THE husband-and-wife team behind a digital advertising firm founded in Milngavie is to open an office in Los Angeles.
Tag Digital, a pay-per-click agency specialising in the global events and publishing sector, was established by Craig and Laura Davidson in 2011.
And the couple, who have been selected for the Scale-up Scotland programme, believe a planned move into the US west coast events market can help revenue more than treble by 2019.
Tag Digital, now based at Glasgow’s Whisky Bond, already operates
a London office and is on track to post a turnover in excess of £2 million
next year. The Davidsons have a target of growing this to £6m the following year.
The team now runs campaigns in 46 countries, with clients including New Scientist, Dubai World Trade Centre, GES, UBM and Shortlist Media, in various locations across North America, Europe and the Middle East.
“By specialising in events and publishing, we naturally found ourselves exporting almost immediately,” said Mr Davidson. “It limits the target market in the UK. The kind of work we do, as long as you have a laptop and internet you can do it.”
He said events in California would typically have a budget ten times that of a London event, which made the region a “natural focus”.
Projects for next year have also been secured in the likes of New York, Texas and Philadelphia.
“We’ve got a small office [in Hollywood] that we’re working from initially but we want to hire an account manager and a few specialists to open a full office there,” she said.
The couple are currently working from the Hollywood office, and Ms Davidson said the trip would help “suss out how much work we can achieve with our existing clients, how much more new work we can get and the feasibility of managing the location.”
Ms Davidson said the company initially provided web design and digital services before branching out into pay-per-click advertising.
This is a model of internet marketing where advertisers pay every time someone clicks on their advert on a website or search engine.
Having established a niche in this area, the couple went one step further by focusing on clients in the events and publishing industries.
“That’s when the business really started to take off,” she said. “The more we specialised the easier it was to get clients and the more clients we were able to get, the bigger they got. [Marketing] budgets are moving to pay-per-click.”
The expansion strategy will be helped by the news that the firm was recently named as one of 20 businesses accepted on to the inaugural Scale Up Scotland programme.
The initiative is run by The Hunter Foundation & Entrepreneurial Scotland and is designed to scale companies up to £50m turnover.
Ms Davidson said: “Every year the business is growing and it’s just us making it up as we go along.
“With Scale-Up Scotland it’s entrepreneurs who have done it before. They faced the challenge of creating global businesses.
“Going through that with experience entrepreneurs, and those at the same stage as us, and learning from them will be really useful.”
The business has received no external funding to date, with Mr and Ms Davidson remaining the sole shareholders.
And while Mr Davidson said selling equity has never been an option, he added: “Once we’re on the Scale-Up Scotland programme and we’re able to spend a bit more time with these types of people they might explain to us why that sort of thing might be a good idea. So at the moment no, but we’re not adverse to it.”
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereLast Updated:
Report this comment Cancel