HOISINGTON – Dakota Meyers has traveled to Yale and back, and now he’s back home in Hoisington.
On Thursday, the Hoisington Chamber of Commerce celebrated Meyers’ return with a ribbon-cutting for Meyers’ digital advertising agency, Meyers Enterprises LLC. located at 163 S. Main in Hoisington.
Meyers’ business is on raised platform tucked into the corner of the building, but he’s not in need of a fancy showroom setup. For Meyers and his small team of employees, the magic happens on a computer screen.
“We’re not a storefront, walk-in type of business,” Meyers explained, although he doesn’t mind if prospective clients just happen to walk in. “We’re an advertising agency.”
Meyers’ services center on the placement and optimization of both digital and traditional media, “Our emphasis is on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of advertising,” Meyers explained.
“We’re not going to give you advice on color gradients, look and feel, or brand voice. Our specialty is measurable customer acquisition using paid media,” he said.
In the parlance, Meyers’ focus is media buying, or media planning and placement. In the digital world, optimization is a keyword in advertising, he said.
“We operate in kind of a special niche,” Meyers said. “We’re actually a planning, placement and optimization agency. Say you’ve got your tag line figured out, you’ve got your business proposition and maybe even a 30-second commercial cut, how do you take that material and get it out there so people are looking at it? That’s the part that we do,” he said.
“Anyone who wants to know more about advertising can come talk to me, even if it’s a small business or even if someone is just getting started, I’d be happy to walk them through some of the things they can do themselves,” he said.
Home field advantage
The 2009 Hoisington High School graduate earned a bachelor of arts degree in economics from Yale University in 2013. His first thought then was to complete his master’s, but realized he’d had enough of finance.
An attempt at a small start-up business fizzled in Connecticut, so Meyers headed west.
After some tinkering in the finance sector, he took positions at a couple advertising agencies in Colorado. He wanted to be closer to home, so he joined the media buying team at Koch Industries and advanced to manager of strategic and media planning. “After I sort of maxed out in where I could go there, I got the itch to go and do my own thing.”
Coming back to his hometown Hoisington was a logical choice, he said.
“Nowhere can be more hospitable than coming back home and being closer to folks,” Meyers noted. “Back when I first started in the advertising thing, I thought that how cool it would be to go back home and buy one of the old buildings on Main Street.”
He picked the name Meyers Enterprises as homage to I.C. Walter, whose iconic enterprises in Hoisington included Hoisington Lutheran Hospital, Dairy Queen and Town and Country Supermarket, as well as oil production, leasing operations and farming into the mid-1970s.
As a Cardinal growing up, Meyers was imbued with a winning attitude.
“I could have opened this agency anywhere I wanted,” he said. “In San Francisco, New York, Austin or Denver; heck even in Wichita.”
But, “when you’re from Hoisington, you expect to win,” he said.
