Who is Bobby Campbell?

Running two of the nation’s fastest-growing companies, Bobby Campbell rarely looks back at how far he’s come since opening his first startup out of a spare bedroom. He’s too busy looking around the corner and trying to project the future moves of his booming advertising companies: Division-D and AdKarma.

To his co-workers, Campbell is an inspiring visionary obsessed with charting business growth and motivating young employees. But don’t mistake him for a tailor-made CEO. Campbell is not a jet-setting MBA graduate who lives in corporate boardrooms and stuffy suits. More often than not, the tattooed motorcyclist sports a vintage T-shirt and ball cap to his Columbia office. On top of that, he has a balanced life as a father and husband who also writes business columns for Forbes and Columbia Daily Tribune and volunteers with the Boone County Fire Department.

“I’m not your traditional CEO, there is nothing traditional about our companies, and there’s nothing traditional about our location in Columbia either,” says the 41-year-old Campbell. “Our mantra is hard work, determination and a positive attitude will be the key to success. It’s not technology that makes our companies successful. It’s not being in the right sector. The key to our success is the group of people who work for the companies, and that may sound cliché, but it’s the God’s honest truth.”

His results are surely impressive: AdKarma, which works with publishers to boost their video advertising revenue, was ranked No. 31 on Inc.’s Fastest Growing Companies list, No. 2 among the nation’s top advertising companies and the No. 1 company in Missouri. Division-D, which helps national advertisers plan and manage their marketing initiatives, was also named to the Inc. list for the second time in three years.

By ignoring outside business advice, looking for opportunities in a disrupted market and hiring young people as company leaders, Campbell has been able to beat the startup odds and build two of the nation’s cutting-edge advertising firms.

 

Ditch your mentors

An aspiring novelist with hopes of becoming the next Hemingway, Campbell didn’t take a single business course in college.

The University of Missouri graduate ventured into the advertising business after realizing that creative writing wasn’t a very lucrative market. He found work with a friend’s Internet company and experimented with digital media before deciding to go out and open Division-D (originally known as 3 Interactive) in 2003. With only $20,000, Campbell had three months to turn a profit before the company would fold.

Undaunted, he quickly began cold-calling companies and trying to convince them that his online media-buying startup could help them better reach the growing digital audience. Within the first month, he was operating in the black and had landed American Express as a client. Steady growth helped him finally move the company out of his spare bedroom and into a small Columbia office space by 2006.

“Working from home, I was always trying to keep people from ringing the doorbell, trying to convince clients that I wasn’t a guy calling from his bedroom in the middle of Missouri,” Campbell says with a laugh. “As far as they were concerned, everyone in Missouri was living in a cornfield with hogs out back.”

But the most challenging times were not yet behind him. Surviving the first couple of years wasn’t nearly as difficult as the growing pains Campbell experienced during years three and four.

“You’re growing, you’re trying to bring in advertisers and convince them to use your service, while at the same time you’re learning how to run a company,” Campbell says. “There were many times when we were running a negative profit, and I didn’t know if we were going to make it.”

Without any formal management training, Campbell had turned to respected business professionals for advice, but relying on their guidance wasn’t helping him catapult Division-D to the next level. Unwilling to accept defeat, Campbell made a conscious decision one morning to ignore the suggestions.

“I decided that if this company was going to fail or succeed, it was going to fail or succeed based on my ideas of what I thought was the right move,” Campbell says. “I decided to eject a lot of internal and external noise and set the company on a path that I thought would succeed. That was the difference between us failing and succeeding.”

Campbell’s tenacity and self-assurance remain two of the qualities most admired among his employees. “None of our success would have been possible without a confident leader with vision,” says Stephen Vyskocil, AdKarma’s vice president of sales. “Confidence is one of the most attractive qualities you can have, especially in a leader.”

Campbell says it’s still smart to turn to experts such as lawyers, bankers and accountants who can help support a startup’s growth, but he’s vocal about why strong mentors can actually hurt entrepreneurs.

“Over-relying on mentors can be a detriment to young startups who need to learn to rely on their own instincts, learn from the mistakes they make and take ownership of their decisions,” he says.

On his own, Campbell became a better manager through trial and error as well as by volunteering with the Boone County Fire Department. What initially seemed like an unwise decision to become a volunteer firefighter while starting his first company proved quite valuable.

“The Fire Department has a system for creating command structures in emergency situations or disasters, where you have a lot of people showing up to handle the situation,” he says. “A fast-growing company is controlled chaos, so I took a lot of lessons I learned about challenging and managing people and applied it to my business.”

For example, a manager in an emergency situation should supervise no more than five people at a time. Any more than that, and they lose track of what some people are doing.

“We’ve integrated that principle into how we scale our business; as we add people to our staffs, we try to control the number of people that any one manager is responsible for, and that helps us keep a better tab and not lose control of the company as it grows so fast,” says Campbell, whose firefighting experience has also taught him about facing fears, overcoming challenges and giving back to the community.

 

Run toward the disruption

Early on, Campbell learned that disrupted markets are full of uncertainty and challenges but also great business opportunities.

