Tony Chopp is an ad man — not the type of 1960s Don Draper-Mad Men kind of advertising person, though. Tony is an expert in the thoroughly 21st century subject of search engine marketing, particularly the side of the field focused on paid search results, sometimes called pay-per-click, or PPC for short.
“When you do a Google search,” Tony said, “the listings on the top of the page are paid search results.” In the case of Google, the 800-pound gorilla in the paid search ad field, it’s called Adwords. The other two big players, Tony said, are Bing, the Microsoft search engine, and Yahoo! There are also lots of others that cater to niche markets.
Another difference between Tony and the mid-20th-century TV characters is that he lives in Southern California, where he still hangs onto his day job: working for a pair of companies in the cosmetic surgery and aesthetics field – for now.
“The first company is a cosmetic surgery practice in Southern California. The second is called New Look Now,” which is basically a lead-generating service for businesses in the aesthetics industry, he explained. “We find consumers and we transfer those people to practitioners who can actually provide those treatments.”
New Look Now’s web application lets potential customers upload a photo and list their appearance concerns. Then the software will morph that picture into a photo of the person with their concerns addresses.
Tony said he came to PPC marketing by process of elimination. “We tried radio advertisements, doing stuff with TV and stuff in print. What we saw was that this Paid Search marketing channel was performing the best, in addition to which, we had a lot of ability to measure what was happening.” And, he said, SEM comes with information that is hard to come by any other way: intent.
“If they input a key phrase into a search engine, you know what they want, you know what their problem is, and you can craft a message that addresses their problem.”
Maybe one day, like a modern day Don Draper, Tony will open his own shop.
Tony Chopp
Ambitous Pay-per-Click
By Manny Frishberg
Growth & Funding Strategist