ANN ARBOR ? Steve Glauberman started Enlighten 21 years ago when he landed a huge contract to develop an interactive CD-ROM. Until last week, Glauberman served as president and CEO. Now he?s given the president?s title to Joe Morrow, an MBA with a law degree, who also will handle some of the operational duties.
Morrow served in leaderships roles at consulting firms, including McKinsey & Company, A.T. Kearny and DiamondCluster International. What?s more, Morrow has started and run his own management consulting company – Morningstar Consulting Group – as well as serve in a senior marketing capacity at the Chicago Board of Trade.
Glauberman said the decision to hire a president, the first time in company history, was based on a desire to scale the company?s services and unique culture as Enlighten embarks on another period of growth. Enlighten also wanted to diversify into promising new service areas, such as search engine marketing.
?When you look at the online world, you can create a destination site for big companies,?? he said. ?Then there?s the acquisition strategy of how you?re getting people to these sites. Email marketing and on-line advertising are the biggest acquisitions. Search-engine marketing is another. We needed to make more of a commitment in acquisition side with search-engine marketing.?
Enlighten will work with the major search engines, such as Google.Com, Yahoo.Com and MSN.Com to come up with the terms that people search for and price the most valuable ones accordingly. Everyone would bid for the best terms and pay by the click.
?Is it worth it to pay $2 for that click when 20 percent of people that click are converted buying that product,?? Glauberman said. ?Some of our clients spend $100,000 in paid key words per month. We have a whole dedicated group working with companies to help them optimize paid search.?
He said the idea is if someone types in the term window blinds it will make Hunter Douglas show up in unpaid links. Customers won?t have to spend any money buying key words because Enlighten has optimized the customer?s web pages to show up at the top of the search pages without paying for key words.
Glauberman has four full time employees working in this new area, bringing his head count to 70 and his annual revenues in a range from $7 million to $10 million.
?While the economy has been tough, we?ve grown and remained profitable,?? he said. ?We now seeing an up tick in business opportunities.?
And the interactive advertising awards keep rolling in. Just last week, Enlighten won two ADDY Awards from the An Arbor Ad Club chapter. Enlighten?s submissions were for the Audi brand website (www.audiusa.com) and its own company website (www.enlighten.com), which both won Gold Awards.
Having won at the local level, the Audi brand website and the Enlighten company website will now compete with winners from Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan at the District 6 finals. Winners of that competition will proceed to the national finals.
For more information, click on Enlighten.Com
