Transcript:
Adam Stoker: [00:00:00] Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Destination Marketing Podcast. I'm your host, Adam Stoker. We have got an exciting announcement for you today. I've mentioned over the last couple of weeks that we're going to start releasing a little bit more of my opinions and thoughts in addition to having the wonderful guests that we've had on the show over the last couple of years, and this announcement is pretty special for me. It's something that I've been working on really for about the same amount of time that I've had the podcast, for a year and a half. As you know, I own an advertising agency called Relic and Relic is a full-service agency, focused on advertising for destinations and marketing for destinations. We've been doing it for a long time, but to share this announcement with you, I think I've got to go back in time a little bit. [00:00:57] When I started out my career, I was at a small agency and we were just a local kind of do-it-all shop here in Utah. There was this agency and agency owner that I had always looked up to and I built a relationship with him through networking events and really came to respect him and look up to him. That was back in 2007. Over the years, we actually ended up even coming up against him on some bids. We won some of those bids, we lost some of those bids, but we've definitely kind of been in the same market in Utah, and they are a great, great agency. Well, over the last year and a half, I've been speaking with this agency owner, we've kept a relationship over the years, and we decided that it was a good idea for us to join forces. [00:01:56] So Relic has acquired EKR. EKR is an agency here in Utah. They do some tourism, but they also do a lot of other general marketing for different businesses here in Utah. So we've decided to acquire them, and our plan is to have them continue to handle general marketing and then Relic will handle tourism destinations. The interesting thing about that is they bring a new skill set to the table that Relic traditionally hasn't always had. So they have a significant team of full-stack developers, whereas in the past that hasn't been a real strength for us. We've done it when we've needed to, but now we have a team of developers that does amazing, amazing work. [00:02:47] So that means a couple of things. One is for web projects, we're going to be much more competitive working on destination websites and different applications, things like that. But two, we're going to start building some really unique products for the industry and that process is going to be accelerated significantly through this acquisition. The other thing that they bring to the table is an amazing creative team. So some of their creative in tourism is incredible, and in addition to an amazing creative team that we have already at Relic, we're going to be adding an amazing creative team and enhancing our product on the creative side as well. [00:03:31] Then another thing that they bring to the table really is a comprehensive, big picture marketing strategy. That's everything from research to persona creation, competitive analysis, things that we've done at Relic, but this will definitely be a service enhancement that helps take Relic to the next level. So something that I'm really, really excited about, we just integrated the teams on November 1st, and it's a really exciting opportunity for us. [00:04:05] So something that I thought would be a fun announcement to have. We're just going to release this as a bonus episode. We're still going to keep your amazing content coming from industry professionals. I'm also working on a couple of episodes that are more advice for destinations and suggestions for destinations, similar to the podcast episode, the episode about podcasts for destinations that I released recently. We're going to keep this content coming. [00:04:34] So the great news is that Relic is going from 25 to 55 and maybe even 60 employees by the end of the year, and it results in a big, big step in continuing to service the tourism industry and also other industries as time goes on. So thanks, everybody, for listening. Thanks for following our story at Relic, and we look forward to continuing to bring you great content.
[End of Transcript]
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