Two months before her wedding, Jen Dodson lay in the hospital and decided that life was too short to put her ambitions on hold.
"I spent a lot of my honeymoon reading business books," Dodson said. "I didn't want to wait any longer. Plus not worrying about sick days sounded nice."
Dodson, who graduated from Towson University in 2009, left behind her previous marketing and graphic design job at a large company. She put together her own marketing and branding agency, Adashmore Creative, officially launching the agency in late 2010. There was immediate interest in what Dodson and her team had to offer, in part because of how difficult it could be to find good and innovative marketing agencies at the time, she said. With budgets cut and marketing resources getting outsourced, there was a space for an area firm willing to take risks on new ideas.
"I spent a lot of my honeymoon reading business books"
"A lot of people don't seem to understand the business side of marketing," Dodson said. "I take the approach of trying to understand a client and build a marketing strategy around that, not just running an ad campaign."
The creative energy Dodson invested in her company caught the eye of her alma mater. Adashmore joined the TU Incubator in 2013, where Dodson and her team joined other startups in building up their business and working on honing their services and skills. The incubator takes a goal-oriented approach as opposed to time-based one to determine how long each company is in the program, and Adashmore graduated a year after joining.
"Being part of the incubator was a great chance to make connections and meet people," Dodson said. "Relationships are so critical to what we do."
Of course, those relationships only help if Adashmore can show clients ways to improve their branding and advertising. These days, that means digital efforts as much or more than it does traditional systems, Dodson said.
"The digital world has a huge role in marketing now," Dodson said. "Some ways are obvious, but we've worked with clients to set up databases to help them with targeting and prevent wasted resources in ways they hadn't thought of."
"The digital world has a huge role in marketing now"
Along with designing advertising and marketing campaigns, the company has built websites, e-commerce platforms and other advanced digital products. It's all built around the idea that there is more to marketing than simply a clever slogan or image. Where once companies simply had to show that they had better features and lower prices than the competition, the current marketing environment is based much more on less tangible aspects of the product, Dodson said.
"Emotional connections are important," she said. "It's important that brands understand that and how that's part of why people are buying from them."
Adashmore isn't done growing; each new client and activity builds their portfolio of skills and opens up new possibilities. But Dodson said she has no regrets about stepping out on this path, even with all the difficulties unforeseen while reading the business books on her honeymoon.
"Inevitably, the challenges of the last project inform the next one," Dodson said. "We never stop learning new things."
