ABOUT SPIKE

National award-winning internet sports producer Spike Matau has over 10 years of Web experience in creative marketing and promotions. He has published over 2,000 stories and continues to lead the online frontier into new areas.

But that's not all he's been involved with. Spike coordinated a 65-venue promotion for the Santana/ Jeff Beck tour, promoting Santana's Lightdance video. At the end of the day, one simple but big idea came through: Spike conceived the idea of creating a flyer insert to go into every concert program on the tour, promoting the Santana video in order to drive sales.

Another pit stop along the way for Spike was with the New England Patriots, where he served as a beat writer for Patriots Football Weekly during the 1996-97 season. This was the same year Bill Parcells guided the Pats to the Super Bowl to play against the Green Bay Packers.

Spike also developed organizational ad campaigns to drive Patriots Football Weekly subscriptions, sell Pats Pack club membership and promote special events. In addition, he pitched a unique idea for a team calendar in the shape of a football.

Back in Seattle in 1997, the internet boom moved along at a feverish pace. Prospective millionaires in their 20's walked up and down the streets with pockets full of stock options. Spike jumped on board with an upstart Web company covering Pac-10 football recruiting on the west coast and produced articles and a variety of copy for products and services.

By 1999, a massive online sports network, rivals.com, had entered the scene and was being touted as the next rival to ESPN. Spike joined the rivals.com team and launched SeahawksInsider.com from the ground up. He built this into the largest Seahawks community on the internet and after just nine months, SeahawksInsider.com averaged 20,000 page views per day.

Spike launched a massive e-mail campaign, followed by street-level marketing and a creative Web marketing mix to build the SeahawksInsider brand, which was later adopted by many in the media.

Spike also helped develop an online recruiting system for the Seattle office of Accountants on Call. He conducted an extensive competitive market analysis of the financial-staffing industry, developed ad campaigns, and increased exposure online for AOC's executive search services with creative word-of-mouth execution.

Another experience with a startup internet golf company in the year 2000 put Spike in position to work with two sister Web sites - one offering a service, the other a product. Finding ways to blend these two sites together, coordinate a site redesign, manage contributing writers, create strategic alliances and develop a database marketing system were some of his accomplishments.

Many pie-in-the-sky internet businesses went down in flames during the internet boom. But the people driving these companies learned valuable lessons about sustaining a business while keeping pace with technology.

These lessons are different today than they were four years ago when Spike joined the seattletimes.com team as an online sports producer. In the past four years, Spike helped build the high-school sports section to become the highest-trafficked subchannel on the seattletimes.com Web site, growing it from 600,000 monthly page views in 2002 to over 2 million early in 2006.

In this four-year period, the number of competitors of The Seattle Times' high-school sports coverage increased from less than 10 to over 40. The drivers behind this growth that Spike helped provide despite this rapid increase in the competitive landscape were: integrated Web marketing strategies, community building, creative promotions, exclusive online content, marketing and communications collateral material, special events, market research and analysis and design.

Spike developed proposals for high-school sports for specialty packaged products like a DVD seasonal highlight video and The Seattle Times high-school sports annual. He also conceived seattletimes.com's "Mobile Times" concept - a revenue-generating function designed to share text messages and information with users. Always a proponent of newspapers pushing forward into areas of non-traditional revenue, Spike proposed a subscription-based premium-content service for parts of the high-school sports subchannel to include in-depth recruiting.

A private real estate investor and resort enthusiast, Spike Matau has blended his background and interests to help give clients more of what they deserve in his areas of his expertise.

Take time out to find new and creative ways to drive your business.