Brian Harniman
52 Glendale Circle Stamford, CT
06906
Voice: 917.833.8719 - Email:harniman at
gmail.com - http://www.travelsites.com/resume.html
BACKGROUND SUMMARY
Marketing and business development
strategist with more than 11 years of online direct marketing expertise.
Extensive experience in online brand building, affiliate program development,
campaign placement and rate negotiation.
CAREER HIGHLIGHTS
1/2006 - Present
Open
List, Inc New York/Norwalk
CEO
- Successfully architected business turnaround
and sale in 6 month time period (Open
List / Marchex.com)
- Concurrently created new business model for
online travel destination and led rapid growth period for business.
- Responsible for managing OL's roster of
distribution partners (NYTimes Digital, Worldnow.com), and overseeing
partner relations, marketing, strategy, and public relations on a global
basis.
- Lead Ad Sales team, doubled ad sales revenue
in 3 month time period.
- Delivered product innovations including new
SEO architecture, new vertical category additions, and
the OpenView editorial construct.
5/1998 - Present
HotelsNearEverything.com LLC dba Travelsites.com
Stamford
CT
Owner and principal
- Content development, search engine
optimization and placement for
high-traffic travel directory web site.
- Online marketing of web site with traffic
counts of 150,000 unique visitors monthly.
- Responsible for negotiation and execution of
web affiliations, relationships, and linkage programs
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
- Travelsites.com was the first travel directory
site on the Internet in 1997.
- When optimized correctly, was #1 in hotbot and
lycos for all airline branded terms (ie. American Airlines).
- Relaunched site in 2004 with new look and
feel, traffic has increased 500% to 150,000 uniques per month
2/1997 -
12/2005
priceline.com,
Incorporated Norwalk CT
Vice President, Online Marketing & Business Development
- Identified and successfully acquired
Lowestfare.com, Rentalcars.com, BreezeNet Marketing, Hotelweb.com and
Flycheap.com. Together these sites represent $70MM in Gross Travel Value
- and helped priceline ramp up retail (non-opaque) business.
- Placed and negotiated 15-20MM online marketing
budget annually at a cost per acquired customer of under $12.00 (Responsible
for 10% of priceline's gross sales)
- Increased online driven sales in 3 year period
by over 300%
- Oversee all corporate strategic relationships:
Ebay, Onetravel.com, SideStep, Gator, Google, Yahoo!, Advertising.com
- Built successful affiliate programs for priceline and
Lowestfare.com
- Successfully changed affiliate vendor in 2003
for a cost savings of approximately 40% with no loss of revenue due to
switch-related downtime
- Developed successful ad sales team that
currently delivers over 3MM in revenue and margin to priceline.com
- Built business model, conceptualized site flow
and lead development teams for priceline new cars, rental cars, vacation
package and small business sites.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
-
Strategic member of
launch team for new portal and business method, priceline.com. Only
launch member still involved with company.
- All aforementioned priceline acquisitions have
proved to be immediately accretive to the core business.
- In planning role for online, drove online
marketing share of budget from 1% to 30% of overall based on cost effective
results.
- Built referral logic system into priceline's
core web application that allows marketing to view efficiency of media
placements down to keyword level
- Designed priceline Fare Elert system (similar
to Deal Detector) for launch in 2000.
- Negotiated key deals with AOL, United Online,
and Cendant - responsible for driving more than 50mm in gross travel revenue.
2/1995 - 2/1997
econnection.com,
Inc. Chestnut Ridge NY
Internet Marketing Director
-
Strategic planning
and interactive marketing, including branding, affiliations, Customer
Relations Management.
-
Search Engine
Optimization and Strategic Indexing.
-
Project Management.
ACCOMPLISHMENTS
-
Responsible for
strategic e-commerce planning.
- Wrote spec, drove development of first
non-book affiliate program on the Internet
- First ecommerce application to use streaming
audio (Real Server 1.0)
-
Directed web content
development and strategy.
-
Optimized site and
achieved high keyword rankings.
-
Established high
positioning within competition keyword search results.
EDUCATION
BA Fairfield University, Fairfield, Connecticut
AFFILIATIONS
Member, Board of Advisors:
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS/PRESS