How We Roll
Kristan Rodriguez
“Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.”
I grew up in a small, close-knit Indiana town and attended Indiana University in Bloomington. I’m incredibly close with my family and learned the value of hard work, kindness and integrity from my parents, who I consider to be true ‘salt of the Earth’ people.
The impact of what we do each day is always bigger than us. We make waves outside of digital advertising. That’s fulfilling work.
At Closed Loop, I manage a team of five who work on one of our largest entertainment industry clients. My skill set has grown from primarily paid search 16 years ago to search, social, display, apps and video.
The lack of standardized attribution across platforms can be frustrating, and it’s challenging to know each channel’s real value relative to another. At Closed Loop, I like helping clients move their large, multi-channel programs to ad-serving platforms to improve data standardization and channel performance insight.
I love understanding how each channel works, and I love to be a hands-on manager who “does the doing” and gets the results! I enjoy building a fun but professional rapport with the clients I work with and often find myself not only co-workers with them, but friends as well.
Given my former background in teaching, I also like to work with clients to truly educate them on what’s ‘under the hood’ of their marketing programs to demystify digital advertising.
At Closed Loop, I’ve always appreciated that I’m trusted to do my job as a professional and that I work with colleagues who I can trust to be excellent in all they do as well.
The most meaningful part of my job is making our clients look good by arming them with informed insights and results to take back to their internal teams. As an extension of our clients, our hope is that we help them become digital marketing rock stars internally.
We provide information about what’s going on behind the scenes of their paid media investment and what we need to do next. It’s easy just to give data, but that’s not enough. We work hard to craft a story behind the data and to provide insights that enable our internal partners to be empowered to make informed decisions and justify the next steps for their programs.
There’s so much importance put on our well-being. Lance Loveday always says, “It shouldn’t be work versus life.” You want a balance of both, and your work should feel like life to some extent. It’s the people you like. It’s the work you like to do. It doesn’t feel like eight hours that’s separate from your real life.
Culturally, work at Closed is so different from other companies. It’s allowed me to have balance. From a parenting perspective, I’m enabled to balance work and life with three kids I’m trying to grow and develop. The fact there’s a big part of me left at the end of the day for them because I’m not burnt out from my job makes all the difference. Closed Loop has made me a better parent than I would be working somewhere else.
I love working in an environment where I don’t have to choose between working and being a mom.
Transparency. We get far down into the weeds as much as our clients want us to be. Some of our customers are hands-off and simply want to see results while others want to know all the details.
Regardless of the engagement, we meet our clients wherever they are. We’re able to lift the curtains as much as they need to demystify digital marketing.
For one, I watched the company grow from five people in a tiny office sublet from another company with only two clients. Today, we are a huge marketing program with a team of 30+ people across the U.S. with several amazing clients.
Now, we have this whole team that backs each other up. And it’s just crazy to think that we started from that point.
Incredibly, we made it through a recession where many agencies didn’t make it through. And even with COVID-19, we came through that. We endured all of these challenges and grew at the same time. Today, we’re still thriving and happy as a company.
I’m excited and proud. I’m proud of Lance and all of us for getting where we are and still being on this crazy trajectory. If anything, the next 20 years will be even crazier.
The integrity of Closed Loop is remarkable. There’s a greater vision not just for the company and our customers’ bottom lines but also for our employees and community’s wellness.
The impact of what we do each day is always bigger than us. We make waves outside of digital advertising. That’s fulfilling work.
1. Don’t be complacent. It’s easy to become stagnant or feel like you’re in a rut sometimes. And the feelings associated with that are always unpleasant. But digital marketing is constantly changing. For your personal and professional growth, don’t get passed up. Invest in yourself and learn new things.
2. Be a data nerd. Advertising hinges on being a data geek. Those who are good at paid media know the importance of using tools like Tableau and digging deep into data. If you want to excel, be hungry to top what you’ve already done before. Slicing and dicing into the numbers enable that.
3. Be a good teammate. It’s important to know when to look to your team for help and contribute yourself. You can never do everything yourself, but at the same time, you need to be good at what you do. Push yourself and the whole team forward.