The Surge Agency
Surge Agency was founded by Brad Herrick with one-third frustration and two-thirds inspiration. After decades of working on both the agency and client sides of the fence in many marketing capacities, Brad saw fundamental deficiencies in the client-agency model. Agencies he retained were more concerned with maintaining their staffs, and securing awards than recommending sound, objective strategy. Lead strategists would pitch the business, then vanish to go after the next big account. Additionally, the expertise to manage the marketing mix in the digital era was becoming more than any one agency could handle. The results were a lot of marketing campaigns but little solid focus on truly transforming the customer experience.
So Brad got an idea. What if he created a small, nimble agency that contained bright minds focused on the basics (Strategy, Listening, Story Crafting) , savvy in digital media (though not unduly enamored by it), that always maintain a relentless focus on the end result – Transforming the Customer Experience? Through such an approach, Surge Agency has maintained a small core team that weaves itself into the strategic fabric of its clients. We help our clients unite internal and external brand attributes, engage authentically with their customers in new ways, and achieve measurable results. With Surge Agency, you will get the big ideas in less time and with less budget – guaranteed. So we invite you to invite us in. We will help you listen more intently, engage more collaboratively, tell your story more authentically, and transform your customer experience.
Brad Herrick - Founder, CEO/President &
Customer Experience Fanatic
Brad is a “left brain-right brain” marketing strategist with more than 20 years of progressive marketing leadership experience helping companies build engaged brands and craft compelling stories. Brad’s listening and story-telling skills were carefully honed as a journalist in his early years, where he was recognized for his off-beat, investigative articles. He migrated his skills into marketing early on through his work at Maritz, a leading performance improvement agency in St. Louis, where he helped leading technology accounts like HP, Digital and IBM build their brand and channel marketing programs.
Brad was “baptized by fire” into the fast-paced world of technology in the ‘90s when he became part of the marketing leadership team that helped transform Iomega Corporation from a floundering $300 million company to a $1.8 billion technology powerhouse in less than three years. While heading up the research, channel promotions and direct marketing efforts for Iomega, Brad learned the importance of listening to the voice of the customer and crafting product and marketing strategies that resonated with that voice. Since Iomega, Brad has worked at several companies, both Fortune 1000 and start-ups, helping them drive innovative marketing strategies. He formed Surge Agency in 2006 to help clients create brands that listen, engage, tell compelling stories and transform the customer experience. Today he and his team work with both established companies and start-ups to create more authentic brand experiences, focusing heavily on technology, healthcare and medical technology. Brad enjoys writing through his Experience This! Blog and poetry (you may find him reading at undisclosed locations in St. Louis). He maintains his “groundedness” by living smack dab in the Midwest with his four children and his dog, Pez, and by occasionally entering the boxing ring.
Mark Errante – Interactive and Social Media Strategist
From his start as a video producer doing claymation films, Mark has honed his skills as a digital story-teller. Mark has held several video production manager positions in St. Louis where he has worked on such diverse work as feature-length documentaries on the Grateful Dead to news coverage for Inside Edition, and corporate videos for Charter Communications, MasterCard, and Commerce Bank.
Mark built on his video production expertise by immersing himself in digital and social media. He has led the digital strategy for a software development firm focused on recruiters, where he has worked to rebrand their interactive presence and implement several community-building initiatives across many social media platform.
Mark has also written and produced several short films for the St. Louis International Film Festival and the Milwaukee Film Festival and has degrees in Film Directing, Scriptwriting and Computer Science.
Dave Anderson – Brand Culture Documentarian
Dave Anderson’s expertise is helping clients revive their brand cultural roots through a documentary-style approach. Dave is an accomplished imagemaker with a background in the worlds of politics, television, film, music and photography. A former MTV producer and Director of Television in the Clinton White House and currently a full-time still photographer and videographer, Dave has a vast and unique experience both in the realm of broadcast production and still photography.
As a television producer, Dave was responsible for arranging town hall meetings, live national addresses and other televised appearances for President Bill Clinton and other key administration officials during the Clinton Administration. He was hired away from the White House to oversee MTV’s Choose or Lose Bus, a 40-foot-long traveling television studio and voter registration operation which traveled across America, registering hundreds of thousands of young people to vote and covering the 1996 Presidential campaign. Later, as a producer at MTV News, Dave directed a wide variety of news pieces on music, politics and pop culture. His subjects have ranged from presidents to pop stars to oversized drag queen Christmas elves. Currently Dave is producing and directing the original Oxford American Magazine online video series “SoLost,” an off-kilter, Kuralt-inspired journey through the side roads, backrooms, cellars and psyche of the latter day South.
As a photographer, Dave has been recognized as “one of the shooting stars of the American photo scene” by Germany’s fotoMAGAZIN and named a “Rising Star” by Photo District News. His project Rough Beauty was the winner of Center’s 2005 National Project Competition and was published as a book in 2006 by Dewi Lewis Publishing (UK), Mets & Schilt (Netherlands) and Actes Sud (France). Vince Aletti of the New Yorker has called his work “as clear-eyed and unsentimental as it is soulful and sympathetic.” Dave’s work has been featured in magazines from Esquire to Newsweek and can be found in the collections of various museums including the Corcoran Gallery, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
A book of his color work, entitled ONE BLOCK, will be published in 2010 by Aperture.
Born to Quaker parents and raised in East Lansing, Michigan, Dave studied history and film at Oberlin College. He lives in Little Rock, Arkansas with his wife and son.
Bob Onken – Creative Communications Designer
Bob comes to Surge with over 20 years of experience designing visual communications. He has a passion for conception, designing and producing creative communications that work and exceed the clients’ expectation! His obsession toward customer service fits right in with the mentality of the entire Surge team. Early in Bob’s career, like Brad Herrick, he sharpened his creative craft at Maritz. Starting in the Maritz Travel Company, where he was the original artist in building a creative services department for Maritz Travel. After a few years Bob was enticed to move over to Maritz Motivation Company where, as a project art director, he serviced clients such as Georgia Pacific, Toyota, EPIC Health Care, Best Western, General Dynamics and Ralston Purina, helping these companies improve internal performance. After Maritz, Bob moved into publishing where he was the art director designing the St. Louis Visitor’s Guide. At the same time, he was also art directing and marketing a monthly national insurance magazine. On January 1, 2009, Bob Onken Communication Design became a dedicated team member serving the clients of Surge Agency.
