Michael McMahon has been engineering performance marketing systems since before most current best practices existed — because in many cases, he helped invent them.
In the very first days of online advertising, McMahon was Director of Direct and Digital Marketing at Anderson & Lembke, where he worked with Ken Schneider, Jodi DeLeon and Tony Liano to launch The Microsoft Network and with John Zagula and his team to co-launch Windows 95 and Office 95.
In September 1996 he launched Left Field, one of the first performance marketing agencies. He won two marquee accounts, Amazon.com and Bank of America, on his first day, before he’d even hired his first employee. That resulted in brother Sean being evicted from the basement and three guys managing some of the world’s largest digital brands via a single dial-up modem!
Amazon had 50 employees and was still private. Michael worked with Jeff Bezos and his team, including Jodi Liano and Leslie Koch to design and execute customer acquisition campaigns across all media channels.
Bank of America was just launching their online advertising, and retained Michael to consult on digital marketing and to manage their online media and analytics.
Around the same time, McMahon worked with Kimbal and Elon Musk to launch Zip2, while the brothers and their business partner, Greg Khouri, operated out of a Palo Alto apartment. He continued advising the company as it grew, working with the marketing team under VP of Marketing Teresa Kersten and later Rita Belle Cunningham.
At Levi’s, Robert Olson, Heidi O’Neill, and Alicia Schmidt hired Michael to consult on the expansion of the storied brand into the new digital marketplace.
Hotmail had four employees and a media budget of roughly $1,000/month when Sean Fee and his team retained Left Field. They grew to a $20 million/year client for whom we managed all forms of both online and offline advertising.
McMahon consulted with Google, working with former San Jose Mercury News client Doug Edwards on how Google should structure its advertising business and work with agencies and advertisers, years before AdWords became the engine of the internet economy.
These weren’t supporting roles. They were founding conversations with people who built their vision and were ready to accelerate growth.
In August 1999, after three years of explosive growth and expansion, Left Field made a decision that surprised the industry: they resigned the Amazon.com and drugstore.com accounts. (You would need to ask Michael for the reasons.) The move was notable enough that it was covered by both the NY Times and Adweek.
Later that year, the Left Field partners split, and Exile on Seventh emerged as McMahon’s new agency. Exile grew into a “proudly independent” 85-person, $90 million agency with offices in SF and Atlanta. Though hit by client losses, the agency remained profitable throughout the dot com collapse and McMahon ultimately sold to Omnicom’s Agency.com group.
In the following years, he:
- Designed and built one of the first fully integrated marketing platforms, with dashboards, time reporting, media planning and buying, and project management.
- Served as board member, then CEO.
- Consulted with and managed marketing for many mid-market SaaS and founder-led companies.
- Was a partner at ADpocalypse.ai, an early AI-in-advertising consulting group.
- Built an e-commerce business selling gadgets to motorcyclists, pilots, travelers, and gadget lovers.
- Earned FAA pilot’s and mechanic’s licenses.
The release of ChatGPT was a revelation. With AI, Michael was finally able to build the marketing engineering consultancy he’d been anticipating for years, from analytics and optimization to designing automated workflows and data-driven creative tests.
And here we go again…
