Having started his career briefly as a journalist, Andy quickly moved into marketing communications where he has spent the last 20 years working first in advertising, then founding a Public Relations consultancy 'The Partners Group' before moving into corporate marketing. He's worked on pan-European advertising and public relations campaigns for many years and first 'discovered' search marketing in 1997 when he was charged with developing the European market presence of one of the UK's best known B2B brands, Portakabin. After five years as the client, he bought into the supporting agency - Web Certain Europe Ltd - where he became Managing Director. Under Andy's leadership, Web Certain has continued to focus on multilingual web sites handling Europe's major languages under one-roof with partners around the world providing the more specialist language needs.
As a keen linguist himself, and former student of languages at Universities in the UK, France and Germany he has been a qualified member of the Institute of Linguists since 1984 and the Chartered Institute of Marketing since 1999. Whilst he doesn't claim fluency in every language, he has some knowledge of French, German, Italian, Dutch, and Russian as well of English - and believes this helps in terms of giving best advice to clients who are planning web site localisation, translation and promotion.
He is particularly keen to promote of the opportunities of 'reaching out to Europe' to clients and believes that the significant opportunities open to web site marketers are largely under-exploited. He also edits the online newsletter www.web-marketing-secrets.co.uk and the blog www.multilingual-search.com which report on search marketing developments throughout Europe - both often summarising reports published in other languages to help English-speaking marketers.
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