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PRESENT AT THE EVOLUTION

Digitaria employs more than 130 people in San Diego, and it wades deep into the world of advertising and digital media.

By San Diego standards, it is a very big ad agency.

But don’t compare the business to one of its New York City counterparts.

“We’re the furthest thing from Madison Avenue,” said Dan Khabie, the company’s CEO, who prefers the term marketing agency.

Madison Avenue can be a bureaucratic, top-down culture, concerned with promoting its star talent and amassing industry awards, Khabie said.

“We focus on client problems, not Madison Avenue problems,” the executive said.

And it isn’t a small number of creative stars dictating ideas to the underlings. “We take ideas from everyone,” Khabie said. “Everyone here is a creative.”

Integrated Marketing

Digitaria, which reports 2012 revenue in excess of $35 million, specializes in integrated marketing, with a heavy emphasis on digital media. It produces Web content for desktop and mobile devices, social media campaigns, apps and more.

“We just launched a China site for Qualcomm,” said Khabie, referring to a customer of more than 10 years.

The company also does the engineering behind that creative work. It has a team of 20 people working on the NBC.com site, Khabie said.

Other services include Web strategy, auditing — measuring how well an Internet campaign is going — and business consulting.

Big Client Names

Digitaria clients include Ford Motor Co. (specifically its Lincoln brand), the National Football League, Petco Animal Supplies Inc., Rolex SA, Taylor Guitars and Under Armour.

Digital may be a good place to be nowadays.

Advertising Age recently reported that big firms are migrating to digital advertising, partly as a way to save money. Top executives at Procter & Gamble, General Mills and L’Oreal all have good things to say about digital, according to reporter Bradley Johnson in the late June issue profiling the 100 Leading National Advertisers.

Advertising Age, a publication of Crain Communications, reported that ad spending for the top 100 spenders is not back to pre-recession levels, and grew 2.8 percent from 2011 to 2012. It forecast 2013 growth in the low single digits.

As a company, Digitaria has made several transformations.

It began life as two companies: San Diego-based Digitaria and Encinitas-based Console. Both were formed in 1997.

Each had strengths. Digitaria had creative chops and was constantly selling, recalled Doug Hecht, now Digitaria’s president and chief operating officer. Console had technical acumen and a stable base of repeat customers.

‘Ferrari Without an Engine’

“Digitaria was a Ferrari without an engine,” Khabie said. “It looked great,” but it lacked something. “Console was the engine that made the agency hum,” he said.

The companies moved in together in 2005 and officially merged in 2006. Digitaria brought Khabie and current Chief Creative Officer Daiga Atvara to the mix. Console brought Hecht and Chief Technology Officer Chuck Phillips.

The merged company was able to do things frequently done by two businesses: generate ideas and then implement the technology behind them. There was no throwing ideas “over the wall” to a tech contractor, Phillips said, which could increase time to market and possibly change the original concept of the creative people.

The big British holding company WPP took notice, and acquired Digitaria in August 2010, making it part of subsidiary JWT (known as J. Walter Thompson in the old days).

WPP reports 165,000 employees in 3,000 offices in 110 countries. Its CEO is Martin Sorrell. Its 2012 revenue was $16.9 billion.

“Joining WPP allowed us to bring global work into San Diego,” said Khabie. “I get a chance to work on global work — here.” The global parent also helps in attracting talent, he said.

In the spring of 2012, JWT put its Minneapolis office under Digitaria, giving the San Diego business a huge client: UnitedHealthcare, part of UnitedHealth Group. The publicly traded, Minnesota-based insurer reported $111 billion in revenue during 2012.

Listening and Observing

Today Digitaria counts more than 200 employees. In addition to Minneapolis, the agency has offices in Salt Lake City, New York and San Francisco. Its San Diego headquarters occupies 17,700 square feet in East Village’s DiamondView Tower.

To stay fresh, Khabie, 40, makes it a point to work among his staff, whose average age is 29.

“I left my office,” he said. “I want to make sure I’m not missing anything.”

The CEO said he will rotate to a new department every two weeks, or go work in Minneapolis for a month.

These days Khabie sits in a big room among computer programmers and tech analysts. On his left is engineer Joko Halim, whose desk features an aquarium occupied by neon tetra fish and tiny, 1-inch long shrimp. On his right is Phillips, and Phillips’ bobblehead doll of San Diego Padres third baseman Chase Headley.

Asked how his employees feel about the boss being a constant presence, Khabie said, “It’s not micromanaging. It’s listening. It’s observing.” It is an attempt, he said, to “stay ahead of where the market’s moving.”

Talent in San Diego

Being in San Diego has been a mixed blessing, the executive said.

“Digitaria has a chip on its shoulder,” Khabie said. “The world looks at San Diego as a non-advertising/marketing town. Therefore you have to work that much harder to convince people that there is great talent here in San Diego.”

Playing second fiddle to Los Angeles and San Francisco has its positive side. Khabie said he feels it gives his company drive and humility. It also helps with the work-life balance. Bottom line, Khabie said he feels Digitaria would not be the same company had it not grown up in San Diego.

The digital way of marketing has so many channels, Hecht and Phillips said. And it has the advantage of two-way communication, letting advertisers gather reaction from potential customers.

Digital communication is also evolving. Witness two recently announced technologies: Video on Instagram, with its 15-second video clips, and Google Glass.

Will Digitaria be working in those two new formats? It’s possible.

“Everything’s on the table,” Hecht said.

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