Mason Culture - Mason Interactive

2020 is a whirlwind. In addition to helping our existing clients navigate the evolving landscape, we have had the privilege to welcome new, inspiring brands to the Mason family. While our client portfolio is growing, we are also growing our team of digital experts and are excited to introduce our newest team members; Marissa and Katie.

Marissa Bavaro, SEO Account Manager

Marissa is the latest addition to our growing team Rocket (SEO). Her days at Mason Interactive include developing and implementing SEO strategies on behalf of our clients, auditing client websites, conducting keyword research, preparing reports and monitoring performance in order to improve our clients’ results, efficiency, and profitability.

Marissa started her career in account services and had the opportunity to grow her passion of digital marketing into an SEO career. She graduated from Stony Brook University with a degree in Marketing and a minor in Media Arts. With the ever changing landscape of search, Marissa always keeps up with the latest SEO trends that help her clients rank in the SERPs. What she finds most interesting about her job is seeing how people’s minds work when they search and what makes them convert.

When she’s not optimizing for keywords, Marissa likes to stay creative with art projects, cooking and baking, and her newest hobby is candle making.

Katie Sutphin, Marketing Associate

Katie started as an intern at Mason Interactive in January 2020, and earlier this Summer she became a part-time member of team Turbo (Media). Her typical day at Mason Interactive includes brainstorming client concepts with other team members, and executing a variety of behind the scenes tasks such as pacing accounts, writing ad copy, creating ads and audiences, and pulling creative insights of top performers.

Katie is a rising college senior at Ramapo College of NJ, all set to graduate in May 2021 with a bachelor’s degree in Communication Arts with a concentration in Global Communication & Media Studies. Growing up, she aspired to be a Journalist due to her passion for reading, writing, and current events, and currently she writes for a school newspaper and does freelance writing work for a local entertainment company. In her free time she enjoys hanging with friends, reading, practicing yoga, and watching movies.

“Mason Interactive was my first internship, and the perfect fit for me! I couldn’t have asked for a better place to learn the industry, or from better people. As I worked with both paid media teams more and more, I began to really like what I was doing. My favorite thing to do at Mason is to write ad copy because I love writing. Creating interest clusters and audiences is always fun too!”
– KATIE

Again, we welcome Marissa and Katie to Mason Interactive, and continue delivering top-quality digital marketing services for our clients.

We have four teams at Mason: An SEO team, an Email team, a Marketing team, and a Media team.

As we grow, we are proud to announce a restructuring of one of the teams to better serve our clients.

Our Media team has been refashioned into two distinct “pods,” or teams. Each “pod” is a group of four people, led by a seasoned professional with at least 5 years industry experience. The teams are named “Turbo” and “Hawk.”

This means that some people on a client team might be changing. In no case will everyone on an account change, but some restructuring of account teams may occur.

There are three strong, positive reasons to do this.

First, this structure gives employees a clearer career path, strengthening institutional knowledge of client accounts.

Second, it gives clients more stability. If person # 3 on Team Turbo leaves, there are still three people on the account that know the business – in addition to the fact that every account is touched by the Director and also the Managing Director.

Third, it lets us train our staff across disciplines. Today, everyone on the team is either Adwords certified, or Facebook Blueprint Certified. Soon, everyone on each team will be certified in both Adwords and Facebook.

These three very strong upsides are worth the one-time temporary disruption of moving one Performance Marketing Specialist from one client account to another.

We are in Chicago pretty much every month for a night or two, and we just got back from July’s trip. Had a great time, as usual, and I hope the QBR was useful. I know it was for us 🙂

Mr. Padron strolling from TCS HQ, on past the campus.

I think it’s key that everyone on a team have a common goal.

When our company was smaller, and there were five of us in one room, there was much less need to formalize our mission. Now that we’re bigger – and growing even bigger – we think it’s important to formalize it.

So, Mason Interactive’s mission Statement is: Be an ally for our clients to grow their business. That’s it. Simple. We succeed together, or not at all.

Our brand pillars are:

Transparency: Total access to costs, process, and team. You will never hear us say “no, we can’t give you that data.”
100% alignment on goals: The more we know about your goals, the more we will succeed.
Treat other as we’d like to be treated: This sounds simple, but it’s a great rule for life.
Frictionless: We strive to make every interaction as frictionless as possible.
Evolutionary: We evolve in real time to get better every day

Every new employee, from this day on, will be asked to memorize these pillars.

We had the pleasure of hosting Hamza today as our very first client face-to-face in our new office.

Hamza, many thanks for coming in from Chicago!

After 8 years, four offices, 20 accounts and an equal number of employees, my Second in Command, Julie Eydman, is leaving. We wish her well 🙂

Several old employees showed up for the festivities, and it was great to see them too.