Welcome to “Brand Champions,” where we dive deep into the art and science of building unforgettable brands. Join us on Advertising Champions TV as branding gurus share their secrets to creating brand loyalty and driving impact. Discover the strategies behind iconic brand stories and learn how to stand out in a competitive marketplace. Today, our host, Olivia Rouse, spoke with Patrick Hodgson of Admax Local.
Patrick Hodgson
Vice President of Client Services & Marketing at Admax Local
Website Address: https://admaxlocal.com/
Short company description:
Admax Local is a trusted digital marketing agency that delivers tailored, results-driven solutions for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), franchises, and white-label partners. Our services include SEO, paid social, paid search, and landing page optimization, designed to help local businesses thrive in an increasingly competitive market.
How do you help a brand maintain consistency across multiple channels and platforms?
The core of how we approach brand conistency in the advertising space across multiple platforms for client is to focus on a clear tone and audience truths. Essentially its one narrative we want to help a brand tell but in a different emotional way way depending on channel. So for an example paid search we focus on more intent driven, paid social more emotional and community at the front end ad level. On the back end we use same naming conventions, shared dashboards to prevent breaking identity. The goal is to have a clients’ brand feel familatr everywhere but talk to you based on the enviornment you’re in.
Can you share a rebranding project that taught you valuable lessons about brand identity?
This one goes back to 2017 when I was wprking for the Tiger Woods Foundation. I was part of a small task force that helped rebrand his businesses verticals (charity, live events, resturant, golf design) to TGR properties under TGR Ventures. This project taught me that changing visuals without changing behavior confuses customers. We focused too much on logos rather than how it impacted customer expectations, internal teams, and Tiger himself.
What strategies do you use to build and maintain brand loyalty in a competitive market?
This one is tough because in my opinion a brand has to earn loyalty. The clients and businesses that have been successful on this front have set clear expections in the beginning, delivered the service or product consistently at a quality level, and comunnicated well. When these three things come together the customer usually has the painpoint they came to the brand with removed.
Transcript:
Olivia:
Hi, and welcome to another segment of Brand Champions, where we highlight the best and brightest minds leading the brands of tomorrow. This is your host Olivia Rouse, and I’m so excited to be joined by Patrick Hodgson with Admax Local. Patrick, welcome.
Patrick:
It’s great to be here, Olivia.
Olivia:
I am so glad. Well, I want to start by asking, what’s been bringing you joy in your work?
Patrick:
Oh, that’s such a great question. We had our best year as an agency in 2025, so I’m just really excited about the momentum coming into this year and the team that we built of skill, skill, skill marketers out there that really did it and really know how to drive value for our clients.
The thing that excites me is probably what excites everyone right now, which is AI. There’s a lot of misinformation out there about AI. So I think just being on top of everything that’s going on and sort of troubleshooting and bringing that source of an ethic for our partners and potential clients has been exciting for me.
Olivia:
Awesome. I mean, it’s definitely very exciting to be in a space of coming out of a year with so much momentum, especially with so much change coming to the industry for marketers, for brands, for everyone in between. I mean, we’re all learning to communicate in a new realm. I want to learn a little bit more about who you guys are at Admax and who do you guys serve, and how do you make sure you align with these brands because, like you said, there’s so much noise and now e have these tools that supercharge us. Tell me a little bit about how that looks like for you guys.
Patrick:
It’s more challenging than ever because, like you said, there’s a lot of noise out there. There’s a lot of tools that promise that it can be a one stop shop, but then a potential prospect may not know how to use that specific tool and how to get the best out of that. So that’s where we sort of come in handy.
Typically I’m actually serving SMEs, franchise sort of businesses, multi location businesses throughout different digital advertising. So think about Google, Meta, programmatic advertising. And we do a lot of streaming ads as well.
We’ve been brought back to SEO because of everything that’s happening with AI and everything with Google.
