V Digital Services is opening its first digital marketing office in the Pacific Northwest and has hired an old friend to run it.
Kenny Stocker, the former publisher of Seattle Weekly, will head up VDS’s Seattle regional office, which will be the fast-growing company’s twelfth shop in a major U.S. market.
With the arrival of V Digital Services, customers in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest will gain instant access to a 55-person team of specialists, all based in the United States and devoted to helping businesses both large and small thrive in the digital space.
With expertise in everything from organic SEO and programmatic advertising to web development, pay-per-click advertising and social media management, VDS has a track record of producing measurable results for clients across a range of industries.
Close local relationships are a key part of how VDS does business, a close-to-the-ground approach Stocker said he remembers well from his days at the Weekly.
Stocker led the paper from 2006 to 2013, when it was owned by VDS parent company Voice Media Group. He shepherded its transition from a print-based publication to a digital-first operation, and left when VMG sold the newspaper to Sound Publishing as part of a corporate realignment in which the company has aggressively built its digital advertising agency business while making targeted reductions in its print newspaper holdings.
Stocker went on to serve in VP roles at Cheezburger.com and Fexy Media, where he learned a lot but spent most of his time working with national and international clientele.
“I’ve really missed those local relationships,” Stocker said. “I’m beyond excited to work in the Seattle market again and offer businesses of all sizes the opportunity to harness aspects of digital marketing they may have thought were available only to large advertisers.”
Stocker’s work at Fexy and Cheezburger also required him to stay current on the ever-changing menu of opportunities available to clients as they navigate across digital channels. That experience coupled with his long tenure at Voice Media Group, where he started as a Denver account executive in 1990, makes Stocker a natural fit to lead VDS’s Seattle office, said VMG chief executive officer Scott Tobias.
“Kenny is not afraid of hard challenges, and he always delivers,” said Tobias. “We are extremely excited to add Kenny’s local knowledge of the Seattle area and his great skill set to our team. It is great to have Kenny back home.”
Along with V Digital Services, Voice Media Group owns and operates six iconic alternative weekly newspapers and websites across the country, including Miami New Times and Denver Westword. VDS, a Premier Google Partner, combines the reach of those established newspaper properties with cutting-edge digital strategies for customers, including precision-targeted programmatic advertising.