Industry Digital marketing Founder Nick Bell Headquarters Melbourne, Australia | Website wmegroup.com.au Founded 2008 Number of employees 439 (2016) | |
Type of business Proprietary Limited Company | ||
WME is an international digital marketing agency headquartered in Melbourne, Australia. WME has offices around the world, including New Zealand, Hong Kong, Singapore, Dubai, the United States and Thailand.
Contents
History
WME was established by Nick Bell from his home in Melbourne in 2008. He launched the business after dropping out of university and teaching himself search engine optimisation (SEO) for websites. He started the business with $400.00 in his bank account and turned it into a multi-million-dollar operation.
In its early days, the company only offered SEO services, but it has since expanded into a full-suite digital marketing agency that offers clients search engine marketing (SEM) strategy services, social media marketing, web and app design and development, and AdWords services.
In September 2014, Bell spoke to Computerworld, a technology news website, about his desire to create 115 new jobs in the company's Melbourne head office by the end of the year. The then Victorian Minister for Technology Gordon Rich-Phillips was quoted as saying that WME had "seized the opportunities" offered by the digital economy in Victoria.
WME currently employs 157 people in their Australian offices, and has 439 global employees spread across their international offices. The newest office in Bangkok operates under the name Primal and is the 8th Asia-Pacific office. The company has decided to independently brand each of its international offices, as opposed to growing the WME name globally. Bell says that the reason behind this strategy is that he wanted to choose individual brand names that better reflected their respective international market. Another company that emerged from WME is Melbourne based Appscore, which was founded by Nick Bell and Alex Louey in 2010.
Awards and recognition
Controversies
WME received some criticism in February 2016 after the liquidation of Exa Web Solutions, one of Australia's largest digital agencies. WME offered free services for up to three months to former clients of Exa, a move that was criticised by some as an attempt to "swoop" in on Exa's clients.
In June 2014, The Age reported that the General Manager of WME at the time (then called Web Marketing Experts) was the target of a negative SEO attack, which caused his business to disappear from Google search results and subsequently lose thousands of dollars in revenue. Mackay also told the reporter that he had worked with a client who had mistakenly purchased a recycled domain name that had been previously penalised by Google. As such, his client's rankings suddenly dropped and they had to start the business all over again.