Robin: Hello, and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I’m Robin Tooms, VP of strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest today is Joel Tarver, senior manager of digital marketing at Baker Hughes. So Joel welcome back to Brandonomics.

Joel: Thanks for having me, great to be here.

Robin: Well I love the fact that we get to talk today about digital marketing, but really bigger than that. It’s about the energy industry. So this industry goes through up and down hiring cycles all the time. We know that. We’ve been through it, but one thing that doesn’t change is the need to recruit the best talent, and really engage them with the company. So how do you see kind of your role in digital marketing in helping to support that?

Joel: Well an advantage that we have is we’re an innovation company. We’re actually a technology company that specializes in oil field services, and a lot of people say we’re innovation. Innovation is in our DNA, but ours literally is. We have, you know Howard Hughes Jr. in our lineage. Okay, essentially the Steve Jobs of his time, and his father actually had the patent on the two cone rollers. So it’s something that’s fascinating, particularly about being in Houston as well, because that’s where this company started.

So we have a lot of pride that’s around that too, and I think it’s a message that doesn’t often get out there. People think okay that’s oil and gas, but you know it’s terrifically technological. You know NASA puts rockets in space, and we essentially put them in the ground. I mean we have these tools that come together that are almost like the Avengers, a superhero team. You know we got a GAMA tool. We got those doing MRIs. We’ve got a bunch of stuff on there, and it’s something to really get excited about, but I think most people don’t think about.

Robin: Yes, what’s very cool about that is you’re essentially kind of taking all these ideas, and representing them all through theses digital pieces that you’re putting together, which is a lot. It takes a lot of expertise and energy. How are you accomplishing that?

Joel: Well what we want to look at is getting the right amount of talent in here, and finding those that are used to using that medium, and also we start with a message. So we still are very grounded in what was traditional, but then we look at these other ways that are methods that we look at to distribute the message if it be social media, if it be through animations, interactive emotion graphics, or mobile.

Robin: Well you even mentioned you’ve been hiring some actual gaming developers on your team as well.

Joel: Yes we actively recruit gaming talent. We look at that not just the engineering side of it as a software development. We’re looking at the creatives too. We’re looking at the 3D modelers. We’re looking at the technical artist, and we’re looking at even the concept artists.

Robin: That’s really amazing. Thank you for sharing that. This has been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside of look at top brands and their marketing strategies.