Will Ackerman is a well-rounded, equally creative, analytical, and inspiring problem solver whose passion continues to be solving complex digital business problems. He's been able to lead under-performing digital divisions into profitable, record-setting multi-million dollar profit centers throughout his career.

He uses a principle of 5C's for all digital initiatives, which he's found to be highly effective in unlocking potential audience growth and revenue acceleration as well as strengthening his team.

My 5C's: Content, Communication, Convenience, Customer Care, and Consistency.

He established this philosophy very early in his career with the help of some very talented mentors. His first big success using this model was as a web producer in the Magazine Publishing industry. He entered the market during the initial Dot-Com bust, where the perception of the internet was seen as a "fad"/"has no long-term value", especially for content. Yet, his managed sites achieved consistent audience and revenue generation beyond budgeted expectations and without the ineffective paywall model. How? He saw trends and methods to pick content that would be sticky and build added value for the site's visitors. The end result was: increases in visitors, repeat visitors, subscriptions, new advertisers, new ad dollars, and consistent loyalty to paid digital subscriptions, like Shape magazine's iShape health/fitness program and Star Magazine's mobile app. It led to his first promotion to the Executive table.

The Realization

Will loved the satisfaction he felt in solving complex business problems. As a result, Will accepted an offer at a company whose multi-million dollar growth had stalled, becoming the Head of Marketing and Product. The company's size was positioned in the middle of their vertical. Their product was a phone/messaging advice-based content, products, and technology services company. Will saw the people who used the product loved it and were loyal. The problem arose from the difficulty of getting new people to sample the product.

With his team, Will had a plan and started redesigning the active but limited content strategy, improving the site's usability with a new design, and creating new customer care scripts. After launching the new website, a new landing page model (that became the industry standard for more than 10 years), and integrating a solid omnichannel content strategy with radio appearances, TV & radio commercials, the enthusiasm for the product surpassed its primary competitors and grew into the #1 position in the product vertical.

The Impact

These impacts have been routinely consistent in Will's career working across startup, small, medium, and enterprise companies. Will has picked up skills across various verticals, Marketing, Content/Content Strategy, Product, Product Development, Customer Care, Data Analysis, and more. His most recent work has blended many of these with AI and machine learning to build a potent messaging tool that has reduced churn across the brands using it.

What will enjoys most these days is building strong teams by putting up guardrails and removing speed bumps to help each member find what they love doing most and be as successful as they can.