Beyond Expectations

Can you believe 2023 is almost a wrap? What a whirlwind of a year it has been overall. The year began amidst recession fears that went unfounded, rolling into various stages of a slowdown across industries. Thankfully, ultimately, the almighty American consumer came out swinging. For business leaders and marketers, there was a lot of noise and market shifts to weed through the past 12 months 

Despite the headwinds we faced, 2023 kept our team at thunder::tech incredibly active, and we are fortunate to be in the midst of a growth-led transformation for the agency. 
 
A few notable moments for the t::team include: 

• We doubled down on our dedication to attracting and retaining the best talent for our clients with the addition of our first  Employee Engagement Strategist. We also celebrated expansion through vital new hires in Account Services, Performance Marketing, Content, Social, Visual Design and our Technical team. 

 

• We rebooted our intern program and are now back to year-round internship opportunities. Want to join us? 
• We forged new relationships with esteemed brands like Life Fitness, Sazerac House, Jocko Fuel, Mickey Mart, Osborn Engineering, Consumers Energy, Great American Insurance, Parker Hannifin and others across diverse industry sectors.

• Another exciting success for thunder::tech was record category channel growth in 2023. We experienced notable achievements in CPG & Retail, Destination & Hospitality, Industrial, Education and Professional Services.
• Finally, our most exciting achievement of 2023 was the acquisition of Silent Partners Media Group, a NYC-founded digital agency. We began the process at this time last year and quickly integrated it into our operations early in the year.    

From a service perspective, our production teams expanded their offerings, catering to clients' evolving needs for innovative marketing solutions. Key highlights included: 

• Riding the trend of re-branding that has exploded post pandemic. We set a new agency record for delivering complete brand solutions, from research and positioning to messaging, visual identity systems and standards.
• We have embraced partnership marketing, which proves not to be slowing down. We elevated influencer marketing services, collaborating with an extensive array of brands and launching into NIL (Name, Image and Likeness) work with athletes from OSU, Clemson and LSU.  

 

• Handling increasingly intricate web projects, spanning AI development, multilingual site creations, sophisticated e-commerce setups, intranet and portal developments across various platforms like Sitefinity, Umbraco, Kentico, Drupal, WordPress, Shopify and Hubspot. 
• Our Social and Influencer Team partnered with thunder::tech’s in-house video and visual design teams to provide clients with content studio and content hub services.  

 

• Performance Marketing leaned into helping clients convert to the big GA4 migration and deepened all areas of their service reach from SEO, PPC, programmatic, email and marketing automation to social advertising.   
• Creative continues to innovate. One notable area for 2023 was packaging design within the CPG segment.

 
2023 was an exciting year of growth. There is no end to that in 2024 as thunder::tech heads into our milestone 25th year. We are grateful to be the marketing agency of choice for so many middle-market brands. Our success remains rooted in our clients' trust in us as partners, driving evolution in our t::team to lead you to success. 
 

So stay buckled in; this ride isn't over yet! 

Best wishes for an incredible 2024,    

:: Jason Therrien, CEO