What’s In a Name – Angular.Marketing

So, I think I threw a few of you for a loop earlier today with this tweet saying that today was my last day at Virante. Technically, this is true, but not because I am leaving my beloved coworkers and business, but rather because Virante as we know it is no more. I am excited to announce that as of today, Virante is now Angular. I do want to say that I was very moved by the positive comments I received from so many of you.

Why the Change

Over the previous two years we have contemplated a rebrand for our company. When I first began at Virante in January 2005, we were a full service web development and marketing firm. We did everything from logos and brochures to web design and SEO. Like many small digital agencies, we did just about anything and everything we could to make ends meet. However, we quickly realized that wasn’t a model we were passionate about. Slowly but surely we jettisoned various parts of our business. First it was graphic design, then it was web design, then it was managed social media. Over time, we evolved into an SEM powerhouse – honed specifically to earn clients traffic and revenue from the search engines. But even that shifted, as we launched tool after tool after tool after tool such that we were becoming just as well known for our products as our services. In the mean time, we had grown up quite a bit, myself included. I had gone from being a guy who brazenly pronounced that I spent my “5 to 9 doing black hat, and my 9 to 5 doing white hat”, to someone with too many battle scars to pretend anymore that things were better on the other side. I think the word most people use to describe this is maturity. Everything was changing at Virante, except our identity.

What’s in a Name

Many people over the years have asked what Virante means. Truth be told, the name was determined on a whim by a young entrepreneur, our founder, Ryan Allis while still in his teens. It just so happened that the word could be loosely translated in Italian to me “to turn, to veer, to bend, to manipulate”. It seemed appropriate to a degree for our wilder days, but the reality is that it never actually conveyed anything to anyone who read it. It was at best an inside joke. So, in looking toward the future, we wanted a name that represented our strategic advantages, the things that make us different.

Part of this came with some soul searching. We have never been the long-term, hold-your-hand, here’s-your-monthly-report, don’t-forget-to-brush-your-teeth kind of SEO firm. Don’t get me wrong, this kind of general practitioner SEO is the bread and butter of the industry that is a necessary component of a healthy, long term strategy. But this just wasn’t us. Our specialty was two fold: innovation and inflection.

• innovation: it isn’t a fluke that we have been shortlisted twice in the two years the US Search Awards has existed for innovation. We eat, sleep, and breathe it here at Angular. Whether it is inventing topic modeling API for content optimization, building enterprise level link removal tools, or running monte carlo simulations to determine optimal sub-domain usage, we have always looked for a different angle on solving search problems.
• inflection: it has also been our focus to change the direction of the companies with which we work. In the past, it meant turning flat traffic levels up, but these days it means 180 degree turns from penalty to recovery. We were never happy with 1% gains month to month. We wanted to see a real change in that organic traffic graph. We wanted to see an inflection point that put our company on their analytics map once and for all. We wanted to see a sharp angle towards progress.

And so, we became Angular. Even our use of the gTLD (http://angular.marketing) even though we own http://angularmarketing.com is meant to represent our bias towards the future, our bias towards progress, our new angle on things. I am proud today to call myself the Chief Technology Officer of Angular. I am proud of how we got here. I am proud of where we are going. I can’t wait to get started.