Goodway Group has chosen Jay Friedman as CEO.
Friedman has assumed the chief executive position after more than 16 years at the company, most recently as president. Former CEO David Wolk moves into the role of executive chairman.
Friedman’s appointment marks the first time a nonfamily member is leading the full-service digital marketing services company, which started out as a printing company in 1929.
“I take the responsibility of the fidelity of their legacy and their views and their values very, very seriously,” Friedman said, noting that his strategic vision for Goodway is “in lockstep” with Wolk’s.
The agency’s vision to “unlock growth for brands” involves framing marketing as a growth lever rather than as an expense. “With the CFO’s thinking cap on, we want to help marketers spend the least amount possible to achieve the growth goals that the company has now,” Friedman said.
Instead of beginning with a budget, Goodway advises that marketers start with a growth target. And the company works with brands to deterministically and probabilistically measure the impact of marketing.
Two themes Friedman has seen bubble to the top of every marketer’s agenda at present are retail media and identity, from cookieless solutions to measurement to addressability.
In terms of retail media, Goodway helps retailers and brands alike “navigate, understand and prioritize where their investments go, how they measure and how they determine where to best reinvest,” Friedman said. Goodway is helping four retailers build custom retail media networks, he said. As well as advising brands on which retail media networks to buy across.
As for the perennially prickly issue of identity, Goodway launched an identity graph solution, Passport One, last April. Passport One augments the amount and depth of first-party data that brands can connect to various platforms and lean on to develop measurement strategies, according to Friedman.
In part to address common marketer concerns, Goodway gobbled up two companies in 2022: growth marketing agency Tuff and UK-based data and media consultancy Canton Marketing Solutions. That ended a streak of more than 90 years with no acquisitions.
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“There comes a point in any company’s life cycle where it has to decide if it wants to get acquired or if it wants to grow, either via acquisition or investment, to compete at a higher level,” Friedman said. Goodway made its first deals to meet the “gaps in where marketers were struggling to either measure or to iterate more quickly.”
Having filled those gaps, 2023 “is really about integrating all of that into a holistic offering so that we can create that flywheel for marketing growth,” he said.
Goodway’s main investment areas going forward, Friedman noted, include retail media, CTV, linking brand and performance marketing to outcomes, and strengthening the company’s data science and analytics group, whose offerings already include in-house media mix modeling and regression analyses.
Although he declined to share Goodway’s revenue figures, Friedman said the company is profitable and actively hiring. Its current headcount hovers around 550 people.
As a private company without the “financial pressures” and investor requirements that public companies contend with, Friedman said, Goodway is in a distinctive position. It can hold steady in building toward its long-term goal of having all its clients “put marketing at the top of their boardroom agendas.”
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