I never intended on getting into marketing. It just kind of happened.

After graduating from Arizona State University with a useless Global Studies degree in 2011, I valued my independence a bit much and thought I could make a living without having a full-time job. It took me a while to realize that I wasn’t cut out for door-to-door auto glass sales or any of my other unorthodox attempts at making money, and in 2013 I realized that I needed to get a “regular” job. A friend of mine referred me to a business process outsourcer and a few weeks later, I found myself working for Revana as a contractor for Google, fixing issues with business listings on Google Maps.

That job got offshored to India in 2014, and I became a support specialist for another one of Revana’s BPO offerings: AdWords sales and support. For the next few years, I built and managed AdWords campaigns and trained coworkers, SMBs, and ad agencies on how to use the platform more effectively. I greatly enjoyed my time as ryjones@google.com, but became dissatisfied when my marching orders changed from ‘helping our clients succeed’ to ‘pushing products they didn’t need’.

So, I transferred to Revana’s in-house ad agency in 2016 and gained familiarity with six-digit monthly budgets, Yahoo Gemini, Facebook Ads, video ad design, and other fun things like DoubleClick and 3PAS. I had a wonderful group of friends at Revana that I left behind to work at Revana Digital. Few things suck the fun out of a job more quickly than leaving all your cool coworkers behind, so in 2017 I quit and started working as a RiderCoach at the best motorcycle training school around, until a friend referred me to another ad agency.

I hit the ground running at V Digital Services in mid-2018 with a sizable book of business and was promoted to Paid Media Team Lead in early 2019. I greatly enjoyed my time managing some of the agency’s largest accounts, but I was disturbed by how much of my day-to-day job became generating demand for debt. I’ve been a Dave Ramsey aficionado for many years and was very passionate about not being in debt, and couldn’t square that with my clients that sold loans. So I gave VDS lots of notice that I was going to quit, and started laying (baking?) the foundations for Pretzel PPC in the summer of 2020.

Looking back over my PPC career, my proudest moment was shoehorning 5 electricity puns into a single text ad for an electrician—and this was before text ads became ‘expanded’. A close second was the feeling of satisfaction I get when my clients tell me how much I’ve helped improve their PPC results.