Typically we’ll get customers that are still doing vanity sort of campaigns that only are focusing on traffic, and we really try to get them focused on the metrics that matter. So think about your revenue, your lifetime customers, if that data is available.
More than ever, a lot of the platforms are now very AI driven and there’s a lot of automation. So making sure that the data that we’re feeding is the right signals so we’re optimizing those campaigns. That’s really where we sort of help out.
And then if there isn’t alignment when we’re doing these discovery calls, we’ll be honest and transparent with the clients and say, hey, we might not be the best partner for you. This is someone that we can recommend that might be better at this particular aspect of advertising and marketing for you.
Olivia:
That’s huge. I think there’s so much to be said about agencies being able to recognize their fullest capabilities in making sure that alignment drives everything, especially in an age where everything can be autonomous and is almost coming at you in 50 million directions, being able to really cut through and speak exactly to who you guys are and find that authenticity to deliver the best for your clients is something so wonderful. It sounds like that is just such a core of what you guys do.
So tell me, you’re very excited about the momentum, you’re very excited about AI. What do you think most brands are missing in or maybe not understanding yet about the impact of AI on their businesses and making sure that they understand partners like you guys, who can drive them forward in understanding what it is to move forward in the digital age?
Patrick:
That’s a great question. I think the biggest challenge is a lot of partners and practitioners out there don’t understand the basic fundamentals of AI.
Essentially with any sort of AI tool out there, you have to train it. You have to feed it the right data and training material in order for it to optimize really at the level that you’re seeking.
Folks think that it’s already built in a box when they open it and they get into trouble and get discouraged by the results.
So that’s kind of where we come in and help train it with the right data sets. We have a wonderful engineering team that’s done a lot of A/B testing over the last couple of years with different AI tools out there.
So it’s really about getting clients to focus on the training part of the foundational piece.
Then looking at how your workflows are today and how we can simplify something that’s repeatable so it saves you time out there.
Olivia:
Absolutely. I mean, that time saving plus meeting with the ways that you’re putting in the right information, and I love how you focus on that it’s a language “learning” model at the end of the day, you know?
Patrick:
It really is.
Olivia:
For people who love to communicate, it almost hyper-shows us our faults in what we take in and how we produce. I think it’s a really exciting time for agencies to be pushing out that educational piece and continuing to help clients move forward.
So my last question to you is, what is something that you are really trying to dive into and learn more about as you guys continue to step forth on the forefront of this agency space and bring this momentum to your clients?
Patrick:
Yeah, I think the biggest learning opportunity for us is just really seeing how that can improve our workflow internally.
But then also from a client perspective, how can we get more information quicker so that we’re ramping up campaigns faster and the results are positive instead of negative, or we’re not waiting 30 to 90 days to get the results that a client is looking for.
For example, we work with a lot of furniture brands out there, and a big Super Bowl of effort is President’s Day, which is fast approaching.
There’s one client that has more experience with AI and has the right data sets, and they had record breaking numbers for our President’s Day share.
So I think for me it’s really about understanding what’s happening organizationally, and then if we can supply tools that are part of a service or add on without a crazy cost, that’s something we’re doing.
So thank you to our engineering team. We have this portal that we’re onboarding clients on, and within that we have AI sort of insight tools.
So again, like we were talking about training, we have 100,000 data points through different partners that we’ve worked with throughout the years.
Now an AI tool is going to help anyone that becomes a partner of ours optimize their Google Ads campaigns and their Meta ad campaigns.
It’s pretty cool from a visual perspective. You’ll see where the ROI is coming from from each location, and then we can continue to feed these systems with the right data.
Olivia:
Wow. I mean, there’s such a wealth of what you guys know and where you guys are going that I’m so excited to continue to share. I want to say thank you so much, Patrick, for your time today and all the wonderful insights. I could not be more excited to stay tuned with all that Admax Local is doing.
If you want to learn more, audience, thank you for tuning in, and find us on industrychamps.com. Until next time..
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