It all started when Atlanta natives Belsky and Belnick met for lunch at The Chastain Cafe. Belnick wanted a new company, and Belsky wanted to solve what he sees as a Faustian choice for digital marketers: get lost in the big agencies or struggle to manage 10 specialty shops.
On the back of a napkin (yes, they really hung it on the wall) they sketched out a unified house of services that would include e-commerce, search, social, advanced analytics, business intelligence and database management.
Briefly, Acadia has combined five rooms of the house through the acquisition of Imagine Media (social); Techwood Digital (performance marketing); Well Built (e-commerce); Lift 361 (analytics, database and strategy); and most recently Bobsled Marketing, an Amazon and Walmart agency.
Acadia can now identify a brand’s best customers from its proprietary data, recommend a comprehensive approach from product to marketing, and deliver a media plan across digital and social channels. It also considers customers’ retail systems, from supply chain to media, and offers 24/7 e-commerce management.
This has attracted clients that include Greenlight, Bark, Natierra, Red Roof Inn and Alchemy Bikes.
To build its workforce, Acadia puts values like curiosity and collaboration ahead of experience, then trains to close gaps. That means hiring former professors to run account and design functions and a member of Atlanta’s SWAT team as a search engine optimization specialist. And to keep them all together, Acadia has made limiting turnover to a single-digit percentage the top key performance indicator for executives.
