Carve Communications Feature Q & A

Scott Goldberg has joined Carve Communications as the agency’s Managing Director and Executive Vice-President of Client Services. Goldberg brings over 17 years of experience, and was previously recognized by AdAge Magazine as a “CMO for Hire”.  Today, a Q & A with Mr. Goldberg.

Looks like Carve has been on quite a roll the last quarter or so, what can you attribute the success to?

Truth be told, the growth trajectory has been more like the last year or so.  There’s no singular change that we made though, it’s more a combination of things.  First, it’s the internal team that we have at Carve and how we are true partners with our clients and how we become an integral part of the team with our clients.  And second, as an agency we’re focused on putting everyone in the best position possible to succeed.  By that I mean we take the time to identify everyone’s strengths and then we look to maximize them in such a way that it benefits them as they further their careers here at Carve AND it benefits our clients too.  And if there was a third, it’s all about the results and as someone way smarter than me said, the results speak for themselves!

There’s a lot of agencies that call themselves “generalist firms”, but you guys say you play at the intersection of technology and lifestyle.  What do you mean by that? 

What we’re trying to say there is we’d rather be great at 2 or 3 things instead of mediocre at 5 or 10.  We use that model across the agency.  For example, rather than limiting us to certain industries, we like our clients to understand our areas of expertise and how we tackle each one.  The best example is what we did with advocate and influencer marketing in 2019 where we went from minimal involvement to building out a robust team, strategy, and methodology led by an industry pioneer of sorts. As it relates to 2021, we’re now looking to satisfy the demand around content. We are actively building out our approach, and our team, focusing on content development and distribution strategies and how they align with our PR efforts. That’s a bit of foreshadowing so stay tuned for more details on that later this month.

If there was one or two things that differentiates you from other similar agencies, what would those be?

PR agencies have been around for a while, but our roles and responsibilities have evolved and changed over time.  However, the way we measure or consider what success looks like hasn’t kept up, until now.  All placements are not created equal.  Therefore, we’ve developed a way to quantify what success looks like now and it’s about much more than the number of placements or impressions.  And, perhaps most importantly, we talk with our clients to understand what’s most important to them and consider their input as we define what success looks like for them. 

If we asked your clients to summarize the agency in one word or phrase, what would it be?

Love that question.  If I can turn that into a two part question it would be one, what word do we want them to say and two, what word would they actually say.  The word we want them to say is “partner”. When we start working with a new client partner we dig deep and dedicate ourselves to becoming as knowledgeable about their business and industry as they are.

To answer the second part, in regards to what word we think they would say it’s probably proactive.  We pride ourselves on the fact that we are aggressive and idea generators.  We don’t sit back and wait for our client to come to us with an idea, a campaign, or a product launch.  Instead, we come to the client with pitch angles and ideas based on our own knowledge of the industry, based on headlines in the news, AND what topics we know because of our media relationships that there’s in fact an appetite within the media for a certain topic or trend.

If there was one piece of advice to colleagues or other Managing Directors what would it be?

Work smarter, not harder.  Fortunately, our clients trust us to understand it’s not about how many billable hours we invoice them such as a lawyer or accountant, instead it’s about the actual results we deliver.