Kevin Provost

Analytics-Driven Marketer
kevin.j.provost@gmail.com | 503-380-7432 | Portland, Oregon 

Objective: I want to use marketing and communication to produce work I’m proud of, quantifiable results for my organization, and meaningful interactions with customers and colleagues.

Soft skills summary: My root capabilities in marketing strategy and analysis, communication, sales, client services, and program design and management all contribute to my ability to identify and reach the right audience with relevant messaging, thereby achieving the desired result. Leading, for me, is the same as supporting, except for who gets the last word—if I’m in it, I own it.

Hard skills summary: Marketing is all about segmentation and messaging. As a writer, a data analyst, and a tireless collaborator, I slice, splice, compare, suppress, sample, test, and analyze audience data. I use my love of language and story to deliver a meaningful message, in context, to the people described by the data. My expertise lies in identifying patterns and in using data tools and marketing tactics to match those with my organization’s goals, minding the metrics and tweaking the tactics until the desired result is reached. Then scale, scale, scale. So, I bang out Excel sheets until they're flat and malleable, I'm conversant in several analytics and visualization tools such as Tableau and SQL, and not bad at Eloqua, Marketo, SalesForce.com and the Google, Omniture, and Webtrends web analytics platforms. I use scheduling, project management, and budgeting tools too numerous to list.

Career Path:

Response Capture, Account Director – Portland, Oregon 
October 2012—present

At RC I lead my team developing and testing marketing tactics on a small scale, analyzing and recommending whether and how to embrace them. Huge successes include deep-level contact sourcing methods, and best practices for retargeting, social media engagement, and marketing automation & telesales strategy for events. We also worked extensively with one key client's web team to implement online chat, integrating the substance of customer chats with marketing and sales data segmentation and follow-up. Primary clients are software and hardware enterprises, as well as healthcare and insurance companies.

Left Brain DGA – Account Director – Portland, Oregon (HQ: Redwood City, CA)

July 2011 – present 
Left Brain’s CEO is a disciple of Jim Collins Good To Great. He has found one thing that the agency can be best at in the world, and is striving toward that goal. As a relationship manager, my primary vertical is financial services, where many marketers fail because of obstacles created by the data security required. Experience and understanding of SAS 70 requirements has afforded me the ability to move well beyond marketing automation and CRM tools implementation to meaningful marketing strategies to support B2C and B2B middle market efforts. Key successes have come in using automation to identify and drive meetings with corporate CFOs for bank Relationship Managers.

Rubicon Group – Director of Client Services – Portland, Oregon
July 2009 – June 2011
Rubicon is where I first moved in earnest from analog interruption marketing into online marketing. All of the fundamental data and segmentation skills I acquired in the manufacturing environment of direct mail were extrapolated on the web. The team at Rubicon was a hotbed of ideas and creativity, embracing or inventing whatever was needed to integrate tools and deliver measurable results. My role was to lead the Client Services team, acting as primary liaison between the agency its clients, mostly high-tech enterprise companies. Rubicon provided me with extensive training through teaching. While leveraging my communications skills to expand and help land new client relationships, I also researched, wrote, and led online and onsite seminars in marketing automation, key performance indicators, web analytics, and tactics such as retargeting and landing page optimization.

Direct Marketing Solutions – Director of Services Execution – Portland, Oregon
November 2001 – June 2009
As the largest direct mail facility in the region, DMS is a strong direct marketing company with some agency features. I led the 8- person Client Services team, reporting to the CEO and working hand-in-hand with the COO and the CFO. Banking, technology, and media clients trusted us because we made things simple – pricing came fast and was solid, my team could walk to the production floor, and clients could go home on time without worrying about the projects they’d placed with us. Also : Design, print and mail 100,000 pieces three days from now? Yes. During my eight years at DMS, company revenue increased 20-30% each year. 

FYI Direct, Director, San Francisco Client Services – San Francisco, California 

November 1999—October 2001

Brann Worldwide Advertising, Senior Account Manager – Richmond, Virginia 

April 1998—November 1999

Keifer Braunger & Shelley Advertising, Director, MegaMail (subsidiary) – Eugene, Oregon 

November 1996—March 1998 

Interactive Technology Group – Eugene, Oregon 

December 1994—September 1996 

Education: Virginia Commonwealth University – Richmond

BA in English Literature, minor in Programming Languages, 1994
I paid my own way through college, attending mostly night classes and working days, so my undergrad took me nine years. VCU had great teachers, thousands of arts students, and a rich, vibrant, café intellectual scene. I must have had 30 or 40 jobs in college: office temp (that’s 29 of them); rock -climbing trip leader; waiter; bartender; high-rise window cleaner. Near the end of my time there I partnered with a physiology teacher to start a company out West selling software on this new “worldwide web.”

Influences: 
Tom Waits, Sonny Rollins, Lucinda Williams, Bob Dylan.
Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Virginia Woolf, Neil Gaiman, Raymond Carver, Italo Calvino, Hunter Thompson.
Cohen Brothers, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, Wim Wenders.