AKQA, a digital-marketing agency, has announced the launch of a new business unit called AKQA Search.
“We’ve always done search, but as a digitally focused agency, we really want to make sure we have all the assets and technologies that make us as effective as possible,” said Scott Symonds, executive media director at AKQA.
In August of 2007, AKQA acquired SearchRev, a search marketing firm and technology provider. “The idea of AKQA Search is really to more closely integrate [SearchRev’s] performance technology with a strategic service and integration with other aspects of the campaign,” Symonds said. SearchRev will remain a standalone brand, he added.
The AKQA Search business unit will be based in San Francisco with five additional staff members in the New York office, Symonds said.
Scott Linzer, director of search marketing at AKQA, will head the new unit, which officially launched last week. Before joining AKQA in January, Linzer worked at Universal McCann as director of search marketing and before that, he was the director of media at iCrossing.
Symonds said that he hoped that as many as ten people, including employees from both AKQA and SearchRev, as well as some new hires, will work under Linzer in the near future.
