Almost everybody remembers their first.

 

Mine was on Wednesday, August 5, 2015. I parked on Doyle, walked to Ellis, and climbed the stairs to the second floor of a downtown Kelowna office building. It was 2:00 PM on the dot. I was about to embark on my first official job interview in the Okanagan, a fact-finding face-to-face where a full-time position was on the line, with Jim Csek (pronounced check) at Csek Creative.

Geraldine greeted me at front reception and asked me to take a seat. While seated I was quietly thanking Rob Cupello of the Pulse Group for providing the job lead and my contact information to Csek. Heck, it was because of his diligence that I was wearing slacks and a dress shirt. People who know me know I wear long pants (especially in the summer) as often as I buy shampoo!

 

A few minutes later, Csek and Cupello walked out of the back area from their own project pow-wow. After greetings, Cupello was off to his next meeting. It was show time. Jim, the interviewer, escorted Jim the interviewee, back to his office. His COO digs featured a large round conference table and video screens mounted high on one wall. Game on.

 

For the next 45 minutes, the two Jims covered a variety of topics. Some work related, some not. We started off sharing firsthand experiences about crossing the Canadian and USA borders. You know, guy stuff. From there we delved into digital hot potatoes such as social media platforms, content marketing, and data mining.

 

 

After the session, I felt sky high. Ice broken. First-class first. Jim was still interviewing other candidates and stated that he was in no immediate hurry to make a decision. About 10 days later I received a message that another applicant has been offered and accepted the position. No worries.

 

 

I thanked Jim in a follow-up message and asked if he would allow me to create a blog post about Csek Creative. He agreed. I sent a questionnaire. Two days later I received the answers below from Project Manager (and one of the firm’s partners) Ryan Lahay:

 

 

 

What was the impetus for launching Csek Creative (CC) in 1999, and what was your vision at that time?

At the time we had a website, welcometokelowna.com, where we were selling advertising. As we approached businesses to purchase banner ads on the community portal, we were finding that many of them did not have a website to link their ads to! This naturally led to us recognizing the need for local business to have websites. As we started doing more websites for businesses, we created a new entity called “DotCom Media Inc” to accommodate the growing industry. This eventually came to be Csek Creative in August of 2010.

 

From those early days – how has the marketing/agency/media business changed and how has CC adapted to those changes?

The web design business was still in its infancy in 1999 and the early 2000’s. A lot of effort was spent legitimizing what we were telling businesses. Companies were skeptical of the Internet, and resistant to the costs associated with getting online. Fortunately, most of the skepticism is long gone now that businesses recognize the value with being online and marketing themselves – either digitally, or traditionally. As online marketing became a larger part of the “marketing picture”, Csek Creative was able to start working across mediums to develop multi-channel campaigns and solutions. Sixteen years ago we may have been simply creating small websites. Now we are creating larger websites, recording video, shooting photos, developing internal intranets, creating billboards and traditional advertising campaigns – all with one goal and a unified message. We live in an exciting time where marketing campaigns across multiple mediums can now tie into one and another and build on top of each one’s respective strengths.

 

 

From those early days – how have clients and their needs changed and how has CC adapted to those changes?

It’s hard to capture 16 years of change in a short paragraph. We went from businesses not knowing what the Internet was, to not knowing why they actually needed to be on it. Sixteen years later we are still helping business adapt to different ways they can engage with their target markets. Now instead of telling everyone they “need to have a website”, we are telling everyone “your website needs to work on a phone”, and they “need a content marketing strategy”.  Our business adapts as the best techniques to grow our clients’ businesses evolve and change year after year.

 

 

The CC website is very impressive – describe its form and functionality?

The goal was to be simple and straight-forward. Consumers are short on time, and we wanted to get the message out as soon as someone came to the site. This is why “WE HELP COMPANIES WITH THEIR ONLINE AND OFFLINE MARKETING GOALS” is big and in your face when you end up on the site.  We also feel the best way to explain what we do is to show what we have done with other businesses. This is why there is a strong emphasis on the brands we have worked with, as well as the different creative services we provided for them.

 

 

What was the impetus for launching Kelowna Now in 2014, and what is CC’s working relationship with the digital media platform?

I mentioned earlier than we started off with selling advertising “welcometokelowna.com”.  As we invested more time and effort into the Csek Creative brand, we shifted focus away from WelcomeToKelowna.com. In 2012, we decided it was time to look at the media platform again as we saw there was a market opportunity for something a bit different than Castanet in Kelowna. We sensed there was an appetite for change in local media, and we felt we could deliver it. We rebuilt WelcomeToKelowna.com from the ground up, and rebranded as KelownaNow.com. Today, Csek Creative and KelownaNow.com are sister companies. Csek Creative provides the technical muscle and creative chops that help support the great work the news team is doing with the KelownaNow brand.

 

 

Content Marketing has been identified as the present and future of marketing. How does CC define it and implement it with clients and brands?

Content marketing is a large catch-all for a variety of marketing techniques that revolve around one common denominator: writing, creating, sharing, and promoting original, creative and interesting content.  The specific tactics and channels that are utilized may differ from client to client and industry to industry. For one terrific example of what we are doing with a talented local Realtor, you can check out a blog post we just published out a couple days ago. http://www.csekcreative.com/blog/news/Sales-and-Marketing/176:your-marketing-strategy-is-probably-outdated.

 

 

How many full-time employees does CC have……and why is it your philosophy to not outsource any of your work?

We have 11 employees that are full-time Csek’ers. From the early days of the company, we had a very strong programming team. This is usually the discipline that is commonly outsourced. We always felt that keeping all the work in-house was a way to guarantee the quality of design and code that we would provide for clients over the years. It is a lot easier to stand behind your product if you were intimately involved with the creation of it from the ground up.

 

 

Can you tell us a favorite/fun/crazy/lighthearted client story (something that happened during a meeting, photo shoot, conference call, or presentation)?

A couple years ago we held a conference at the Rotary Centre for the Arts and invited more than 300 members of the business community to come out and listen to us talk about a variety of marketing subjects.

As anyone that has had to speak in front of a large group of people before can tell you – this is “up there” on the “stressful experiences” scale. So for about five hours different members of our team got up on the stage alone in front of 300+ bodies and spoke passionately about marketing and different strategies businesses could use to reach their consumers.

After the presentations were done, attendees were asked to fill out comment cards. We were really nervous to read them. Did they find our message educational? Did they find it boring? I was almost scared to read some of the comments. What if they didn’t like us?!

The first two comments we received were about how awesome Nikki’s shoes were (Nikki is Csek Creative’s CEO and Jim Csek’s better half). It really lightened the mood and gave us all a good laugh. Fortunately the remaining comment cards had positive feedback about the conference itself, too!

 

 

What are CC’s biggest challenges for the rest of 2015 and beyond?

I think challenge is just another word for opportunity. I’m really looking forward to how the creative agency role is changing and evolving to become more integrated with the businesses it works with. Marketing is requiring businesses to become much more responsive and engaged with their customers than ever before, and to do so, the relationship between businesses and their marketing agency is becoming tighter. This is going to allow us all to do great things in the future.