Get to know Barbara Emener, CEO of Paradise Advertising & Marketing

July 8, 2023 | Interview

Barbara, who with her husband Tony acquired Paradise Advertising & Marketing, an award winning full service ad agency, from founder Cedar Hames in early 2018, brings an accomplished career history to her new role as CEO. She has more than 20 years of experience leading marketing for B2B and B2C, sports and entertainment, licensing, e-commerce and retail. Barbara excels at brand strategy, consumer insights, content development and distribution.

Please introduce yourself and where you work.


My name is Barbara Emener Karasek and I am the Co-Owner and CEO of Paradise Advertising & Marketing based in St. Petersburg, Florida. I have been very fortunate to have spent my career in the advertising and marketing industry working both in-house on the client side as well as on the agency side. I believe that this type of experience has afforded me the ability to better anticipate client needs and to focus on executing strategies for them that are bold, brilliant and rewarding. At Paradise, we are proud to not only be marketing experts but business growth strategists. At the end of the day, our efforts are ultimately designed to yield measurable growth of our client’s brand, business, and bottom line. Paying attention to, and caring deeply about, our client’s business and their growth success is our business.

How do you think SEO has changed over the last 10 years?


It’s changed a lot in the past ten years. Remember, ten years ago the iPhone first generation device was not even one year old. Crazy, right? Here are the “fab five” changes in the past decade – as I see them:
1. Bait and switch is a no-no. More transparency and less tomfoolery is required as consumers become more and more sophisticated. Give customers more credit – they can easily sniff out fakes.
2. Content, content, content – Content is key, but don’t create it without a plan. Thoughtful, curated content can be a driving force behind SEO and an end game of profitability; including it in your strategy is important. Why create content if you do not intend to profit from it?
3. Mobile device use and reliance has forever changed local search. Forever. Changed.
4. “Big data” is REAL! It’s not just something to be mentioned in passing around the water cooler or looked over in a marketing plan. Data really does equal dollars and it can do this on countless levels for any brand or company. If big data is not in your mix EVERY DAY, you may as well just step aside.
5. Analytics are real time. They influence the importance of pacing and the tangible, quantifiable, attributable impact digital marketers deliver every second of every day.

How did you get introduced to digital marketing, more specifically SEO?


I recall managing large internal marketing planning sessions in the early 2000s and, in the spirit of partnership, we invited our CFO, CIO and IT teams to the meetings. Over time, we recognized the value and importance of aligning marketing, technology and finance as we built plans that relied on new digital platforms, like placing high importance on SEO in our marketing mix. In marketing, we knew we needed emerging, groundbreaking digital platforms to better identify and qualify new and prospective customers; learn more about our customers; deliver content/messages to our customers; and so on. Having the buy-in and support from the CIO and CFO was critical to securing funding and integration.

What are the services you provide to your clients?


We provide end-to-end digital solutions for clients with an end game of growing our client’s businesses and brands. We start with strategy, what are the goals, pain points, resource variables, etc. and then we migrate to tactical development where we align with the goals, solve the pain point problems, and leverage all resources. From there, we offer end-to-end solutions in the form of SEO, SEM, Advertising Creative Development, Digital Media Buying & Placement, Ad Serve Platform Management, Web Development, Database Management, Data Analytics, etc.
Perhaps the most important service we bring to our clients is the information that comes from our Business Insights group. You can have the best-laid plans and successful digital marketing executions, but if you cannot analyze the data and tell clients what you recommend to do next as a result of interpreting the data then what’s the point? Everyone can deliver results in a report. However, when grounded and rooted in the data and facts, our Business Insights group delivers strategic recommendations to our clients that truly move their business forward in the digital space.

What strategy according to you will prevail in 2018 for SEO?


With the increase in conversational voice search commands beyond Google and Bing (think: Siri, Amazon, Yelp, etc.) and the reliance on mobile devices (think: it’s everyone’s security blanket and it goes with them everywhere), brands will need to re-imagine and get ahead of how their new or prospective customers search for them and where they search (think: local, hyper local, ATB – around the block – focus).

What would your advice be to people who are looking to take up digital marketing as a career choice?


I always advise students or young professionals who are interested in digital marketing to take finance classes or spend time with the CFO and CIO. And I really emphasize that they spend a lot of time with the CFO and CIO.
In business, digital marketing is occasionally misunderstood as the cool, sexy, hip, trendy department. The reality is that to have a forward thinking digital marketing presence, it may take resources and capital to get your platforms and IT systems aligned ­– hence needing concrete understanding, buy-in, funding and resource allocation from the CFO and CIO.
Both you and the CMO have to have the CFO and CIO as key stakeholders in your audience when you deliver and quantify results. In order to do this, you will need to deliver results in a format whereby they understand the cross-functional impact their buy-in has yielded for the brand, the company and even their own department(s). You shouldn’t assume that they are on the same page as you, but instead give them the tools to see the benefits and therefore become an advocate of the strategy you have laid out. I received this advice early in my career and found it very helpful over the years.

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