the wave.