With Division-D, Campbell hoped to take advantage of the disruption that the Internet was causing in traditional media. For decades, the media model had remained largely unchanged, so early on, it wasn’t easy convincing advertisers or publishers that online marketing was valuable.

“When I first started the business, people thought: ‘Hey, there’s this new Internet thing, and there’s some advertising going on there. I should place 5 percent of my advertising budget there just to say I did it,’” Campbell says. “The world has since shifted 180 degrees, where now the digital media buy is the center of the media plan.”

Campbell says about $150 billion worth of commercial advertising spent in traditional media is migrating to digital media. That’s where Division-D steps in. The company works with advertisers to create and place dynamic, engaging ads that catch the attention of today’s inattentive audiences; the team also partners with publishers to offer new additional advertising revenue streams beyond standard banner ads.

“Division-D is specifically built around the idea that there are new, better ways to reach people than what we’ve been doing for the past 10 years,” he says. “Division-D is very good at reaching people through new ad sizes that are a lot more dynamic and generate more interaction among audiences.”

Noticing that publishers were struggling to fully reach their advertising revenue potential, Campbell started AdKarma in 2010. As consumers began turning away from the television and started watching more video digitally, Campbell switched gears and changed the company’s direction to focus exclusively on video advertising.

“Lots of times in business, what you start out to do isn’t necessarily what you end up doing,” he says. “We realized there was a huge amount of disruption going on with how people consume video content. Millennials were migrating away from cable TV and starting to consume content in different formats and on multiple devices. Inside of disruption are opportunities for companies who are agile and fast enough to take advantage of it.”

AdKarma now works with 30,000 publishers and is responsible for more than 700 million video advertising commercials a month. Its revenue grew to $13 million in 2013 and will top $50 million this year. In addition to producing commercials and helping publishers maximize their video advertising options, AdKarma also produces high-quality content, including shows for YouTube.

“That’s where the next generation is getting their content,” Campbell says. “That’s where the new stars are being born. The new Elvis, the new Beatles, the new movie start of the next day already exist, and they exist on YouTube. Creating content will be a huge part of our future. We believe that the more we control content, the more we control the growth of the company, and the more relevant we are to our advertisers and audiences.”

As an unstructured guy who doesn’t shy away from change or breaking the rulebooks, Campbell is ideally suited to taking advantage of a fast-paced and disrupted industry, says Ann Wilhelm, Campbell’s business partner and chief operating officer.

“We might be in the middle of dealing with an unexpected or complicated business situation, and he’ll be able to come up with a new way on how to tackle a situation,” says Wilhelm, who’s been working with Campbell since 2006. “It’s not like he lives a certain set of rules. He expects excellence from everyone; that doesn’t change. But how we get to that excellence might change.”

 

Put young people in charge

Creating a fun, rewarding work environment where employees can grow is as important to Campbell as his companies’ bottom line. Around the office, he is known for keeping the best interests of his employees first and for rewarding hard work.

“Bobby pushes people to go outside of their comfort zone, and while that can be difficult for people and at times frustrating, it helps them better themselves and develop skills they might not have,” Wilhelm says. “He’s always inspiring people and helping them realize that not every day is going to be easy, but if you come to work determined, you work hard and have a positive attitude, you will be successful here.”

Although the companies now have offices in Los Angeles, New York and Ireland, Campbell has no plan of moving his headquarters away from Columbia, an ideal town for startups. He works closely with the MU’s strategic communication department to recruit new employees. A strong internship program helps infuse the office with new energy and allows his leaders to pinpoint those who would make great additions to the team.

“The University of Missouri brings some of the best talent from the state and across the nation,” Campbell says. “With a fast-growing startup like AdKarma, we need a constant flow of driven young people who want an opportunity to do something big.”

More than 90 percent of his staff are millennials. The average age of his 100-plus employees is about 25 years old. And they aren’t just interns or grunts. They’re handling multimillion-dollar campaigns and talking to some of the biggest publishers in the country.

“We’ve found that the more we challenge our young people, the more they step up, and the better they do,” Campbell says.

Like Campbell, Division-D and AdKarma employees take on the “work hard, play hard” philosophy. Many log in long hours at inconvenient times, but they also spend a lot of their downtime together, playing arcade games at the office, attending company socials and participating in philanthropic activities in Columbia. A group of employees even traveled to Haiti together this summer to provide medical supplies and community outreach.

“You have to make money to keep growing, but that’s not the end all of everyone’s lives, so we keep that in mind,” Campbell says. “We really kind of create a family atmosphere here that goes beyond just the dollar signs.”

For Campbell, the most satisfying part of his business career hasn’t been the growing profits or the national recognition. What brings him the most happiness is watching intimated 21-year-olds — fresh out of college with no idea why they’re coming to work for an ad company no one’s ever heard of — learn the ropes, take on more responsibility and work their way up to becoming a vice president or chief executive in the company.

“The change that happens in them over three to five years is the most satisfying experience for me,” Campbell says. “It’s surreal to think of where I’ve been able to take this company, but I get the most satisfaction out of seeing individuals grow. That’s more exciting than making $50 million in a year.”